Thursday 13 August 2015

How I Taught Myself To Approximate A Normal Human Being

When I was a kid, I didn't get things like other people did. I liked maths, because maths had rules and logic. Take this input, perform these actions on it, get this result out. Every time. Maths made sense. Maths was reliable.

I never did anything without a purpose. I couldn't understand why people spoke to each other. Almost everything they said seemed meaningless, they weren't imparting required information to each other, just making noise.

When I entered 6th form, I was fed up of not fitting in, of not having friends or being invited to parties, so I decided to figure out how to be a normal human being. I started being that creepy guy no one really knows just hanging around at the edge of a group, staring but not talking. I was observing, figuring out the rules and logic governing human interaction. I spent months trying to figure out the purpose of small talk, trying to figure out the rules so I could replicate them, but I couldn't find any logic or reason to the conversation I was hearing. It all just seemed like meaningless noise, devoid of useful information, with no set pattern, no subtext that I could determine, no purpose that I could see.

After about half a year of observing people, it hit me one day. I had my first big breakthrough. I'd been looking at it all wrong, trying to determine the purpose of small talk through the meaning of the words. I realised then that there was no purpose to the words, it was the act of talking which itself had meaning. Small talk is just a little "Hello! I'm here! Don't forget me!".

Armed with this theory I took it to practice. I'd been standing quite literally on the outside of groups, backs turned, but I started making noise. I repeated what someone else had said, in a slightly different way. I said meaningless things just to keep myself noticed, and it worked. Those turned backs were turned my way more often, and the more noise I made the more they turned. Eventually, I was allowed into the group to join the circle, and we all made noise together. A brief little "Hello, include me, I am relevant" together.

And that's how I learned to approximate a normal human being.