In Which most people keep it to themselves

Amazingly, it's taken me until now to wonder about something really obvious. As you are doubtless aware, I say a lot of things. I write a lot of things. Like, a lot of things. More than a lot of people. And sometimes I say something unusual and then either I or someone else opines that everyone thinks/does whatever that was, but most people don't say it out loud.

So someone says something nice to/about me and I'm all "Really? Truly? Awesome! Yessss!" etc. Then I get just a smidgin self-conscious and say "sorry, I just get so excited, I love it when people say nice things" and sort of metaphorically twirl a toe on the ground. And people always (well, often. Sometimes. When I haven't gotten too disproportionately pleased) say "no, I'm the exact same, but secretly. I think everyone thinks that! Most people just don't say anything."

Same goes for the overthinking. Like I said in my last post, I totally bet that everyone, or at least almost everyone, does that. Most people just manage not to say anything to other people, and cunningly hide their crazy. Also, they usually manage not to write thousand-word blog posts about it. Presumably they just don't have my mad typing skills or something.

So, here's my point: why not? Or, to put it another way, why do I? Why am I different to everyone else? I've never been real good at feigning indifference when people are nice, and I've never known why you would. Maybe it's a coolness thing. But why is it cool to pretend that you like things less than you do? Is it part of the original "cool", being carefully unenthused about everything? Is it a self-protection thing, like if you admit that you have a strong reaction to something, then others have power over you, or something? Is that really how you think about people? Surely not. Surely. Most people are alright. And this way you weed out the jerks who think you're weird for saying things like "Wow!" nice and early, before they can kill your life buzz.

I mean, I guess it is sometimes inconvenient, in that on a similar basis, when I like something, I say so, which probably comes across as insincere sometimes. It's bad when I run into a few people at once, and all of them have something nice going on in their outfit. If you say "Wow, I love your earrings!" to one person, they're pleased, but if you then like the next person's shoes and the next's hairdo, then you look like you're just making it up. "The eyes, the hair, pick a feature!" But I really only say those things when I mean them. Firstly because people so often have something great about them which is pretty obvious if you're actually looking at them at all, and secondly because I really like it when people say nice things to me. Also, because I'm so aware of how suss it often sounds that the idea of further muddying the waters with insincere compliments just terrifies me, so of course I would never say these things when they weren’t called for. If I sound foolish mentioning the things I do like, imagine how much worse it would be if I started adding to that, and mentioning more things! Especially if they were clearly rubbish, I suppose.

Anyway, the question is: why do I say these things naturally, when everyone else seems to naturally hide them? It's not that I don't like the idea of playing my cards close to the chest and seeming mysterious, it's just that I can't pull it off. I always want to talk to people about how my new play-the-cards-close-to-the-chest-and-be-mysterious thing is going. Tell them how intriguingly difficult I'm finding it not to tell them things. That sort of palaver.

Well, at any rate I assume that everyone else thinks things all the time, but is just heaps better at playing it cool than me. But then, every now and then, this happens. This is the facebook status (about Doctor Who, in case you’re out of the loop) which a Friend of mine made the other day, and the comments on it (or some of them):

TB says: "Vincent Van Gogh with a Scottish accent...sorry but no."
RW comments: "Ach laddie, mah fookin' ear!"
Ang comments: "It's the Tardis translating, buzzkill! Besides, I don't speak Dutch, so it had to be some kind of accent. Unless you want to get all Mel Gibson pseudo-realism, and use subtitles, in which case we have bigger problems.
TH comments: "Yes because the Dutch sound so Scottish, it hurts...
And why are the French from Somerset?
Ang comments: "Again: because they have to be from somewhere other than France, and it should be all the same place so you can tell who's different, so it might as well be Somerset as anywhere else. You can't hire actors who have no accent whatsoever, they sound foreign to EVERYONE. Or would, if they existed."
TH comments: "Wow, clearly you have put a lot of thought into this."

...what? I mean, isn't that just the obvious answer to the question at hand? I didn't put any thought into it at all, I just answered (which is why my answer reads so oddly, in retrospect). I mean, I appreciate that maybe the dude was being deliberately facile and whatever, and that's fair enough, maybe I shouldn't've gone "I will try to answer the question you are begging but not asking", because that's just me being a bit socially odd (which is still a mystery), but what is this thing where people imply that you had to be up late into the night, tossing and turning as you ponder the question or whatever? I mean, it leaps to the eye. And in this case, it has been leaping to the eye, no thought required, essentially ever since we were old enough to watch movies and TV. This issue is the same for every story ever set in a place where they don't speak English. Surely we all nutted it out when we were about 11? I just... I just have no idea what the go is with this sort of interaction.

Leaving this aside, I still have no idea why it is that I seem to be sort of full of words compared to everyone else. It worries me a little, since "pressure of speech" is a symptom of mania and schizophrenia and heaven only knows what else besides. It does sort of seem a little like that, doesn't it? Like some person or event scratches the surface of my mind and words just spurt and spray everywhere, like the blood coming out of the limb-stumps of that knight in Monty Python's Holy Grail.

It's pressurised enough that I have to carry a whole notebook for it. It turns out that you're not allowed to just talk out loud to yourself or others (and yes, I do talk out loud to myself. It's rarely silent in my car when I'm driving alone. If I'm not singing along, I'm talking to myself. I think maybe it's a habit I got from driving when I was tired, trying to keep myself awake) during lectures and stuff, you're supposed to sit quietly. So I carry a little notebook to vent words, and relieve the pressure, so to speak. It's full of disjointed half-thought phrases and song lyrics and lists and so on. Which is weird, because I also use it for passing notes in class, and it's a strange thing to hand to a curious friend a repository of your half-formed thoughts and absent-minded musings. It makes me nervous when people flip the pages back (because they don't want to waste paper, people often do this; as if an 800-page "Fat Little Notebook" is not already wasted paper, a sunk cost) because I usually have no recollection of what things I've written in there disjointedly, and how they will seem when strung together.

I particularly always want to write down nice things that I remember, (and they look especially mad when read back out of context, I assure you) to sort of crystallise the memory. There are so many things that I can only really remember once they've been said out loud a few times, or written down. And it makes me sad to think that I won't be able to remember how it was when that nice boy in my class said that he thought I was really really cool and had impeccable dress sense, or that lovely girl said that she thought I was so funny that when we became facebook friends she went and read all my old statuses on my profile page. Because without crystallising, those sorts of things get lost, filed vaguely under "Oh, how nice!". And then when you have a rough day and you need to access that sort of memory, you're out of luck.

Obviously it's difficult, because putting a memory into words is like trying to put something soft into a box. It's protected there, and you can find it, but it's changed. The bits that don't fit get squashed in, some of the shape is lost faster, squished into the shape of the box, formed and deformed by the words which protect it. Or maybe it's mosre like hanging a coat on a skeleton? Anyway, like a metaphor which isn't quite right. Exactly like that.

Anyway, I don't really have an answer to my question of what makes me respond differently, maybe it's just that once you start thinking like that, once you start, it sort of snowballs. I mean, you can tell it snowballs, look at this blog. Since I started Medicine, I've been told a couple of times by lovely, apparently perfectly sane people, that they never read books because they don't have the time. (Lovely, apparently sane people who get much much better marks than I do, obviously). In that time, just since I started this highly intensive etc. course, I've written about 70,000 words of blog alone. (Never mind emails, facebook statuses, notebook, etc). That's about the same length as the novels my compatriots don't have time to even read.

See? Takes but a scratch and there's pools of words all over the place! Whoa.