Now, you might be saying "you're making a mountain out of a molehill, Vector!" and you'd be partially right. I know how to do a couple of the above things. I am struggling mightily with them--and if one more person says "just let things happen," I will stab that person with a fork. "Just let things happen" has led to my saying things like "Wait, we're friends? I didn't know!" Then I lose the friend in question, and everything goes bad. Sure, I don't do that anymore (learned my lesson). I do similar things. There's hundreds of questions I have to fill in, bit by bit, sometimes by questioning people and sometimes by my own careful experimentation. It's a slow process, and extremely frustrating.
Pardon the earlier ramble. It had been a long day, and towards the end my thoughts were disintigrating into mush. What I meant to say was that, if you just relaxed and let things happ-ARGH!
*gets stabbed by a fork*...okay, so here's my perspective. You've got a command of language, and seem to be able to communicate your ideas well. You write clearly and concisely, and when writing creatively (ala Mafia Narratives), you seem to have a highly-developed understanding of people, their emotions, motives, and so on.
As such, I find it implausible that you are "Socially Stupid," and unless the afforementioned evidence is all an Epic Ruse on your part, I'm inclined to believe that people who have called you that in the past either didn't know how to listen (many, many people are like this), or didn't know you as well as they might think. Granted, face-to-face communication is
a lot more complicated than writing, given that you have physical behaviors, facial expressions, and a lot less time to extract the intent from people's words... but 75% of effective communication is understanding what you're trying to say (which you seem to) and the remainder involves being able to put yourself in the opposite person's shoes, and figuring out how to help them to understand what's in your head. You can't write or say an idea... you can only provide words that help people conceptualize similar ideas in their own minds.
Since you seem to be approaching this Heuristically, here's a description of how I tend to handle the second half of communication, which might give you something to check yourself against:
A lot of people have told me that I'm highly empathetic... but if there's some innate "Human Empathy" trait, I definitely don't have it. Instead I spent most of my life learning to "read" people by building a mental database of the traits and feelings of others... I ask them about their opinions on things, and the reasons behind it, without arguing another point. I let them tell stories, and ask them how they felt during certain events, or why they chose to take a certain course of action. As I gathered more examples from more people, I noticed trends and similarities between some things, and from people with similar experiences... and built up a web of traits and assumptions I can make about them, which basically helped me understand what to expect from people. Whenever something didn't fit what I'd assumed to be true, I revised it with the relevnt information.
Using this, I've basically learned how to intuit people's feelings, guess what they're going to do next, or find the best way of talking to them. I figure most people do the same thing, but probably haven't wasted as much time trying to quanlify and understand their own mind... at least as far as interpersonal communication goes.
Back on topic, I'm missing the planning session for a Backpacking outing to Red River Gorge this weekend, so my gear might be all wonky, and I might end up holding up the trip if I'm ill-equipped.
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Topic: Things that made you sad today thread. (Read 9793731 times)