Chatterbox

Anyone who has driven a boat with an outboard motor knows it has only two speeds: glacial and airborne. There is no intermediate setting. For this reason I consider myself an outboard motormouth. I only have two settings when it comes to conversation--awkward uncomfortable silence, or nonstop chatter. There is no in-between.

Unless I'm in an environment in which I feel extremely comfortable and secure, I generally start off with new people extremely shy and quiet and warm up and become more talkative as time goes on. Partly because I'm severely socially phobic (I'm terrified of making myself look stupid), partly because I don't warm up to new people straight away, and partly because I hate the sound of my own voice. That last one is the result of childhood bullying--when I was very young I was a motormouth. I spoke my first words before I was sixteen months and scarcely shut up from that day on. I loved to talk. I loved it more than anybody around me could reasonably be expected to listen. My mom got so tired of listening to me jabber one day that she told me her ears were sleeping and she couldn't listen right now just to get a few hours of peace. I lived in England long enough to adopt an English accent but not long enough to be seen by my peers as equal to them and was always mocked for residual Americanisms; upon moving to the US, I was mocked for my Yorkshire accent. To spare myself the torment, I simply spent ten years a selective mute. I still haven't quite been able to shake it.

So people who get to know me better are usually quite surprised when the verbal floodgates open because they had no idea I could talk that much. I quite like talking, actually, but there aren't too terribly many people with whom I feel comfortable enough to talk as much as I really want--thus the handful of people I do trust end up subjected to a truly mind-boggling amount of chattiness. I just store it all up until I can talk to them and then let it all out. It's dizzying. I jump from one tangent to the next without stopping to breathe. A conversation about bubblegum could somehow result in social commentary about Volkswagens without pause or reasonable transition.

The rest of the time I just give off the appearance of being very unsociable even though I normally really want to join in with the conversations around me. I just never feel very welcome and worry I'm going to get mocked for the way I talk, which today is equal parts American and Yorkshire and has the same effect as a cheese grater on the temporal lobe.

Fortunately I have some very accommodating loved ones who just let me run off at the mouth all I want. I talked nonstop with my boyfriend's dad for days and he followed everything I said without once getting lost or having to ask me to repeat myself. Boything just kind of sat there following the conversation like a ping-pong ball back and forth across a table. He'd never met anyone who could keep up with his dad in conversation--and I'd never met anyone who could meet me parry for parry.

Most people quite like the sound of my voice (I sound like my mom and therefore HATE IT), so even when they have no idea what I'm trying to say they're usually very happy just to listen. I blame the accent. It makes me sound a lot more sophisticated than I am.