SMotD - What Did You Just Say?

Listening.  Though I would never want to reduce something so beautifully complex into one word, if I had to define what most NATs struggle with, it would be the ability to listen.  My mind moves in many different directions, all at once, and if you aren’t interesting me, or if you are saying something that I cannot connect with a learned experience, the chance is you have no hope of garnering my full attention.  Sure, I may nod, but I drift off.  And on the phone…forget it.  You might as well be reading ingredients and proportions off the back of a fruitcake recipe.  I just won’t care.  So is the context for today’s SMotD, the moment I realized that conversation fillers cannot substitute for listening.

Age 17, madly infatuated with a girl, Susan, who I had met at camp.  Gorgeous eyes, small frame, knowledge of rock music, fantastically intelligent, and exciting in every measure.  The 17-yr old me was hopelessly ridiculous with girls, though I gave dogged pursuit in this case.  Despite the fact that I was generally interested in what she had to say, and valued her opinions, I would find my mind wandering during conversations.  I was either completely into what she was discussing or so bored that I would fixate on one portion of her conversation and let my mind digress into its elaborate train of special interest focus.  In one particular phone conversation (one of several, she actually gave me the time of day and a date or two), my attention drew elsewhere, and she finished a long segment of some point she was discussing, and I said, without even thinking, “That’s cool.”  She curtly but politely responded, “No, it’s actually not.”  

To this day, I have no idea what she said, or what was very much not cool, but I knew I had created the cardinal sin in a conversation, lack of interest.  I literally could not remove myself from my world and focus on hers.  I could not take the shifts in conversation if I didn’t know where they were supposed to go, especially if they entered the relatively small circle of topics outside of which I (with supreme arrogance) thought myself a learned scholar.  We never had much of a conversation after that, and drifted apart rather quickly (we were in the same town, but at different high schools).  But I remember how quickly I lost the conversation and how I replaced empathy with something pithy.  Those words were devastating, but at the same time, my NAT brain allowed me to avoid apologizing, or even trying to change my behavior.

I struggle mightily even today with focusing on another person during conversations, but I force myself to consider that this person is taking the time to connect with me, and they generally want to be heard, just like me.  They may not be as forceful as me, as confident as me, and they may be talking about really uninteresting things, but my special interests are just as annoying to most people.  My mind simply makes me think that my stuff matters oh so much more.

Feelings: boredom, shame, misunderstanding, surprise

What I learned:

1) “That’s cool” SUCKS as a conversation filler.

2) Other people bring their experience, which is always valuable, even if they seem in the moment to be the most boring person on the planet.

3) I shouldn’t be so hard on myself because my mind gets bored in conversations.  Many NTs do as well, but refocusing on someone is exactly what I hope that person would do for me.