I Wish To Converse...

I Wish to Converse…

I have not always been quiet.

In sixth grade, at the end of the school year, our teacher at Silver Spring Elementary handed out a mimeographed mini-yearbook. Under my name: Most Talkative. I remember being a class clown, quick with a joke, eager to be noticed. In elementary school I had the confidence to act in school plays and sing in the chorus. I had a voice, and I used it freely — without thinking twice.

Then seventh grade arrived, and something shifted.

Perhaps it was entering a larger middle school where several grade schools merged into one. Familiar faces disappeared, replaced by hallways full of strangers. The boy who had been Most Talkative didn't know where he fit anymore. My confidence evaporated almost overnight. From seventh through eleventh grade, I carried a quiet but persistent sense of inferiority — as though I had shrunk to fit a space that suddenly felt too small.

In ninth grade, I was bullied by seniors. I stopped trying out for sports. I stopped singing. In gym class, I waited — always one of the last chosen for a team, if not the last.

I hated school so much that I became truant more times than I can count. Ironically, my only real burst of creativity in those years was forging excuse slips for the Attendance Principal.

Creativity — misapplied.

I never once succeeded in asking a girl out during my first three years of high school at Cumberland Valley. For school dances, I went alone and stood against the wall, watching everyone else laugh, touch, lean in close — participating in relationships that seemed so effortless to them. With each passing year, I saw myself as more invisible. More shy.

I remember asking girls to the Junior-Senior Prom and being met with open laughter:

“What? Me go out with you?”

Why would they?

It brands you. Not forever — but for longer than it should.

I do not need to dominate a conversation. I only want to feel that my voice has a place at the table.

What I had not yet learned was how to live fully in speech. That would come — slowly, in pieces, from unexpected places.

My mother took me to therapists from time to time to address my anxiety and depression. I don't remember dramatic breakthroughs — only the quiet acknowledgment that something inside me had tightened, and the small reassurance that I wasn't entirely alone in feeling it.

It wasn't until I moved to Arizona that something began to loosen. Perhaps there is truth in the advantage of being the 'new kid in town.' For reasons I still don't fully understand, I began receiving attention. Acceptance. I wasn't accustomed to it. I often wondered what they saw in me, because I certainly didn't see it in myself.

I even attracted a girlfriend now and then.

But inexperience showed. I was naïve — about girls, about affection, about how to demonstrate feelings I barely understood myself. Some expected more from me than I knew how to give. There was one instance in March 1974 where a girl I had taken to a John Denver concert interpreted my hesitance afterward as evidence I was gay — and she made sure to spread the rumor. Others likely misread my reserve as indifference. They did not know who I had been in Pennsylvania. They did not know how deeply that silence had already set in.

I remember once standing somewhere — music playing overhead — when a girl said, 'Hey, Rick, there's your song!' It was You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin' by The Righteous Brothers.

At the time, I didn't understand what she meant. Later, it became clear. It hurt. But I've sat with it long enough that the sting has faded into something closer to understanding — of her, and of myself.

When I look at my sons and the ease with which they navigate affection and intimacy, I am genuinely moved. They make it look so natural. I never had that — not early on. But watching them, I've come to believe that some things are learned rather than inherited, and that maybe something in how we raised them made the difference.

Over time, doubt became a companion. Doubt about my abilities — not just socially, but fundamentally. As a person. As a man.

My girlfriend of 1973/1974 wrote me a letter stating we were through because, in her words, "You're not macho enough." She then began to date my cousin. He treated her badly — and she accepted it. Even then, I sensed something was off — not just in me, but in what she was measuring.

It felt easier to withdraw than to risk exposure.

Easier to become a loner.

Eventually, solitude became familiar. Comfortable, even.

To this day, I could count my close friends on one hand. My wife sometimes asks, 'Aren't you lonely?'

I answer honestly: 'No. I'm used to it.'

But being used to something and preferring it are not the same thing. I know the difference. I've always known.

I suspect I sometimes disappoint her in this way — that I cannot always hold my own socially, that I cannot move through conversations the way others seem to. I've made my peace with that, even if the peace took a while to earn.

I often feel I have little to contribute to everyday conversation. I know nothing about sports. Little about auto mechanics, investments, real estate, hunting, fishing, or politics. When conversations drift in those directions, I listen, absorb, and wait — hoping a subject will turn that I actually know something about.

