I Just Want Real Talk
My desire for deep conversation without losing everything
I didn’t realize I might be an introvert until I was fifteen.
My parents returned from parent-teacher conferences, where they had met with my sophomore English teacher. I loved English, but didn’t love my strict, no-nonsense teacher. I was doing really well in the class, but I rarely spoke up, even when I knew the answers. After a year of healthy debate and frequent talking in my freshman English class, my parents were shocked to hear their talkative daughter wasn’t speaking up during one of her favorite subjects.
Yes, I knew the answers, but I didn’t want to be the center of attention. I wasn’t embarrassed that I knew the answers; I just didn’t want the focus to be on me. Besides, it wasn’t like we were having meaningful discussions. I would have been raising my hands to answer general recall questions. I had things to say, but I didn’t want to say them in her classroom. And I was starting to realize that although I had a lot to say in general, I needed to feel both safe and listened to for me to say those things. My sophomore English classroom was not that place.
I was a talker from the moment I learned my first words. As the oldest in my family and the eventual oldest of 23 grandchildren on my dad’s side, I spent the first few years of life holding court with my aunts and uncles. I had plenty of friends in my neighborhood and at school, but I also loved talking to anyone older who would listen: babysitters, older family members, and even older people in our neighborhood.
I didn’t just enjoy hearing the sound of my own voice. I wanted to talk about stuff that mattered to me. I wanted to dig deep. When adults didn’t treat me like a little kid, I wanted to talk to them even more. As an emerging adolescent, I would often repeat talking points I heard at home, but I would do so with passion and conviction. I craved deep conversation and talking about things that were important to me. And while I often hid the deepest parts of myself to even family and my closest friends, keeping those secrets for my angsty journal and letters to friends in far-off places, I welcomed any opportunity for intimate conversation.
In high school and college, I loved debating hot topics. One of my favorite classes was AP US History for that very reason. My APUSH teacher was one of my favorite teachers in high school because he pushed us, I learned a lot (enough to breeze through to a 4 on the exam), and he gave us a safe space for open debate. I didn’t always agree with some of my closest friends in that class, and I learned it was ok, because our debates were grounded and mostly respectful.
Oh, I could be passionate about some of my deeply held beliefs. I cared about lives lost in Bosnia and began my long journey to understanding genocides across the globe. I was a staunch pro-lifer who wrote a solidly researched anti-abortion speech my senior year of high school. I was concerned about human rights abuses in China, and someday wanted to adopt a baby girl left behind by the one-child policy.1
And I wanted to talk about all of it through the black and white lens of adolescence.
In college, I learned nuance. I learned the issues above weren’t as simple as right and wrong. In my history and English classes, I read books and studied historical events for a better understanding of the world I lived in. I came to understand that it wasn’t always “good guys” vs. “bad guys.” There were varying degrees of gray. Because I was making these discoveries with some of my closest college friends, our conversations blossomed into color. We challenged each other, not always agreeing, but aware that maybe there was more to the conversation than we had originally believed.2
In the years since leaving the safety of a small college campus, I’ve continued to evolve in my understanding of the world around me. Some of my beliefs have changed, some have become more firmly grounded, and I’ve become far more comfortable with saying “I just don’t know.” I do not see the world the same way I did when I was 18. I’ve evolved with my life experience. That change has impacted my friendships and family relationships, challenging some to the breaking point while strengthening others.
As I changed, so did my world.
The social media we thought would bring us all together instead divided us into silos created by increasingly powerful tech bros. Peace, love, and friendship didn’t make them money; sowing bitterness and discord did. As our national politics got nastier, so did our social media discourse. I witnessed the beliefs of friends and family becoming more extreme, the twisting of truths and half-truths changing and adjusting the way they saw the world. The more I saw from some people online, the less safe I felt with them in person. I feared that our disagreement wasn’t just about nuanced differences in opinion; we were now seeing the world in a completely different way.
I’ve struggled with how to even talk about this in my own home. After the 2024 election, my teenage son, tired of discussions relating to how my husband and I felt about the incoming administration and the people who unapologetically supported it, said, “People can be friends with people they disagree with.”
Ordinarily, he was right. I wanted what he said to be true. I had tried to live my life as if what he said was true. But I was also living in the aftermath of tremendous hurt. He didn’t understand that some of the people who disagreed with me thought my view of the world made me less than human. My views made me less of a Christian, to the point where my faith was questioned. My dreams for the world I want my students and children to become adults in make me dangerous to some, so much so that they don’t even believe I belong in a Christian classroom.
The crushing reality for me over the past decade has been an increasingly small circle of people I can trust with my deepest wishes, hopes, and fears. Because I’m not the same girl I was when I was 18. Because I’ve come into my own in middle age and I like who I am. Because those who should love me most, understand me least. Because those who would be my true “ride or dies” are spread across time and space.
And for an introvert who thrives on deep conversation, that has been spiritually and emotionally crushing.
While my writing has been a place for me to process those deep wishes, hopes, and fears, my personal life has been an experience of burying those emotions deep out of fear that I will blow up relationships that are already tenuous, at best.3 It’s not about finding some arbitrary safe space where no one can hurt me. Disagreement is part of being human. Instead, it’s about wishing those who disagree would take a beat and step into a new information ecosystem. That they would take a note from Harper Lee and “Consider things from (my) point of view…climb inside (my) skin and walk around it in.”4
I want to stop feeling like I’m crazy. I don’t want to be reaffirmed at every turn because I believe we should be challenged and let go of absolute certainty. But at the same time, I know there are things that are true, and I’m tired of being told that they are not true.
I want to be real without fears of alienating people I genuinely love. I want to challenge and be challenged without being afraid of the outcomes. I want to discuss difficult topics without worrying about the humanity of my friends and family. I want conversation concerned with building community, not defending individualistic selfish desires.
I want real talk with real humans who have not lost their ability to empathize with the suffering of their neighbors, whether they agree with them or not.
And with AI looming on the horizon, I believe we are going to need this more than ever.
For your consideration:
This particular spicy episode is for their paid subscribers, but Pantsuit Politics published this yesterday just as I was finishing writing this piece. It felt timely.
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Yes, I now understand that all of these issues are complex with a lot of layers, but we all have to start somewhere in our path to activism.
This SHOULD be the power of a college education. And in a world transitioning to AI, this is what we need to be pursuing even more. For more thoughts on this, check out Jenna Park’s piece “Critical thinking might be the only thing…”
I am incredibly thankful for a husband and a handful of college friends who have been going through various versions of the same journey. Social media has had its definite pitfalls, but it has also kept some of these people close when we’ve needed each other most.
I know that To Kill a Mockingbird is taught less and less, but many people of my generation seem to have forgotten the lessons we learned when we were forced to read one of my favorite novels of all time as sophomores in high school.
I feel this...