What Should I Say?

Do you ever stop and think? For us introverts it's a common practice. You might think we are so quiet because we have nothing to say. The truth is we are thinking of at least five different thing that could be said and weighing the potential outcomes. Often by the time we think of the best thing to say in given moment, the moment has already passed, and the conversation has shifted to a new topic and the process of contemplating the wittiest comeback starts all over.

I can remember many times as a young person thinking of wonderful comebacks to a cocky remark someone made in our youth group meeting, the morning after the exchange. It made me feel really frustrated and I would ask myself, "why couldn't I have thought of that last night?"

At other times I would try to keep up with the extroverts and say the first thing that popped into my head with the usual result being that the words would come out wrong and I would be misunderstood or the thing I had intended as a joke would be taken as an insult.

Over the years I've developed a preemptive strategy for situations like that. I often imagine ahead of time what someone might say and then work out how I might respond to steer the conversation in the direction I wanted it to go. Sometimes these premeditated dialogues serendipitously fit a situation I found myself in and the words came out just right and everyone had a good laugh, both because what I said was funny and because they couldn't believe it came out of my mouth!

Perhaps all this thinking makes me seem slow witted at times, but it does offer one advantage: with all these running dialogues in my head I'm never bored from lack of conversation!