We Spoke for Hours and Said Nothing
Picture your worst nightmare. Not the jump-scare kind—I'm talking about the recurring, soul-level dread you bring up in therapy. The thing that feels like a monster under your bed, even as an adult.
Well, this is mine: a dinner party full of people too scared to say anything real.
Just typing that gave me goosebumps.
Superficial conversations haunt me. If I have a social event with strangers on the calendar, I’ll start rehearsing my exit strategy three days in advance.
Over the years, I’ve become disturbingly skilled at pretending to care about the following:
The divots in your country club’s golf course caused by “out-of-town” golfers
Your coworker’s tuna salad that stinks up the entire office
The way a 20% chance of rain might, possibly, affect your pickleball tournament
The Audi dealership not covering your $40 oil change (a true tragedy)
Your 10-year-old daughter’s scandalous lack of playtime in her basketball league
I often catch myself asking wildly inappropriate questions like, “Have you ever seen a dead body?” or, “What famous person do you think your cat came back as in this life?” I’m convinced my cat was Bob Barker in a past life—the timing checks out, and he carries himself like an 80-year-old game show host trapped in a 2-year-old fur coat.
There are times I’ve ghosted parties and never returned.
Sometimes I go to the bathroom and drive away like I just committed a petty crime.
It’s not that I think I’m some tortured intellectual—it’s actually the opposite. I just get mind-numbingly bored talking about jobs, meal prep, or which preschool is “Montessori-adjacent”. I want to talk about what’s real—like your greatest fear or your deepest insecurity.
I’ve found that asking uncomfortable questions usually goes one of two ways:
It backfires, and you lose your audience (but they probably weren’t your audience to begin with), or
It opens up a real conversation.
But trust me, I still fall into superficial patterns too.
My version of small talk (and something I still indulge in, unfortunately) is gossip. It feels amazing in the moment and terrible afterward. For a long time, gossip was my go-to dopamine hit. I’d obsess over other people’s drama while ignoring the giant, emotionally-stunted elephant in my own room. I still slip back into that cozy pattern when something’s off inside me.
Unfortunately, there are going to be times when you have to be “on.”
You can’t always ask people about their most traumatic childhood event (sadly).
But you also don’t want to fall into people-pleasing mode—that soul-numbing dance of nodding along just to keep things smooth.
So here’s a little checklist I came up with:
The Techniques:
Dissociate into your mental to-do list
Grocery list, blog ideas, things you wish you said in your last argument—go wild.Embrace the void
Accept that nothing is happening here and that’s okay. Float in the shallows.Roleplay if the stakes are low
Maybe you’re a failed soap opera star who faked your own death in 2012. Or a French diplomat en route to a scandal. Or just a person one bad conversation away from losing it. Choose your fighter.Drop a philosophical bomb and see what happens
“It’s wild that we all know we’re going to die and still talk about the weather like it matters.”
[Silence. Sip your coffee. Watch their soul leave their body.]
Overall, just remember:
Not every moment has to be deep, and you don’t need to connect with everyone.
It’s also not (just) people-pleasing. Sometimes the easiest gift you can give someone is making them feel heard—even if what they’re sharing makes you want to remove your eardrums, stomp on them, and put them back in once the conversation is over.
Maybe connection isn’t always about you.
Maybe it’s just showing up, nodding along, and letting someone feel like their weekend plans actually matter.
And honestly? Maybe that’s what being human is.
(Or maybe it’s just what I tell myself to survive without screaming into the soft underbelly of my repressed childhood memories.)
