Especially when you are being serious....right??!! I know you have yelled (or growled) "I'm serious" at more than one person...
I dont think I have ever had to insist that I was being serious before, If I have something like honestly serious to say (which is subjective even to my own value set "I see serious as something that involves me and the other person" not usually something just about me) I usually toss a disclaimer in there and people generally are aware of it by my mood and or demeanor.
But when I say complexity I mean the bizzarre twists, conceptions, memories, hypocrisies, guilts, foresights, etc which are constantly running around in my mind at any time and become filters with which I analyze things and things people say or do, these complexities are often kept rather quiet and in the background when I am BSing with people, but if its someone I am emotionally evolved with communication gets really confusing and convoluted internally and hard to bring across because there are 100 different variations on whatever I am talking about internally being balanced against how I know the people I am talking to will receive the communication, and often times that communication is shit off simply because I dont know someone well enough in a situation to judge how they will take it, so I stop it.
I can be really neurotic with my thoughts, in the way I check them, anaylze them and cross reference them to the rest of everything I know to draw connections, I think this is a thing of consequence as it has made me completely leery of "small talk" with people, I just cant do it well, its too rigid and too formal in a way.
But yes long tangent short,
I never had to growl, possibly because of the fact that when I want to put something out there I am very direct. Then again it could also be the way I am and look, I think being male helps too.