I've found that phrasing is a pretty key aspect in getting other people to listen to you. If you just want the other person to listen and empathize with your situation, you can go ahead and say "I'm feeling pretty bad right now and I'd feel better if someone was listening to me" or "hey I'm feeling down about my situation and I don't know what to do, could you give me some advice?" Otherwise people will feel completely lost as to why you're talking about serious business.
If you just want to talk about your feelings just because you have them, it's essentially you dumping your emotions onto someone else because you don't know how to handle them - and chances are, they don't really know how to handle them either.
Sometimes this is okay to do because some shit you can't deal with alone (coping with family death, etc.), but for most things people expect you to deal with your problems on your own. A lot of times the seemingly shallow advice people give to you is actually meaningful, but it sounds empty because either 1) they're repeating the advice of other people who actually have gone through bad times, or 2) relating to you on a meaningful level would require going back and reliving their own painful memories for a while.
If it's simply human connection you're looking for, then it's hit or miss... with a lot of times being miss. People aren't so willing to share about themselves, because they're probably going through the same thing you are - having been ridiculed or ignored or invalidated for their beliefs to the point where they just don't care to do so anymore. It takes real courage, though, to speak what's on your mind and not care about whether anyone else listens or what they say in return.
And (somewhat paradoxically), this is how you find people that are doing the same thing, and if they stick with you the people that you could consider true friends.
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That's exactly the mentality I'm attacking. It's like it's incomprehensible, the idea of not being able to go to someone. So therefore it must have to do with how the person is phrasing it, or what they're talking about, or how often they seek it, or who they ask.
"True friends" or whatever cliche you can think of to justify and romanticize the ideal.
It's not unexpected that people see this blog as a plea for help, but really it's not. In no part of the writing am I actually asking anything. I'm stating what I have observed. You can give anecdotes of things you've observed that are different, but just assuming I'm an idiot who doesn't know how to talk to people is wasting your time (except for maybe the self-satisfaction some people get with giving strangers advice they don't bother to verify in themselves).
I'm sure if you ask any friend if they would help you in a time of need (and they knew it wasn't now) they'd reply "of course." It seems the decent thing to do be, it lives up to the picture one wants to see of themselves. But when it comes down to it, it's a lot more rare than TV would have you believe.
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EPT
