Asked and Answered

I am not a very talkative person.  Throughout my life many people have asked me why I’m so quiet.  Not nearly as many as those who have ironically told me to shut up, but still a pretty respectable number.  Usually when someone asked me why I speak so little I repeated “I don’t know” as many times as necessary until the topic was dropped, but the truth is I have given it some thought.  So now I will attempt to answer that question to the best of my ability.  As for the question of how so many people can be so unaware of their own lack of creativity to think that I haven’t heard their bad joke hundreds of times before, I’m afraid I really just don’t know.  All I can do is hope that Comedy Saint Peter will hold those comedy sinners and heathens accountable for their crimes against comedy humanity.

            

The simple answer is that speaking has caused me nothing but pain, but if I say that in casual conversation I’ll get pity eyes.  It all started in second grade, when my school got a new playground.  I watched it being built for months, all color and plastic; far better than the old playground made of wood and a rare space metal that conducted heat at a rate unheard of before or since on Earth.  When the day finally came that my class got to play on the new playground I was forced to stay inside and write sentences, just because I was having a discussion on the finer points of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban with a classmate while our teacher was trying to shove meaningless facts down our throats.

That brush with fascism was just the beginning.  The world continued to punish me for speaking but not with such straightforward penances; instead it destroyed my self-esteem one blow at a time.  I was told that I was academically gifted, but somehow that failed to translate to me being right about everything, so instead I felt like I was wrong about everything.  Also, I had weight issues, which wasn't very helpful.  We don’t need to get into that now, but long story short, no, I don’t know what you mean when you say that in high school you could eat whatever you wanted without gaining a pound.

Maybe I’m over psycho-analyzing myself.  Maybe it’s as simple as hearing someone say something favorable about the strong silent type, and my impressionable young self took it way too far.  Or maybe it was the old adage that it’s better to let people think you’re a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.  However, I don’t think it’s as simple as a cliché or even a traumatic childhood memory.  I think it’s more likely that being quiet is a part of who I am, and there is no simple answer to the question of why I am who I am.  Speaking of old sayings, I guess what I'm trying to say is that I am what I am and that’s all that I am.