Experiment

So, I am going to try a personal experiment. I am going to go a whole day, maybe Monday, without verbalizing a single complaint. Once I can manage that, I will try to go two days, and so on. I pick Monday simply because I have a crazy busy weekend ahead of me, and have just pulled an all nighter, and though I will have no shortage of complaints I will have no one to complain to anyway and it will be no challenge to keep it to myself. That defeats the purpose of the exercise.

I have a bit of a problem with complaining. Not usually in professional or academic situations so much as in personal conversations. Part of it is that I have no idea how to keep a conversation going. I could talk about things that make me happy-- but those are much less complex, there is no issue to be analyzed or solved, so unless the other person jumps in-- which almost never happens, I cannot maintain a conversation. Problems can be analyzed, discussed, and solved. I am a problem oriented person, not because of a general negative outlook on life-- if anything I am dangerously optimistic, but because I can and enjoy working with problems so that I can fix them. I am constantly working with problems. On the outside it seems I am overly focused on the negative aspects of my life, but that is only because I am spending most of my time FIXING them. If I had friends to go out for a drink with to feel better about failing a course maybe I wouldn't care about fixing my problems, but fending off failure is about all I have going for me at the moment! There's nothing to talk about in happy things. They make me happy. I wouldn't want to change that. End of story. Things that are annoying or troublesome are a puzzle to be solved. Happy things are just there. How do I stretch that into an entire conversation?

I have been slowly discovering over the past few years that these are not puzzles anyone wants to share with me, they find them draining. My second problem is that I have little else to talk about. My life is very complicated and very hard. It is a mixture of brief very complicated very hard periods separated by long periods of general isolation and boredom. What is there to talk about?

My only strategy at the moment to fix these problems is to try and get the other person to talk about themselves, but they wont. Even close friends I've known for years that I know aren't just trying to get rid of me. I'll ask them how their day was, an invitation to tell any story they want from the day, and they say, "fine." I ask if anything interesting happened, and get "no" or a one sentence story. Then what? Talking to NTs is like pulling teeth! I don't get it! I DESPERATELY want to talk about something other than myself, I am endlessly curious about the people around me and will listen to literally ANYTHING anyone could spew at me, but I can't get them to do it!

So, a negative consequence of my attempt to quit any and all complaining (except in the form of scathing anonymous emails to businesses and the ruling bodies of my university, who deserve it) is that I may very well have nothing else to say to anyone. But I suppose I'd rather lose touch with the few friends I have than continue to be thought of as a pathological pessimist who is work to talk to instead of fun.

Boo.