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From: Joseph Dewey
Date: 04 Oct 2005
Time: 17:09:40 -0500
Remote Name: 66.10.108.34
I think that sometimes cluttering comes across as being intelligent. I've had people describe my cluttering as "your brain works faster than your mouth" or "you just have so much to say that you have trouble saying it." My math teacher in high school thought I was smart, and told everyone else that I was smart, and so in a way having the speech problem of cluttering helped me with the "smart" image. I also felt really alone. One reason was because of my personality. I've always felt different than people and that I haven't been able to fully relate to people or that I haven't met anyone who really "gets me." I think a part of that comes from having a "clutterer’s personality" which is just a different personality set. Something that's interesting about clutterers is that they're typically extroverts and social people, but they have very limited social skills and poor communication skills. This creates a disconnect of wanting to relate to people but being unable to relate to people, and I remember being very frustrated about wanting to talk to people, but not really knowing how to do it. Something else that I think resulted from my cluttering was developing the ability to ask people questions. I can ask a question very fluently, but I have a very hard time answering questions, especially ones that require story answers. So, often a conversation with me would be me asking a bunch of questions and the other person answering them all. This at best results in people feeling like that I'm really interested in them but lacking the connection that two-way conversation has, and at worst makes people feel like I'm interrogating them. The other thing that I like to do is learn people's names and say hi to them. Clutterers do well with short phrases, and "Hi Mary, how are you?" provides me with the social interaction that I crave yet does it in a way where I'm not going to be cluttering at all.