> If you mean at the current moment in time, I'm sober. And it's easier when I'm typing and can edit my sentences as I go. But in day-to-day, trying to explain things or convey my thoughts coherently, I'm pretty bad. I think it's gotten worse in the past few years with how isolated I've been starting with the pandemic.

Talking is a skill like any other.

So, a comparison.

You know how you can picture a car in your head but you can't make draw a car unless you've spent time practicing as an artist? That is because connecting our mental representation of "a car" and making our hand draw a car is a skill that requires a lot of training. This is why artists practice drawing still lives, looking at an orange and copying it down to paper with a pencil trains your brain on how to translate the thing that is visually inside your head to what your hand needs to do to re-create it.

Well, the same for mental dialogue. Going from "idea in head" to "words coming out of mouth" is a skill that takes practice.

There are ways to practice this! Toastmasters is a famous group whose goal is improving this skill, but there are many other routes. I had good luck with table top RPGs, I spent years playing a character who is supposed to be charismatic, and accordingly I had lots of chances to practices being outgoing!

We are good at the things we practice doing!