I don’t know how to say this — but then again, that’s usually the case.

Somewhere along the line, I realized that I have terrible anxiety about the way I talk.

And when I say that, I mean that both in the “public speaking” sense as well as one-on-one conversation. I could be talking to a room of 40 strangers, or to a close friend over of coffee: either way, I’m usually a mental wreck.

I’m nervous. I stutter. My heart accelerates. I talk in circles. I speak in a low baritone, and I have a tendency to mutter. I pace the room to play it cool, but end up looking lost. I worry that other people are seeing me fail, and things immediately get worse. I get the shakes and sometimes my rows of teeth don’t even make contact when I try to spit out a thought.

I don’t enunciate as well as I’d like to, and please believe me when I say I’ve been trying to better this for 31 years. My experiences with braces as a kid didn’t finish as well as the orthodontist had hoped. I still have a bit of an overbite with my two front teeth, an open bite on either side, and a bottom row that’s starting to become more crowded than any floss pick would prefer.

Even when I get my enunciation right, sometimes my cadence spits the words out half-baked. The prepositions all start running together — to the for the by and how because — and whatever is truly going on in the conversation is subject to interpretive guesswork at best. I give up on a thought or jump to something else without really finishing up the previous idea.

Close friends and former partners alike have noted that my speech patterns are most broken or difficult to discern when I’m anxious or overstimulated. This cocktail of dread and uncertainty and pressure is amplified by stress, and the nerves set off an electric minefield in my jaw line. Arguments and confrontations feel like a personal hell, because I can’t even say what I feel like I need to say.

And all this, to say, is that I’ve come upon a realization that feels natural, feels like home: That I communicate the best — prefer it, enjoy it, feel most comfortable with it — when I have the time to write out all of my thoughts. I’m a better writer than I am a talker.

An example I was prepared to make in this post is how I would prefer to speak with a keyboard, say, even at McDonald’s, if given the opportunity — disregard the semantics for a moment — but the fact of the matter is that I’ve been using online menus and touch kiosks to order food for years now. I easily prefer the touch menu or clicking a button to speaking to another person. I prefer to bag my own groceries. I strictly use the ATM instead of dealing with an actual banker.

Now, these behaviors aren’t entirely related, but they do share a common theme: pride in one’s autonomy. And when I speak, I don’t feel like I have that autonomy. I don’t feel like I have full control of my voice. I’ve never formally been diagnosed with a stutter or a lisp — can’t say that I particularly have the time or money for speech therapy right now — but it’s something that frequently impairs my speaking, even in anxiety that it might happen.

The most confusing part, to me, is that I’ve been told I’m good at formal speaking, and I have a resume worthy enough to convince my impostor syndrome otherwise: I co-hosted a radio show in college for 3-4 years with my best buddy, and we later had a podcast together. I was chosen to deliver daily sports segment on camera for a failed, but ambitious streaming network. I’ve delivered life-defining speeches at both of my late parents’ funerals, I’ve officiated two weddings, and of course, I currently lecture twice a week at Indiana University.

Some folks have told me they don’t notice my speech habits being unusual, and that’s fine, but mentally, it has rarely felt right with me. The few acmes of success do not stick with me because this 24/7 anxiety I have is simply pervasive enough to always, eventually, inevitably outweigh the confidence I gain with such moral victories.

Why is this the case? Why am I the way that I am?

Well, I’ve actually been looking for answers for a few years now:

The first factor that comes to mind comes with a stigma, but I’m more than happy to consider it, for there is no shame in being me: I may very well be on the autism spectrum. Conversations I’ve had with my therapist and general practitioner suggest that I be of the Asperger’s ilk. A few parents with children experiencing Asperger’s have pointed this out to me directly.

The hallmark of Asperger’s is poor social interactions, as well as repetitive and unusual choices of language.

I thought it was just a “funny guy” thing for most of my life, but a hard truth about my social behavior as a young kid and older millennial has been that I sometimes repeat the same punch lines or catchphrases, often multiple times in an hour or afternoon.

The best explanation I have for this is that I can rely on an established joke to carry the weight an uncertain attempt at new humor might otherwise drop with great mental discomfort.

Last month, I jokingly invented a fictional football player named “Ted Onions” for the sake of making a friend’s son laugh. This 7-year-old and I saw the a player with the name “Peppers” on TV and made some good chuckles out of who his teammates must be (“Ted Onions? Stanley Mushrooms?”). It was a great bit! But even still, I say this faux-linebacker’s’ name under my breath a lot. I’m not lying, maybe 6 to 12 times a day. This isn’t necessarily common behavior. At some point, I’d be lying to myself if I felt if these things were just the byproduct of personality, and rather, just the way I’m hardwired.

The gravity of the matter is this: I asked my healthcare provider about two years ago if they felt like I should pursue a diagnosis, and they told me, now being over 30 and all, that it probably wouldn’t be very effective: any therapy intervention pretty much needed to happen when I was very young, and the firmest stepping stone to “progress” (or what that may look like) might simply entail knowing that I’m probably somewhere uncertain on the autism spectrum, it is what it is, and just to accept that that “might” be what I am or why I act the way I do. Again, I don’t necessarily have the time or money to pursue this right now.

The other explanation for why I prefer writing over talking, which is probably more of a contributing factor than an isolated concept, is that I’ve spent close to 75 percent of my life “on the computer.”

(That’s what we called “screen time” in the mid-1990s when household desktop computers were still a novel concept.)

When I first got “on the computer” at 5 years old, I started filling blank Notepad documents with smashed keyboard succotash. Around 7, I used my AOL username to spam chat rooms with smiley faces in the prime of the medium’s era. Getting picked on in middle school (particularly, bullies making fun of the way I talked) thrust me deep into online gaming communities and message boards.

Even as a pre-teen, I found deep comfort and security in the digital realm, because nothing was official until I hit “send.”

Then came social media. High school brought MySpace, college brought Facebook, and life with a desk job permanently bound me to Twitter, where I’ve somehow fired off 100,000 tweets in 12 years.

This is all to say nothing of my professional writing background. This isn’t about promoting my work, but it’s telling that I’d end up in a profession centered around focused, literal communication I can take my time on rather than the soft skills and immediate social flourishes required to succeed on camera and in boardrooms.

I’m willing to speculate that I’ve spoken more “in writing” than I’ve ever spoken aloud in my life. And admittedly, I can be a jabberjaw when you get me all revved up talking about something that interests me (God help me if I’ve had some beers), but the sheer depth of the word count I’ve sent through messages, comments, bulletins, posts, Tweets, blogs, texts, replies, upvotes, DMs, group chats, et al, likely overlaps the entirety of my audible existence on planet Earth.

That feels a little dystopic. Real “robots-running-society kinda vibes.” But there’s also something romantic in knowing that the vast majority of the things I’ve said, I’ve said with the most confidence I can place behind it.

When I speak without talking, I can communicate without failing.

And I’m so very grateful you took the time to hear me out.

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-moose