I keep finding the surface

Sometimes I finally get someone alone. A real conversation, not a party. And it still stays at the surface.

Products. A show they’re watching. Something a colleague did. I listen, I nod, I try to find a door in. I like this person. I want to talk to them.

But the door isn’t there. Or it is there and they don’t want to open it.

I grew up thinking something was wrong with me for wanting to go deeper. Everyone around me seemed fine at the top. Small talk didn’t cost them anything. They weren’t sitting there needing to understand why the thing was the way it was, or what the person across from them actually believed, or what kept them up at 3am. They were just fine.

I am not fine at the surface.

I want to know what you care about. What actually wakes you up. What you’ve been turning over for years without an answer. The book that did something to you. The idea you can’t stop circling. I’m not asking as small talk. I’m asking because those are the only conversations I know how to actually be inside.

The thing about going deep on a subject — the AuDHD version, where your brain grabs something and refuses to let go until it has understood every part of it — is that it makes most conversation feel like watching through glass. You can see people are interacting. You can join in. You aren’t quite there.

I have learned to manage this. I know the social rules around when you’re allowed to go deeper and when you’re not, and I mostly follow them. I wait for an opening. Sometimes the opening doesn’t come and I carry the conversation I wanted to have instead of the one we’re having.

Occasionally I find someone who wants to go. Who takes the bait when I ask a real question and asks one back. Who has a thing they’re obsessed with and isn’t embarrassed about it. And then waits to see if I’ll say something real back.

Those conversations feel so different from the other kind that I’m genuinely not sure both deserve the same word.

I’ve wondered for a long time why connection felt so hard when I wanted it so much. The honest answer is that the connection I was looking for was always going somewhere specific. Most people aren’t going there. People have their own reasons for staying on the surface. Those reasons are real. Most social situations are designed to stay there, and most people are designed to be comfortable with that.

I’m not angry about it. I’m just still looking.

For years I assumed the problem was that I wanted too much. That the hunger for depth was a flaw, something to manage rather than something that might occasionally be met.

I’m less sure of that now. Some of it is just: I haven’t found enough people yet. And some of it is that I spent so long performing the surface version of myself that the people who might have gone deeper with me never got the chance.

That part is on me. Or on the mask. It’s hard to separate the two.