Frustrating conversation

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You do not have to "be fake" to survive. You *DO* need to know who your audience is, and do your best to work within that situation to "go with the flow" of whom you are with.

My advice? Develop the audience YOU are comfortable with, and that is going to accept who YOU are. Everybody else can kinda F* off.

I am pretty analytical myself. I really dislike when people throw tons and tons of information at me, because I start organizing it intellectually into segments that I can address, one piece at a time, and when I do that it seems to bother some people because it doesn't address the whole set. And for me that isn't true because I have to address each part in order to address the whole set, and this one section I am working on analyzing is all I can handle right now. It is not *MY* fault that you aren't able to organize your own thoughts in a way that helps you see the problem plainly, and I am a bit irritated when I am burdened with doing it for them.

And I unfortunately can't shut that off. I do it regardless of what is going on. I end up having to bite my tongue most of the time to keep from interrupting to address something that wasn't resolved 5 minutes back in a conversation...when I can clearly see it needs to be resolved, but nobody wants to go back that far.

Anyway, that is just me agreeing with your frustration. But if you cultivate the people who can work with your process, analytical or not, and can let THEM be the go between, or just outright avoid social situations that are going to force you to mask and be a different "fake" you... well, that might work.

But the problem is that you need to have people who are willing to do that, and that requires you finding the sort of people who fit that requirement. Not an easy task, and it can be made harder by a lot of factors.

When I was younger, and didn't know the difference between IQ and EQ, I gave popular people the benefit of the doubt. I assumed that if they claimed to have trouble with math, they were just slacking off. I had quite a few not-very-close friends, but we never talked about my interests. After a while, I noticed that there was not much of a gap between boring and scary people. Hanging out with the boring ones was like working in a daycare but not liking kids, watching popular TV shows, or reading beginner books.
However, a certain amount of mindless chit-chat is good practice for dealing with the general public, and a lack of ease with them can lead to isolation and depression.