Small Talk

I've never been good at small talk.  It just isn't something I do.

If you try to talk to me, it'll seem like I don't really want to talk.  What I don't want is to go into idle prattle because I don't know how to handle or navigate it.  It's devoid of meaning and I mentally can not grasp how it works or how to continue the conversation from what seems to me to be dead end questions.  I never intend to sound uncaring or unapproachable, I literally just don't know how to turn the little statements or questions into more than just that.  If I'm asked a question with a simple answer, that's normally what I give it.

I do feel bad and I don't always know what to say, but it happens.  I have no intentions of being rude if I've just met you and this is the direction in which our conversation seems to be headed it's just me being uncomfortable.  If you want to start an actual discussion, it's easiest for me if you just jump into it.  Ask me if I've read a book and if I haven't tell me about it.  Tell me what you liked, what you didn't.  I might come up with something similar as well as a suggestion for you to look at in the future and likewise.  Maybe a film or something else that interests you.  For me to take part, I need more to work with than "How are you"s and "what's new?"

I do realise that this may be difficult for the person with whom I am trying to converse as well as it is for myself, but I honestly don't know how to make small talk work.  It's one of society's weird mannerisms that I will never understand and perhaps never be able to get to work in my favour.  Even when I was taking the final test for my driver's licence, I never asked such small questions to try to keep myself calm.  I asked the examiner why he does what he does and why he chose or ended up with it.  It was something that I could dig more into, something that I could get more information from to create more discussion.  In turn, he would be able to ask me what I want to do, am doing, what my motivations are and I could ask him similar inquiries.  Topics like these, I can work with.  If you simply ask me what I'm doing in school and if I want to be a teacher, my answers will be short and sweet.  I get the same questions all the time and I hate them.  I never know what to do or say.  It's awful.

This, I think, is why I'm not the best suited for things like customer service or human resources work.  It's not something I can care enough about to make it sound good.  ESPECIALLY with customer service situations where I will need to run off to retrieve something for a customer because I will repeat the same, "Hi, how are you?  Did you find everything okay?" routine to people I've already droned it out to without realising until after the fact.

I don't know where this puts me in terms of which jobs I'd be good for, but I can tell you that I've done pretty well so far in conversing with my professors and peers about different academic, homework-related, and peer-related topics.  Whether it means I should strive for something like academia or writing in general, I don't know, but I think I might do okay in them given different topics to work with.

I guess what I'm trying to get at is small talk confuses me.  It confounds me.  I don't know what to do and I flounder when people try to approach me with it.  I don't know if I'll ever know what to do with it and I'm sorry to anyone who tries to use it with me.