Not so long ago, I was lucky enough to meet a friend for a child-free coffee.
‘What a luxury’, I thought as I made my way to cafe, ‘I can’t wait to have an uninterrupted conversation’.
It turns out, if my conversation goes uninterrupted, it doesn’t take me very long to say what I wanted to. If I’m not apologising for a cheeky four-year-old singing a song about bums, then I don’t really have all that much to talk about.
You see, I don’t do a great deal.
I mean, I’m always busy, I do laundry, wipe noses, coerce very unreceptive children into eating vegetables and sometimes even vacuum the stairs, but it’s nothing I can talk about.
Once a week I have a reason to wear makeup and I meet with the people who commission my freelance work. They always politely ask what I’ve been up to, and I always say ‘nothing’, because I have nothing of interest to report.
Nothing happens to me, nothing changes. I go nowhere, I see no one.
Sometimes bloggers I don’t know have a public fall-out and I insist on showing my husband Instagram captions aimed at other bloggers I’ve never met. He feigns interest for the appropriate amount of time until he can go back to watching videos of sharks (that’s what men do, right?). But for the most part I have nothing to offer.
I first noticed it when I started uni a few years ago. In those early days I didn’t have a great deal to add to conversations. I’m late to the party when it comes to TV shows. I mostly watch Australian soaps and re-watch the US Office. Love Island (my fail-safe) is months away, and I don’t have time to get back into Coronation Street.
Luckily I’m friendly, and really good at empty conversations about things like the weather, and the merits of a dippable biscuit; but if I didn’t have those skills, I probably wouldn’t speak to anyone.
I feel like I need to be re-socialised again. Greg starts full-time school in September and I need some time to ease myself back into being a person in my own right.
What will I talk about when I no longer have to say “Shh, that’s rude” a thousand times a day?
I need to get out more. Where can I go? All suggestions are welcome unless you try and make me join exercise classes, in which case I will shun you!
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I started volunteering in a charity shop once a week, opens up a whole world of people!!
Amazing! I definitely need to get on with doing something!
I can totally relate to this, I have absolutely nothing to say to people because people don’t need to know the random crap that I’ve been doing because it’s not interesting. I started an exercise class a couple of weeks ago and love it for giving it me an hour or so to myself but I’m busy exercising so I don’t talk and it doesn’t give me anything interesting to say when I return home, I just go back into the routine of small talk, if anything at all. I would like to think it doesn’t matter but I know it does, I can see it becoming an issue with some people and I don’t know how to find my way back.