Incessant Self-Promotion vs. Mysterious Silence

[Nonchalance]

I'm somewhat reserved about myself. Does that make me mysterious?

But while I like to hear what other people have to say, I'm not fond of the yap yap yap type, which doesn't even permit questions.

[lpc123]

Originally Posted by AngelWing

I heard a good one the other day :

I am a quiet person and I
don't have many friends.

I'm pretty sure If I talked
I'd have even fewer.

Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt. - Abraham Lincoln

[Mimidae]

I'm one of the silent types. It's mostly a trust issue. It takes a lot of trust for me to confide anything about myself to someone.

One thing I will say about my ilk: if we share something about ourselves out of the blue, try to be as good a listener as we've always been to you. Most of the time, when I finally feel comfortable enough to share something, the other person says "that's nice" and goes right on talking about themselves. It's a disappointing feeling, like, "I don't know why I bothered."

[michael917]

I have always been noted as the quiet type. I had extreme social anxiety growing up, though nobody understood that (not even me), and so I got a lot of extra attention which just made me more self-conscious and led me to being a very introverted adult.

Throughout my adult life, I've tried various ways of meeting new people but my lingering social anxiety tends to hold me back, in addition to the fact that I rarely come across people who like to talk about the same things I do. On the somewhat rare occasions I find people with common interests, I can talk as much as anybody else. In fact, a year ago I did a solo vacation with a dozen strangers and nobody once commented on how quiet I was, because with that particular group I wasn't.

In the end, people are always going to judge others who behave differently. It would be better if the people judging could do so in silence, and if the people being judged could learn not to take it so personally, but it tends not to be that way.