[498] Feet Back On The Ground

Does anyone else experience the problem of desperately needing to hear things they don’t already know?

As I often do, I’ll ask you to consider what I think I know about the opening line. A gut instinct likely exists about being presumptuous and dickishly naïve. A wayward overtone sets in as you resolve yourself to the seemingly arbitrary directions I’ll attempt to explain myself. A quaint, yet scant, curiosity because every time I write there may be a nice line or two, or I may be drunk, or I’ll submit myself to some level of embarrassment or encumbered analogy.

Besides, it’s not terribly interesting to talk about what you know, right? No one would listen to an hour-long lecture detailing every moment of how to approach, start, drive, and park a car. Maybe it’s interesting to you, somehow, but the degrees of interest lie in doubt. People love to see over-confidence ridiculed and put back in its place. There remains a deep irony in taking endless pride in the exercise of doing so.

It’s important to follow broad and presumptuous statements with qualifiers and restrictions. People often pretend they’re giving you the benefit of the doubt, but if you tune in to about 30 seconds of their response to things you’ll say, it becomes snap judgments and many confused points refuting things you never meant to bring up. That idea feels very “obvious” to me. I know how, when, and why communication breaks down. I know there’s always a more direct, or more often less direct, and “idiot proof” way of explaining something once we give each other enough time or appreciate differences.

So as a qualifier, you shouldn’t take my sentiment as a testament to intellect. To know things is not necessarily to brag about knowing things, but any deference to this fact is fleeting. A mother with several young kids doesn’t appreciate the babysitter explaining to her “what Mikey really likes.” It becomes distracting and incomplete to describe the mother as “proud” of the lack of sleep and endless hours spent being a caretaker to Mikey. She’s painfully familiar. She’s exhausted and could stand to never hear about Mikey’s preferences again.

Interpersonal relationships I think are the most familiar. Everyone gets a little indignant being told how to handle or understand someone in their family. People feel, often violently so, that you can’t be a good judge. I won’t pretend to know when that’s the case, but presumably there’s social workers and psychologists who could take your justifications and strategies from a book of clichés they’ve collected over the years.

I like to consider myself an “expert” in myself. Is that a weird thing to state? I have well over 10,000 hours thinking about me and my place in the world. I know the vast array of “personal” quirks and habits that fit neatly into psychological profiles. I know every instant I should probably be asleep instead of anxiously anticipating. I know how I’m going to react or think to approach different conversations with different people on different topics. I know why I write, or read, or hop on a treadmill, or get spinal taps. I never come as a surprise to myself. I’m never swirling in doubt as to my motivations or lack thereof. Some consider this confidence. Some consider it arrogance. Some think I’m probably just outright lying.

I noticed, what I might call the “unchanging me” when I stopped wondering what tomorrow would bring. As a child, I used to wake up and it felt like hopping on a roller coaster. My emotional state was utterly hijacked by what happened around me. I reacted to my mom being angry. I got so invested in video games I’d fly off the handle and throw the controller. I was at the mercy of what the neighborhood kids cared to do that day. Did I like basketball and riding my bike? I can’t say, but I couldn’t look pathetic popping wheelies and air balling, so I kept at them.

We instinctively grant ourselves an identity. We plant our egos in the center of our hobbies, ethnicities, families, symbols, language, etc. It’s practical. It’s hard to imagine a world in which you would be considered a healthy individual where you didn’t feel a sense of connectedness or belonging.

Less intuitively, we’re always changing. We live in a magical era where we can discuss the very fabric of existence. I can casually stroll into the library and pick up a book “Why Does E=mc2?” and in a few hours take a dive into the work and brilliance of one of humanities greatest intellectual achievements. What then would you say about me if I tried to explain the book as if I wrote it?

Hopefully we can see an analogy taking foot. I certainly don’t intimately know nor have personally worked with nor developed theories regarding physics. I’d be a disrespectful fool to pretend otherwise. In the same way, I feel people are disrespectful fools of their own nature who then attempt to explain the happenings of the world around them. The world stopped being so exciting when I learned to appreciate the foolishness I was strangled by as a child. My persistent experience with people is those who never bothered to examine their own.

In reconsidering the clinical psychologist, you can choose to take their 30 years of collecting stories and habits of fighting couples as a guiding principle in how you conduct your life, or, you can think you and your spouse are special butterflies and your friend Dave gave you massive insight into what “bitches really like.” We’re rarely presented with opportunities to make, what I regard, a simple choice between options like these. We then proceed to carry on in the wisdom of denouncing curiosity and humility, as those might provoke us to consider the amount of information we’re ignoring that’s right at our fingertips.

I’m literally desperate to be in a setting where people ask questions instead of make assertions. This is not a criticism of the necessary conversational style that doesn’t need to be prefaced with dozens of “now I may be wrongs.” I’m desperate to see a behavior and watch a habit of openness play out. When I slow down and examine how I might phrase my problems with myself or my friends, it’s feeling that something was once open has now closed. Our dialogue has been swallowed by ignorant ego-ridden children who’ve dictated what our lives have to mold into.

I know you’re busy. I need to hear that you care about finding ways around it. I know you’re tired. I need to hear why we’re going to the gym anyway. I know I was mean or confusing. I need to hear you ask me why or I need to hear why you’re no longer willing to listen. I can’t count how many times I’ve said I need to hear advocacy instead of complacence. I need to hear hope because I don’t really have any. I need to hear doubt, because there’s too much bullshit I think we’re convinced of. I need you to hear me asking for help, because when I approach the world with my cold ignorant ego, it tends to spell disaster for anything resembling genuine human relationships.