In real life I'm quite verbally "articulate". I notice that people generally don't expect that from anyone, especially someone like me who will be quiet as a post unless I have a reason or mind to talk to people, but when I do, I can talk. For hours, if need be, about anything if need be.
What's always been difficult to adjust to is this: when I was a young kid, my teachers, peers, relatives, and just people on the street sometimes would complain that I would not talk. I was too quiet, I was too shy, I was too this I was too that, I wasn't sociable enough, I wasn't articulate enough. They would tell me you need to learn to talk to people. If you don't learn to talk to people where will you get in life? I probably had some autistic tendencies as a child but these were never diagnosed or looked into. Anyway, at some point I knuckled down and learned how to talk to people, and I did so much practicing that I soon pretty much outstripped the average conversational partner in the ability to talk, make a speech, rationalize things out in speech, look them properly in the eyes and make all the mannerisms that people tend to expect. Then what I found is that most people don't actually want to converse. Or not about anything more significant than TV shows or other fairly mundane and "safe" things, and only for a short time. Sometimes I believe they do it only to size you up as a person. If you appear confident and know what you're talking about, that can often just turn them off talking completely.
So it's difficult to accept after being incessantly nagged and ridiculed in early life to talk to people, I find most aren't up for it anyway. And what's more, they expect it even less from a male. I suppose they figure females are the ones who really enjoy talking and men are supposed to just grunt in agreement or disagreement, or something. People can be unnerved by articulation in both sexes, I suppose. In any case, it has me these days not bothering so much with people or accommodating them in this way. At least when I do that now, it's seen as perfectly normal. But after training myself for 25 years to be able to, it's a difficult adjustment to make to go back to having "nothing to say".
