What would this look like if no one were going to read it?
This is the central question to most things I write. Do I “care” if you
understand what I'm saying? That is a question that struggles to enter
into it. What would it look like if I cared? Would my sentences be
shorter? Would I deliberately avoid certain words? Would I create an
outline and story that carried you step-by-step? I started writing
because I was in pain and continue to write because at some level I
always am. Do I know exactly how it works to make my head feel better?
Do I know why my heart slows down? If I can't even grasp how this thing
contributes to better understanding myself save those simple effects,
what hope do I have that you're going to get anything out of it?
There's a trend in my writing. I get more “likes” when I can zero in on
a disagreement, talk about something personal from childhood, or offer
the rare blog that sounds hopeful. I write those blogs with the same
seemingly inane fervor of everything else. I think it's nice when people
like things I create, but were I in the business of courting likes, I'd
be destitute. Sometimes my life experiences are so familiar and
particular they make something easy to understand. I'm not always
looking for something to complain about. I suspect many people relate to
feelings that still echo from their own childhood.
I don’t seem
to “learn” from my writing how to do it “better.” I always feel as
“clear” as I can be in attempting to capture the moment as it feels. I
snap back into old fights or feelings when I read blogs. I'm building
narratives to anchor and process myself through. I'm hoping to find both
internal and external analogies in how my body responds to things, and
the feedback from the outside world when they encounter me. Should a
label stick? Is stoicism preferred? Is “professional” professional? I
have an endless list of open questions fighting for attention. I don't
know why one topic bleeds into another. I don't know what my gut would
say if it had its own mouth.
I can grant that I'm convoluted. I
don't think this is anything special or different from what it means to
be human. On top of that, it has been relayed to me that while I am
clearly well-read or might attempt to process saying things in real
time, my message, whatever it may be, rarely connects. On its face, this
isn't something I'm usually concerned with. Were I a preschool teacher
refusing to speak in children's terms, you'd be reasonably concerned
with my capacity to do the job or even basic wisdom. When I'm “screaming
into the void so I can live with myself,” it seems almost antagonistic
to suggest I'm not connecting with as many people as I could.
That said, I don't believe I've ever had a good grasp of what people
were looking for when I wrote something. I've written papers that got
“As,” but not usually, and I don't know how or the differences between
them. I distinctly remember in school that umbrella writing style,
filling in the blanks, writing lines in service to each clause, and then
getting a “B” with no fucking clue how I followed the rules and it
didn't work. I know I got an A on one writing prompt in college because
it pertained to the heart of my religion/science reading I'd done
exhaustively over the last two years. I think the T.A. literally wrote
“wow.”
Add to that, when I read, I find every style imaginable,
and find myself generally able to take away what's being said. I might
not have the sensory overload or romance swirling in me from minute
descriptions of a Charlotte Bronte boarding school, but I can digest 15
“big words” almost forcefully packed together. I can know what's going
on and still entertain embarrassed or frustrated solidarity when
something befalls Jane. There are some other “classics” I can barely
translate, but admittedly was reading because of their touted status,
not because I was interested in being challenged or prepared to gorge on
the depth of the lore.
I certainly understand the idea of “code
switching” and “meeting people where they are” as well. I rarely spoke
to the families you find in social work about anything but the
straight-to-the-point practical things they could do. If I knew or had
just read a ton about how to discipline a child, I could sum that up as,
“We know by now that physical violence doesn't work” usually as a
client opens up about its failure as a strategy in the past. The thing
about writing blogs is that I'm meeting people I've often deliberately
chosen to meet me where I'm at, on a platform where the expectation is
to, at best, get a like.
I suspect I could go back and take
everything I've ever written and break it down into small sentences. I
think it is well within my awareness and capacity to take airy and
obscure ideas, tag them to a cliché, and functionally cheapen the
consternation or conflict of ideas that had me spit them out raw. Were I
ever to try and get published or mass produce myself, I'd be “happy” to
do so. For now? It's hard enough to write enough to actually start
feeling better. I need you to be as responsible as me in taking
something hard to understand as an opportunity to ask questions if you
want to know more. My blogs aren't weekly newsletters. We're not in
regular correspondence, so I feel a greater obligation to the
conversations and conflicts in my own head, than how they manifest as
connotative or political footballs.
