You should just not.
Not talk. Not interact. Not feel. Not be.
It never ends well for you. In your head you are a full human being, whatever that means, except you suppose you think that it means you are interesting and intelligent and have thoughts and opinions that you are capable of expressing in articulate, reasoned ways. In your head, you are capable of interacting with others like ordinary people seem to do without difficulty.
In your head, you are you.
It’s when you are outside your head that everything falls apart. To talk to others you have to plan. You have to remember how you are supposed to be, because you never come out quite like you are inside your mind, where you always know what to say and conversations run according to the carefully planned script inside your mind. Outside, people are never as interesting as you want them to be, and you find it so, so difficult to pay attention to things you do not find interesting.
This is why you always wander off in social situations, more interested in inanimate objects and furry companions than the flesh and blood humans you are supposedly here to see. You want people to have depth, but people seem to only want to talk about the same things over and over, and you simply cannot bring yourself to enter into arguments you know you will never change anyone’s mind about. They’ve been having the same ones for years, and they aren’t actually interested in a different point of view, they just want to feel self-important and watch you listen to them.
You never manage to do that and that’s probably why no one likes you.
It’s almost worse when you do find people interesting, though. You are more comfortable having spent a night avoiding everyone than you are having spent a night in animated discussion, actually enjoying yourself. Because in the moment when you are there, everything feels right. In those moments, you are finally the you that you are also inside your mind, no careful calculations or planned actions, and these are the only times you enjoy yourself in social situations.
And it’s a high of a kind—talking, feeling, being. But then you go home, and you wake up the next morning feeling hollowed out, as if the thing that makes you you has been foolishly given away. As if those people you enjoyed talking to somehow sucked the essence of your soul and you let it go willingly, all for the euphoric thrill of feeling, for a moment, as if you belonged.
But it is the next day now and you remember that you never belong. You are embarrassed by how you you allowed yourself to be in public, to these people you don’t really know, and you feel scraped raw and exposed, as if the lightest breeze would abrade your skin like acid sand. You replay everything over again in your mind, all those moments that seemed so fun now making you feel foolish, and you wonder if these people you thought liked you are mocking you now.
You are, after all, incapable of forming lasting connections from brief encounters, like so many seem to do. Every connection, for you, is all or nothing, an intensity that is perhaps not normal. It is why you have one romantic partner, and one best friend, and those are the only people who appear to be able to stand the full force of you longterm. They are the only ones you speak to and do not feel wretched afterwards. They are the only ones who have never run from who you are. And yet sometimes, you wonder if even they truly know you. Because given how everyone else sees you, it seems clear that they must be missing that crucial rotten core of you, otherwise how could they stay?
Anyway, you had a conversation yesterday. A normal conversation, a normal interaction. And now you feel worthless, empty, and abnormal.
You should just not.