When I join a group, I don’t talk much at first. I listen. I try to see who knows each other, who teases who, and who I might dare say the first silly thing that pops into my head to. Sometimes it takes me a little while.
I picked up that habit pretty young. I often felt like people had already made up their minds about me before I’d had time to explain myself. So I paid attention to what I said, how I said it, and the look on the other person’s face while I was saying it. Sometimes, I’d get home and still be thinking about a sentence everyone had probably forgotten.
Then there are people with whom conversation just takes off on its own. I throw out something silly, someone adds to it, and we end up laughing about something that would’ve taken ten seconds to tell if we’d managed to get to the end of it.
It’s often when I get home that I realize it. That time, I just kept thinking about the silly thing.