to shut our mouth every once in a while.

For those who think with their mouth I'm sure it is very difficult. I have such a hard time transferring thoughts to words I find it much easier to be quiet.

I'm like that too. I think way too much, and whenever I open my mouth it has to be something very smart or very important, otherwise it's not worthy to be created into vibrations in the air. So most of the time I'm just quiet, and people see me as very shy and/or slow in the head. (Which I probably am.)

The internet is cool because you have so much time to plan what you're gonna say.

*edit* And edit it later.

interesting... ever since my first pull of DMT I've been receiving this message... "speak less" ... hasn't stopped... I'm trying to speak less.

I've had the opposite experience, and in the spirit of being opposite I'm going to break the trend of terse responses and type out a longer one.

I was very quiet as a teenager, always let other people lead the conversation and had trouble opening up to people. Whenever I did speak up with an opinion or idea of my own I would feel like I had broken the flow of the conversation, like my contribution wasn't quite relevant, like people were just waiting for me to finish indulging my ego before carrying on with the real conversation. I would feel separate to, rather than part of, the conversation.

Taking psychedelics (mushrooms and LSD) for the first few times when I was 19 changed my perspective forever. I was tripping with some new friends at I had made that year at university and usually I was exceptionally shy around people I did not know very well. The most amazing thing happened: I started looking at these people as fellow human beings complete with fears and insecurities, ambitions and values, things that I had never noticed before in my single-minded focus on making sure that I wasn't being awkward or weird.

Turns out that everyone is awkward and weird. I started to hear notes of uncertainty and restraint in the way people spoke to each other. I realised that the pauses that I had been interpreting as awkward silences weren't being perceived that way by anyone else, and there was no "real conversation" that I was interrupting when I voiced my own ideas. I felt like it would be OK if I raised this with the group, and they were very receptive. The ones who I had thought of as being more talkative and chatty worried that they talked too much, the ones who were less intellectual worried about sounding stupid, the other quiet ones had the same worries I did. Suddenly it was obvious that these worries were baseless, we all kind of just do our thing and people can make of it what they like.

An example is this post. Maybe most people skip over it. Maybe most of the people who start reading it don't finish. Maybe most readers think it's too long or too personal or irrelevant. It doesn't matter, because the best we can do is just share our experience and that is worthwhile even if occasionally it might expose us to awkwardness.

I used to feel the same way - still do, really - but I have long stopped using this as an excuse to be quiet.

"Transferring thoughts to words" is a skill worth cultivating! It's hard to do well, especially if your thoughts are subtle and nuanced and the medium of discussion is something as fleeting and time-constrained as a face-to-face conversation. Being able to think deeply is the introvert's skill while being able to speak well usually belongs to the extrovert. To have both is a powerful combination.

A forum is great practice because it's informal but unconstrained by time. I find that writing an idea in text first gives me a cache of useful phrases to refer back to later in actual conversation, where I don't have the time to consider the best wording or analogy to use.