Why do you keep quiet?

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It's just the way I've always been. When around people I know well I can talk a lot but I don't like when I'm very talkative. I might say something dumb or insensitive.

excatly Pensive and Zeldapsychology and both very well said to both your replys. we all keep to ourselves and arent harming anybody outthere and live a sheltered life away from the public

i do not post to many threads because i know my input will not be read by many and it is a waste of energy for me to type.
i have no concern as to the topic starter and i do not even look to see who started the topic.
i just think "whatever i will say will be lost like a thimble sized sand castle that gets washed away to previous pages by the plethora of other posters who post after me"

there are too many members on wrong planet to ever be heard with the time and consideration it takes to process what i say.

it is like a football stadium where everyone is asked to shout out an answer to a question, and the mic is held up to the crowd at large, and all you hear is a white noise.

Because I don't feel necessity of speaking. In Polish there is funny expression pitolić o dupie maryni - literally gossip about mary's ass It means talking about unnecessary stupid things and laugh loudly. I don't need it and usually don't know what's up. So I think about things better for me and stay quiet.

I don't know about WHAT could I talk with NTs. It often ends like oooh, you really don't like cables?! straaange! So I think it's worth to start speaking and when I decide it's not, there will be more explaining or misunderstanding than talking, I don't speak.

And my pronunciation is strange, I have to control myself and repeat some phrases... so I conclude it's not worth to start speaking at all.

But sometimes when I say something I can say too much. Not volume but controversy

I'm accustomed to people not noticing me much, and I'm okay with that. I'm a quiet person anyway, even more so around people, because I don't want to draw negative attention to myself.

This.

I spend a lot of time happily inside my head thinking about things without feeling any need to share my thoughts.

Exactly.
This thread has an odd title. We need a thread titled "Why don't you ever shut up?"

I used to never be able to do it. I felt that if I had something to add to a conversation, I had to do it, otherwise I wasn't being social. I've become quieter since then, I'd say. But I still talk way too much among friends and such.

I don't keep quiet. I just keep from boring NTs by keeping my special interests to myself, and talk about what they're talking about.

That's a lot of it with me. Once I start talking, my urge to "inform" can take over the whole show, and I begin to pour out everything I know that's in any way related to the subject (and a good deal that isn't, just for good measure). So I often just keep quiet instead.

But there are also other things. There's the "start-stop" problem....once I've been quiet in company for a little while, somehow I find it physically more difficult to begin.

Also I've been trained to stay quiet. I was brought up in the days when the old "children should be seen and not heard" thing was still around, which made for an orderly environment but also got me into the habit of feeling that to speak was in some way wrong. To this day I'm much happier to answer a question than to just come out with information that hasn't been asked for, as if I interpret the prompt as permission to speak. In other words, I feel safer if I just speak when I'm spoken to, which is another nasty old expectation that used to get laid onto kids. There ought to be re-training sessions for people who have been repressed like that.

Things get a lot better when I feel I'm among friends, though that can take a long time. Also if I really put my mind to it and plan in advance to speak up at a particular event, I might break through the programming, though I can easily be thrown if I sense there's anything wrong with the conditions.

Three main reasons:

1) I often (but certainly not always) have difficulty speaking, especially if I have to say anything more complicated than a single sentence.

2) The things which interest me generally don't interest people around me, and I don't generally do anything unusual enough to be interesting. My political views are somewhat extreme, which doesn't lend itself to casual conversation.

3) Talking about my private life (such as it is) would require a fifteen minute prologue (which would not usually be appropriate for conversation) on gender identity, sexuality, autism and (lots) more before anything I have to say about my present status would make any kind of sense. It doesn't make much sense to me. It's simple to stay silent.

I keep quiet when people are discussing something not of interest to me or if there's nothing I can add to the conversation. Often it's a processing issue though: sometimes I find it hard to listen and come up with an appropriate thing to add at the same time: this especially happens in group conversation, but much less so when things are one on one.

Unless it is very concrete it is usually difficult to know what comment is appropriate. I mean I rarely say things that are out of order but I also rarely say things that I don't think are obvious. In writing it's easier, because there is time to edit.

Also, I feel stupid, because people know things I don't. I'm not putting myself down, because I know what I know, but in most conversations I'm clueless. In normal conversations people talk about their careers and so on - so I have nothing to say. I just have to try to cover things up, so the less I get dragged into the conversation, the better.

And people are cold. Yesterday I happened upon an internet gossip site and read it for about 15 minutes, today I read it for maybe 45 minutes. It makes me freezing cold and afterwards I can barely walk. Internet gossip is not talking and I don't usually look at it but knowing that people think like this makes me think I'm not fit to live in this world.

Not talking can also be a matter of being otherwise occupied - figuring out what's going on in the room, or in the world, figuring what to eat, where to go.

In sum - cluelessness, anxiety, lack of interest, too slow to think things up in time to say them while they are still relevant. With me, however, none of this is really apparent.

I chatter and chatter and chatter until I bore myself.

It's compulsive, though, not really what I want to do, just what I do do, like stimming.

I have this imaginary friend now though and am trying to train myself to talk to her instead of the humans

I get your metaphor but it makes me laugh because it makes me remember the many times I have been in football stadiums where everyone is asked to shout an answer to a question and the mic is held up to the crowd at large and you can hear the answer very clearly and distinctly.

It is a standard call-and-response social script for rock musicians to ask the audience, "Are you ready to rock?". The rock musician then holds the mic out to the 100,000 people in the football stadium audience (a common venue for rock concerts) and the answer is alsways, "YES!". It's very clear, very audible and completely unlike white noise. This is because it follows a social script and everybody knows the answer is "YES!".

The exception, which I know you will appreciate, was Frank Zappa. When I saw him, he did not ask if we were ready to rock. I doubt he cared.

That's a total tangent and has nothing to do with the OP's post, but I had to put it in because I was laughing thinking of the many times I have been with 100,000 people in a football stadium shouting an answer into a mic in unison and it is always clear what the answer is.

I'm either very quiet or I blabber,

The problem with blabber/listening to NT interests is that you head fills up with detail you can not get rid of and this leads to even more NT oriented blabber/interest next time around.

Today I learned about ponds and the commercial hire of rowing boats.

I did not want to learn this particularly .Now I can not remove that information.

Ten years from now another conversation about this subject might occur and I will then have double the unwanted information.

I have learned to go with tuning-out when it is about stuff like soccer etc.

I really do not want to carry this data, it is quick exchange fact-lets , and exchanging such factlets is like swapping junk for the sake of it. They seem to enjoy the experience of swapping
information for the sake of it.

NT's do not retain all of it anyway .