Loftwings and Demons

I really wish I was better at responding to things.  For whatever reason, it's pretty common for me to have difficulty writing responses.  Whether it's difficulty formulating a response at all, difficulty translating my response into something intelligible, anxiety about how my response will be received, and/or just plain poor time management, I have a tendency to drop conversations or have long delays in responding to things.  I've been trying to get better at this, but I think I have some definite limitations in this regard.  At the same time, I have a moderately good memory, which means I spend a lot of time thinking 'sure would be cool if I could respond to this stuff' and 'hey why don't I try to do that' and 'nope, guess I'm just going to think some more about how I'm not responding to this message'.

Also, I am even worse at verbal conversations.  They go way too fast and half the time I don't even catch what was said.  You know how reading comprehension is a thing people have trouble with sometimes?  Well, for me a much bigger difficulty is listening comprehension.  I prefer to listen to most TV shows with subtitles because it makes it so much easier for me to understand what's being said.  If I could turn on subtitles in regular conversations, I would do that in an instant.

Anyway, maybe that will help give some insight into my behavior for anyone who's ever thought 'hmmmm, I wonder why unspeakablehorror didn't respond to that'.  Like, it's not the only reason I don't respond to things or don't respond to them quickly.  But it is a really super common one, lol.  I'm trying to work on it.  But I suspect this is a difficult thing to deal with for a number of reasons.