The icing on the “I can't
understand you” cake is that when I'm trying to be more deliberate, it
gets regarded as the most confusing. The whole exercise takes on a new
level of frustration and the wisdom of not giving a fuck in how you come
across grips even harder. Two competing and confused forces are at
play. The person who can't understand you doesn't know how to articulate
it. In turn, you couldn't possibly grasp how to say things any clearer.
If you have a better strategy or method for reaching people, please,
feel free to ignore the comment box and shout it into the wind per
standard procedure.
I get headaches. I throw myself into
situations and attempt to monitor how they play out. Whether it's
running last minute an hour away to pick up something for free, or
attending a job interview for a position I hope to jive with in a way my
experience suggests I never will, my blood pressure will spike, my head
will hurt, or I'll just start feeling feint or achy. Am I dreading the
job? Do I regret the gas spent to pick up a scrap washing machine? Did I
just not eat enough? Did I catch Covid? Is some deep-seeded anxiety
provoked and reminiscent of something I didn't want to fail at again? I
don't know. Because I don't know, when I pour the soup with different
food bits out of the mystery can, I have to pick through and identify
what my brain has been eating.
I don't know if you're aware, but
it's extremely easy for me to feel bad about something. I have this
nasty habit of noticing, and I notice a lot of bad that the good does
not outweigh. I want to say that again, the good in my life does not
outweigh the prospect of fascism, destroying the planet, and then adding
up all of the things on the way down to nickle-a-piece problems of
interpersonal strife or paper cuts. I don't speak the way I do because I
was shaped by anything less than an immense and overwhelming weight to
behave in ways that feel suicidal. I didn't move to a rural location and
sacrifice a series of comforts because my environments felt better than
what I currently occupy. Perhaps when you can't understand me, you're
so steeped in the language of death that my meager struggle to keep
things in perspective and organize more robust language, it registers as
abstract, or god forbid, modern art. Perhaps, like the last sentence,
it's always on me to clean up and clarify. (And, still, if you don't
find modern art as obtrusive and pointless as I do, the metaphor will
still die.)
We're not just speaking with our words, of course.
Just like you can know who is a creep in your gut, you can tend to sense
if someone has their shit together, is comfortable with themselves, or
can relate to the world by remaining open to learning or trying verses
judging and shutting down. I write. It's a thing I physically do to try.
It's reaching out whether I know who it's reaching towards or not. I
build. I gamble that I'm going to be able to figure something out or
find someone worthy of trying new or complicated things with. Comedians
“get away” with saying the unsayable because we get to know their
“brand” which transcends the taboos of “polite” (read: silent) society.
When I say I need the checks on my words or behavior from my crowd, it's
as much a practical reality as it is an earnest ideal that they feel
worthy and capable of the task.
Maybe it's easier for you to
“keep it together.” Maybe I occupy a rarefied space that feels very
precarious, or at least, I'm able to talk about it like it's bound to
collapse or explode any moment. When I hear stories of “perfectly
normal” scenarios turning deadly or newsworthy, they're never a shock.
I'm willing to believe “it” is always bubbling just beneath the surface.
I see the bio-psycho-social math behind the number of stressors that
end in inevitable tragedy. Almost never do I see people get ideas about
how to be proactive and overwhelming to fight back. Up and down power
structures I read “defeated” and “coping” and “reacting.” Democrats act
like they know less about how to stop a Supreme Court hijacking than a
Vice News reporter vocalizing the details on what to try. Billboards
will go up patting Indiana on the back for how many kids get adopted
with not a whisper regarding Eli Lilly's profit margin on methadone.
I feel surrounded by death, and it makes me eager to record how that
death manifests in the mind of someone who doesn't understand why is has to
be this way. I don't feel resigned to my fate, so I invite almost
intolerable amounts of stress with regard to how or why I bother to say
things, or who I'm willing to fight with. I want the exercise of my time
to be a living will. I want you to see how ridiculous and contradictory
and confusing it can be, and how you can still build and behave in
spite of it. I want you to get the impression that the conversation is never over, and that's okay if you and your people can just practice in service to words worth preaching.
What if you're worse off than me? What if you have the problems with
being a refugee? What if you're sick? What if writing does nothing for
you, your friends are all meth addicts, and you'd break down in tears to
only be haunted by the things I might bring up in a blog? What
kind of environment is created then? What's your cue? How hopeless does
it feel while you're still getting fed, drinking clean water, and able
to click and scroll your life away?
If I'm hard to understand, it's because the entire other half of the conversation is missing.
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