No, I don’t mean I can’t talk about my feelings. I mean I can’t talk about ANYTHING. Maybe it doesn’t seem like that because for the most part I can prattle along like anyone else but the second I actually need to TALK about something it all falls apart and I lose the ability to string together a simple sentence.
I CANNOT EXPLAIN THINGS FOR SHIT.
You should see me trying. It’s hilarious, I tell you. Especially in writing. “The stronger dispersion forces do not allow the other things in and they do not dissolve” earned me a question mark and 1 out of 4 marks. Ha. To get all 4 marks I’d have had to ramble randomly for half a page.
I DON’T SAY WHAT I MEANT TO SAY.
Take, for example, the time a friend asked me “What’s the difference between a printer port and a USB port?” What’s the difference? Well, for starters, a printer port is a printer port and a USB port is a USB port. Except I figured she’d want a more useful explanation so I told her “A printer port only connects printers!” Zing! Helpful! And not even correct! And I knew perfectly well what the difference was but didn’t say it, not that it matters because my explanation would have been largely unintelligible anyway.
I FAIL AT STRUCTURING.
English teachers who are not middle-aged women like me because apparently I have “original ideas” (the ones who are middle-aged women hate me for it). Imagine their surprise when I turn in "3-page essays) that are 1 1/2 pages long and filled with aimless waffle that demonstrates no understanding whatsoever! And debates usually end with me admitting defeat because organising my thoughts takes up so much energy I tend to forget what I was trying to say in the first place. If my opponent uses logical fallacies, even better! I can spot the fallacy right away but it takes me about half an hour to say why.
Oh, what else? PEOPLE DON’T BELIEVE ME WHEN I SAY THIS. This post, for example, makes me look perfectly articulate to the person who doesn’t know that it took me an hour and several trips to the thesaurus to write. Note also that I wrote under headings. And people think it’s a “quirk” of mine that I can switch from formal language to colloquialisms or vice versa with lightning speed or that I use words in unusual ways. I’M NOT BEING QUIRKY YOU FUCKING IDIOTS IT’S THE ONLY WAY I CAN THINK OF TO SAY THINGS.
Look, I know it’s frustrating, but if you want to learn to cook asparagus without it being too mushy, you’re just going to have to stand by the stove. Your comments about pasta, though, were right on.
Don’t forget to refresh in ice water to set the green colour!
Seriously, it’s just a matter of practise more than anything else. Slow down, think about what you want to write/say. Get all your ideas down on paper, then establish 3 or 4 key themes you want to talk about. Organise your work around those themes and then structure your argument in a logical way towards it’s conclusion.
It’s always frustrating when you are just hunting for that perfect word or phrase which you know you know but just cant get a grip on. Just relax, do something else and then go back in 5 minutes and see if you can figure it out.
This fucking idiot believes that you believe that you have a communication problem. From what I can gather from what you’ve said, it takes you a long time to organize a post and you think that you need to consult a thesaurus to make your ideas clear.
I commend you on finding a way to organize your thoughts and being determined enough to post them.
Since it took only a moment to read through your words and they do make sense, I was tempted to dismiss them. Then I remembered a period in my life when part of my brain had shut down because of an electro-lyte problem. I could not make sense orally and it took me MUCH longer to write a post – perhaps thirty minutes for two sentences.
When I tried to actually describe the problem to a doctor’s assistant, I could see the words in my head, but I couldn’t organize them into speech patterns.
My problem lasted only a matter of a few hours or a couple of days. (Lots of sleep and Gatorade was my easy cure.) But it did open my eyes to how easy it is to lose control over language skills or to be a reasonably intelligent person and still have a problem.
Uh, forever. It’s a personal weakness, not a brain malfunction. I mean, I guess it is a brain malfunction but eh. I’m happy rambling. Rambling is fine. It’s when I actually need to make a point that things start to fall apart. Probably the same as everyone else but… more? It’s kind of like I can’t condense thoughts, like normally you don’t need to but when you are arguing or explaining you need to be logical and concise and ordered and all that and then it becomes more like groping around in the dark.
Person: question or comment
Me: ramble ramble ramble
Person: sums up my rambling in a sentence or two
Me: Uh… yeah.
My husband has the same sort of problem. His is because he’s frightfully intelligent, but because of a minor speech problem when he was a kid (and no consistent treatment for it, although he’s gotten past it now), he basically has his brain moving several times faster than his mouth, so by the time he gets to saying “Point 1”, his brain’s on “point 5” and his mouth has kind of forgotten what to say. He winds up either going completely incoherent or rambles on trying to match up brain & mouth again so he can finish his thought.
It doesn’t happen ALL the time, just when he’s trying to organize a particularly involved thought pattern or progression.
I’ve said it’s like his brain is buffering to his mouth too fast and overloading the mouth queue.
sounds like you may be suffering from much the same thing.
