Hi, I'm a woman in my mid twenties and I've consistently sucked at texting ever since it became a thing. When I was a preteen, I would struggle with small talk but throughout tutorials, practise and exposure therapy now it comes natural to me and I enjoy it. However there are no tutorials for making small talk over text.
I've seen people in this subreddit that are introverts and said they were more comfortable texting than chatting in real life so I was hoping you could give me some advice!
At this age, I made friends that I really love and we're starting to build each their own life. As some of us move, some of us begin a full time job and some of us are still pursuing higher education, texting is essential to keep up. We still catch up fairly often, but I'm sad to see I'm always the last one to know things and I miss important milestones, I want to be a better friend.
With small talk in real life, the environmental context gives me prompts and then the conversation evolves but over text there is no context to start from. My mind realy goes blank, it's not like I overthink what I wanted to say, I literally can't think of anything to say. Moreover I noticed I rely a lot on non-verbal cues in communication, I'm very expressive with my body language and can't translate it into tone over text. I also struggle with knowing how to reach out casually, like as in we've had a "catch up" conversation a week ago so asking how are you feels redundant. Thanks for reading, I hope you can help me acquire this social skill 🙂
Edit: formatting