When I was in university, I went through a phase that lasted about half a decade where I was extremely cynical of strangers wanting to know who I was or about my life.
This was in the late 2000s; I had finally acquired a Facebook account and learned that anyone could Google me and acquire more information about me than I necessarily wanted to provide. I’d always been somewhat talkative with random people I met on public transportation, beginning with a nice man who sat next to me when I was 6 and flying alone for the first time. Now I was growing more wary of offering any identifying information about myself to strangers. My name in particular is so unique and identifiable that I decided it was best not to give it to strangers. Sometimes I offered alternative pronunciations of my name; sometimes I used fake names.
It quickly turned into a game of playing pretend. I wouldn’t contradict any assumption made about me. I also didn’t want to explain my whole life story to random people, so I would pick a country and find ways to make it sound as though I was only from that place without actively lying.
It was a fun game.
But this also created more distance between me and the people I met. The conversations were fun, but I never stayed in touch with any of them. If anyone gave me their contact information, I threw it away. I never really remembered anything meaningful from the conversations. During, I was busy spinning my own tale and only superficially listening to the other person’s side of the conversation. Once we parted, I would forget everything: my own story and the other person’s.
I eventually stopped doing this as a rule because it began to feel tedious and burdensome. I was doing it in large part because I didn’t want to make conversation, I realized. It was all well and good as a strategy as long as it was fun, but once the fun was gone, there was no more point in continuing this, I thought. In that case, it was far easier to answer in monosyllables and communicate through non-verbals that I wasn’t interested in conversation. If I choose to make conversation with strangers, I now figure, it may as well be either sincere or enjoyable. Sometimes, it’s even both.