And We Talked…And Talked…And Talked…And Talked…
A Few Quick Thoughts on the Seemingly Excessive Verbosity of the Awkward.
Humans are social animals. We are born seeking external validation. As we grow, that need for external validation becomes a sense of self and we gain the ability to self-validate…if we’re conditioned properly…by people with good instincts.
Some of us aren’t so lucky. If we aren’t born with special needs that necessitate extra attention, we might get dismissed as annoyances if we’re too much to handle…marginalized as things to be raised by the cartoons on TV rather than the ‘warm bodies’ from which we were excised. We’re denied the privilege of competent caregivers and get stuck with parents who have the emotional and intellectual competence of teenagers, and thus we enter the wider world not understanding the difference between normal and abnormal, where is the line between acceptable and transgressive.
For people with invisible illnesses, like depression or ADD, this can be especially troublesome trying to navigate a world that almost unilaterally demands a modicum of normality. The parents are already ill-equipped to handle excess stress, thus when we start interacting with others, possessing cognitive distortions which infringe on normal rules of decorum, we can get into a whole heap of trouble for our innocence.
If we’re never given, or allowed to develop, a proper perspective in this regard, we tend to internalize all the push-back and rejection, developing a negative view of ourselves as people who are irreparably broken or beyond hope. Everything becomes something we’re doing wrong, regardless of whether we’re doing something right, and no amount of encouragement to the contrary will help rectify that distorted thinking.
It’s an enormous burden to carry so many emotional torments at once when you’ve never found acceptance, never had a shoulder to cry on. It’s been my observation that people who get pushed to the margins tend to want to open their mental floodgates and just gush forth with all they have when they feel they’ve found a genuine moment of acceptance. Of course, this can be annoying for people who were just trying to be nice. The fact remains, however, that the emotional burdens of marginalization are a lot to carry and no one can seriously blame a person for wanting to relieve that burden when the opportunity arises.
What you do with this information is up to you, but I hope it gives you some tools to be better equipped when you encounter a ‘misfit’ who just wants to talk about everything under the sun on a whim. I wont say my observations here are universal truisms, because there are definitely conceited people out there who get off talking about themselves ad nauseum. That said, people who get pushed to margins don’t always get pushed there because they are bad people. They may just not understand the line between acceptable and transgressive, and you may have the power and presence of intellect to help them better understand that boundary.
Here’s a good song to take you home after reading.
