talking to people is genuinely hard for me. talking to my parents about anything serious, speaking up in the office, presentations, any conversation where something is at stake, i struggle with all of it.

so what i do is rehearse it in my head beforehand. i plan out what i'll say, imagine how it'll go, feel kind of ready. and then in the actual conversation the other person says something i didn't expect, and i just get stuck. my brain goes blank, i say something random that isn't even what i meant, and from there the whole thing falls apart. the point i wanted to make never lands and i walk away feeling like an idiot. weak. like i couldn't hold my own in a simple conversation.

the rehearsing in my head doesn't work because in my head i control both sides. real people don't follow the script.

i started using gpt to practice, like telling it to act as the other person so i could try the conversation out loud first. but honestly it's shit. it just agrees with everything, folds the second i push, never pushes back the way a real person would, and gives me these long generic life-coach paragraphs instead of actually being the person i'm trying to talk to. it doesn't feel real at all so it doesn't help.

does anyone actually have a way to practice this stuff? how do you get better at not freezing when a conversation goes somewhere you didn't plan for?