The unending conversation
Buckle up, readers, this is not a light and humorous one.
There’s a problem I have with chats on social media apps. It seems that not that long ago, apps had focused purposes. Instagram was meant for sharing photographs, Facebook was where you wrote nonsense thoughts for your friends to read, and WhatsApp was where you exchanged school notes and gossiped about others in private chats. We’ve moved towards integrated experiences on every application now and it’s given rise to a strange social situation now. The perception people have of me and the supposed “vibe” I emanate seems to be that I am perpetually available for conversation. That my brief replies to everyone aren’t enough, I have to be constantly engaged in dialogue with them with enthusiasm, otherwise, I am “trying hard to be rude” to them.
It’s a strange phenomenon. When I meet people in real life, I do so primarily in one of two ways. I orchestrate a time and place with them, we hang out, we talk and then we go our separate ways. Alternatively, when I meet someone on the street I say hello to them and carry on with my day. (Note: Grammarly says it finds this inspirational. Perhaps that’s indicative of something that I’m reaching for in this piece). None of these interactions come with the burden of sustaining a conversation that is frankly over. I can’t carry on a dialogue that has rightfully ended. I also don’t feel an overwhelming need to stay in touch with people, divulging information regarding my frankly uninteresting daily life. I can see where this particular issue comes from, however. As a schoolgirl, my life had been deeply insular. I spent all my time with the same people who again spent all their time with their individual sets of same people. We were a bunch of school kids going to the same institute, studying the same subjects, reading the same books, and watching the same telly shows. But it created the illusion that we were actually a mélange of personalities. We needed to discuss, share and unpick all our trivial interactions to learn something meaningful. It didn’t help that we had nothing better to do with our free time. Our hobbies and interests were underfunded by the helicopter parenting that our generation fell prey to, while our formal education (or whatever the plethora of private tuition classes we attended constituted) had inflated budgets. But mostly when I look back, I realise that I was incredibly bored. So I maintained easygoing friendships–and they were easygoing. They were people I sat next to, joked with, sneakily bunked classes with. Then I went home and I texted them, and we discussed whatever we’d missed while trying to write down notes in class.
It’s not the same anymore. I rarely text those friends from back then and when we do text, it’s honest. I didn’t receive a reply from a friend of mine training to be a doctor, so when we got on a call that lasted less than a minute, I told him to reply and we laughed about it. I held no resentment, I have no expectations because the conversation ended there. The conversation needs to end when it’s reached its natural conclusion.
It’s not the same with others, however. There’s an expectation that I need to engage with every comment they make, as much as a conversational dead-end as it may be. And even when I do engage, I’m expected to respond a certain way to sustain said conversational dead-end, so that we can continue our battle of pointless texting. It’s all in the name of socialising, I believe. I should point out though that all the critics of my supposed lacklustre texting habits have been men. Make of that what you will, considering what we do know about men complaining that women aren’t being nice enough to them.
As an adult, I rarely have an interest in sharing the details of my daily life. There’s no gossip here, people, I do chores, work, cook, eat, and watch a variety show for fun. I go on long walks and take photos of the leaves turning from green to red. Occasionally I paint a canvas and then bin it because it was terrible. If you text me asking if I’m well and I say yes I am, then that is all there is to it, I’m afraid. And frankly, if that is “purposeful rudeness” to you, then I would rather you refrain from checking up on me. It removes a chore from your list and a conversational dead-end from mine. I text some people with stuff that actually has nothing to do with me. They don’t know anything about my daily life either, because there’s nothing to know. But they have slightly better abilities to sustain light-touch conversations so it’s a mix of whatever I found amusing/interesting depending on my engagement with the wider media of the world at the moment in time. If I don’t share it with you, well, perhaps it’s because I don’t want to. That has to be an option in life, the choice to not engage with everyone you have ever known the exact same way, as though all people share the same hive-mind.
On the last day of 2021, I published a blog post in which I listed a few things I’d figured out at that time. I’ve realised many more things by now, including further boundaries that I needed to set. But one thing that I had said then was:
I need to set better boundaries with people. Without getting too much into it, it seems that I give off the air of more things in my life being up for discussion or criticism. This seems to include everything from where I go to how I engage with things on bloody social media. It’s not. And I may have given off an air of allowing such conversation by being too approachable online.
The pitfall of this seems to have been that once you cut off the easy access to your inner circle, people take it personally. We’re all the main characters in our narratives, so it’s hard to appreciate that someone else choosing to engage a certain way on social media is them playing out the part in their narrative. While the vestiges of the Deutsche Romantik have made sure that we find it hard to believe that not everything is about us, sometimes it really isn’t about you.
Ultimately it boils down to this: comment expecting the conversation to end. I write words for a living, I won’t construct essays about my personal life for you in private chat, mostly because I don’t enjoy discussing non-events. If you’re one of the people I’ve shared a classroom with once upon a time, surprisingly you’re good at this, well done you lot. You’ve never had unrealistic expectations regarding social media conversations. Everyone else has seen a briefer, less authentic version of me in real life. Apologies for that, but I reply in brief phrases if you ask me questions about my life. And I have an even stricter boundary regarding trauma dumping than I did last year. People’s negative energy is bad for my mental health and the latter is very much my priority.