Sometimes I scan the room and wonder, Do they think I'm strange? But then I remind myself: everyone is standing in their own version of that room, wondering the same thing.

There are, however, places where I do have a voice.

My years in the military. Being stationed overseas. Traveling. I can talk for hours about how much I love Korea, and Asia in general. I have often been treated kindly there — by people who saw me without preloaded assumptions, without a shared history dragged in through the door. Just me, in the present tense.

I especially love being on the road alone. A cross-country drive clears my head in ways nothing else can.

Even today, people don't understand my preference for driving over flying. They assume it's about money. It isn't. It's about the solo stretch of road — the freedom to decide when to stop, where to turn, whether to deviate at all.

There's a Bob Seger song, Roll Me Away, that captures it perfectly — that image of standing at a high vantage point with the whole country spread out ahead, the choice of direction entirely your own. I think of that image every time I set out on a long drive. Alone, yes — but free.

Free to keep my options open.

The truth is, I enjoy conversing. I enjoy sharing thoughts and feelings with those I trust. When something excites me, I want to talk about it. I want to connect.

But too often, when I speak — or when I post something on social media — my words are met with correction, criticism, or skepticism, as though I must be mistaken. As though my feelings are controversial by default. It eventually reached a point where I deleted every post I had ever made — graduations, marriages, births — because keeping them felt like leaving pieces of myself out to be picked apart.

I've learned to be more selective about what I share, and with whom. That's not defeat. That's discernment.

Rarely do I offer unsolicited advice, even when I might do things differently. I do not feel it is my place to critique others' decisions. Yet even sharing happiness sometimes feels like a risk — as if it might be dismantled before it can land. And so I've become careful. More careful than I'd like, at times.

Silence has become easier. But I don't think it should always win.

Photography became a refuge. Some have told me I capture feeling and mood well. I once considered portrait photography — I have the equipment, and technically, I know what to do.

But when placed in front of a subject and expected to direct, guide, engage — I falter. Other photographers seem to possess an effortless social ease. I do not.

So I rely on distance. A super-zoom lens. I capture authentic expressions when people don't realize I'm focused on them. It is easier to observe humanity than to orchestrate it. And perhaps that's not entirely a limitation — the images are honest precisely because they're unposed.

There was a time I thought I could be a teacher. In the military, I delivered speeches and briefings and won awards. If I could prepare, write, and stand behind a podium, I was confident — commanding, even. When I know my material, I can communicate clearly and persuasively.

But remove the script, require spontaneous conversation, and anxiety creeps in. I am far more articulate in writing than in unscripted speech. The page does not interrupt. The page does not laugh. And over the years, I've learned to meet people there — on the page — more than anywhere else.

When I travel to Korea — or anywhere in Asia — something unexpected happens. Because no one knows me there, no one assumes who I am. No one has a history with me. I am given a clean start. People engage. They listen. I open up easily.

All it takes is the sense that someone sees me — that my words won't be judged before they're finished.

I have said, 'I'm used to it.'

But that does not mean it doesn't still weigh on me.

Being accustomed to silence is not the same as being free from it. It means the quiet has become familiar — humming in rooms where I measure my words before speaking, in moments when I swallow enthusiasm before it can be dismissed.

I tell myself I am fine. That I prefer solitude. That I do not need what others seem to need.

And yet.

There remains a part of me that still wants to walk into a room and feel relaxed. To speak without rehearsing. To share something joyful without bracing for correction. To be met not with suspicion or analysis, but with simple curiosity.

I do not crave attention.

But I have never stopped wanting to be heard.

Sometimes I wonder what became of that sixth-grade boy who was voted Most Talkative.

He is still somewhere inside me.

I hear him occasionally — when I am on a long drive, when I am writing, when I am halfway around the world and no one knows who I have been.

He is not gone.

He is just careful now.

I have learned how to survive in silence. But more than that — I have come to understand that the silence was never the whole story. It was a chapter. A long one, yes. But not the last one.

Perhaps that is why I am writing this now.

I wanted people to understand how I became who I am — and that the silence was not emptiness, but survival. That the boy who was once voted Most Talkative didn't disappear. He adapted.

Perhaps this is my way of practicing a voice I have too often kept contained.

And perhaps, at this stage of my life, the switch I wish I could flip is not somewhere outside of me —

but within.