Why Are We So Afraid of Conversation?

In my mid-teens I succumbed to a protracted period of intense self-consciousness. For about five years, give or take, I was convinced I had lost the capacity to chat naturally with anyone, crippled even in the lowest stakes conversations by a sense of terrible guilt that the other person had ended up in conversation with me — someone with absolutely nothing to say. I can hardly remember how it felt now, except that at the time I used to describe the sensation by way of several lines from Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. They were about a character who came across a puddle she could not cross. In finding herself incapable of crossing even a puddle, her whole identity failed her. We are nothing, she cries out. Then falls.