I used to dread small talk. Not just because it felt shallow but because of my shyness. Every casual conversation felt like a small test I wasn’t prepared for.
The usual questions. The weekend. How’s work. How are you?
It always felt like a performance. Like everyone else had been given a script I never received. So I smiled, nodded, and counted the minutes until the conversation ended. I felt relieved, but also quietly ashamed.
For a long time I thought the problem was shyness. That if I could just be less shy, small talk would stop feeling so heavy.
But recently I’ve been thinking about it differently.
Maybe the discomfort wasn’t about shyness at all. Maybe it was about not knowing myself well enough to show up even in a two-minute conversation about nothing.
Because small talk, as shallow as it seems, asks something of you. It asks you to be present. To respond. To reveal, even slightly, what kind of person you are. And if you don’t know what kind of person you are, that’s terrifying.
So I started paying attention. Not to what other people were saying, but to my own reactions. What made me light up mid-conversation. What made me go quiet.
Slowly, I started finding clues.
I noticed I came alive when conversations turned to feelings over facts. I noticed I preferred depth over humour, though I loved when both showed up together. I noticed that the conversations I replayed in my head weren’t the awkward ones. They were the ones where I had said something true.
Small talk, it turns out, has been one of my greatest teachers.
Not because it taught me how to talk. but because it taught me how to listen.