How Are You? I Am Fine.

One of the hard­est things to get used to when I started the job I have now was that when any­one in the office asked how I was, they paused, as if antic­i­pat­ing a response other than “I’m fine. How are you?” It had been a while since I’d spent much time around peo­ple who had that much energy for other peo­ple, and it had been a while since I’d had much to say that I wanted to share. Whether ask­ing or answer­ing, I have, I admit, some­times been grate­ful to be let off the hook with a sim­ple “I’m fine.”

I knew I was in for it when, on a day when I was clearly anx­ious, a coworker cocked his head after my “I’m fine,” and asked if I was sure I was okay. I wasn’t. But when I’m not okay, empa­thetic ges­tures such as these break down my already-fragile defenses, and hav­ing a break­down a month into a new job seemed like a less-than-ideal har­bin­ger of my employ­ment future. Only, by then, I had also remem­bered that offer­ing sub­stan­tive responses to ques­tions like “How are you?” was often rewarded with a fresh per­spec­tive, a sym­pa­thetic ear, an elab­o­rate dis­trac­tion, or a fero­cious hug (another thing I was try­ing to get used to). So I unbur­dened myself of the two sto­ries that had me so wound up–nontrivial ones, but not earth shattering–and over the next day or so I was fre­quently reminded to breathe through it all. And I reminded myself to stop say­ing I was fine when I wasn’t. You know what FINE stands for, any­way, right? Fickle, Inse­cure, Neu­rotic, and Egomaniacal.

Sil­hou­ettes

Ear­lier this week I sug­gested to a friend, only half jok­ing, that blog­ging made me feel like an ego­ma­niac, des­per­ate to be under­stood. My friend replied that every­body is kind of like that, and we agreed that we’re very fond of peo­ple who also have the outward-looking ana­logue to ego­ma­nia, what­ever that might be called. My favorite guess at a word for it is “ambis­crutiny,” made up by a copy­ed­i­tor in Mass­a­chu­setts draw­ing upon her half-remembered high-school Latin classes. I strive to be ambis­cruti­nous, to be as con­sumed by the world around me and the peo­ple in it as I am by intro­spec­tion, even when that exposes me to as much pain as joy. My capac­ity for com­pas­sion is greater when I don’t try to fil­ter out the things that chal­lenge me.

Per­haps you’ve noticed a recent uptick in my post­ing fre­quency here. It’s not all to do with this game of blog tag I’m play­ing with my friends (see the bot­tom of this post if you have no idea what I’m talk­ing about). I think I may also be writ­ing more here because I spend so much of my time these days in the com­pany of peo­ple who seem eager to know me, and I feel inept at the kind of talk­ing I usu­ally end up doing with them. Given my druthers, I’d prob­a­bly always be sit­ting on one porch or another, bour­bon in hand, lost for hours in a con­ver­sa­tion that began with some “sim­ple” ques­tion and evolved into an attempt to clar­ify some nuance of our per­sonal faiths or philoso­phies. Time and space being stub­bornly resis­tant to my efforts to engi­neer such con­ver­sa­tions, I instead turn more often than not to writ­ten cor­re­spon­dence with friends flung far and not-so-far, and, fail­ing that, I write myself down here.

I resist hav­ing abridged con­ver­sa­tions because I don’t like inter­rupt­ing ideas, which come only half-formed in the first place and take a while to artic­u­late, and I hate to be mis­con­strued. I don’t often speak at length because it’s hard to be mind­ful enough of what I’m say­ing to guess how any­one I don’t know very well might inter­pret it, and harder still not to worry that they’ll fill in the gaps with their own sup­po­si­tions. It’s hard to lis­ten to someone’s story with­out strain­ing for mean­ing right from the start, but if we’re con­stantly pars­ing what we hear as it’s being said, we must be miss­ing nuance. To lis­ten well I have to try not to assume that what you say is ever exactly what you mean, or that I would under­stand exactly what you say if you do some­how man­age to say exactly what you mean. The real story is in the void between the words as much as in the words them­selves. The real story makes us both more vul­ner­a­ble. That’s a good thing.

If I speak pre­cisely, if I take too long to answer a ques­tion you thought had a sim­ple answer, it’s not because I am shy. It’s not because I’m bored, and it’s not because I’d rather not talk to you. I’m doing the best I can with the infe­rior tools at my dis­posal, and they are not up to the task of answer­ing “How are you?” in fewer than a thou­sand words. (Nei­ther, by the way, are your tools.) Lan­guage is like sonar, show­ing us to each other in the depths, but only mak­ing sense as what we reflect back. I’ll be twenty-five fath­oms deep, with the agony and mirth, blind with­out the sun, but lis­ten­ing for the ping.

Note: The entire fore­go­ing post has been an excuse to quote this poem, which is on page 5 of my own per­sonal hymnal.

A Rit­ual to Read to Each Other
by William Stafford

If you don’t know the kind of per­son I am
and I don’t know the kind of per­son you are
a pat­tern that oth­ers made may pre­vail in the world
and fol­low­ing the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the frag­ile sequence break
send­ing with shouts the hor­ri­ble errors of child­hood
storm­ing out to play through the bro­ken dike.

And as ele­phants parade hold­ing each elephant’s tail,
but if one wan­ders the cir­cus won’t find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cru­elty
to know what occurs but not rec­og­nize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to some­thing shad­owy,
a remote impor­tant region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should con­sider—
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is impor­tant that awake peo­ple be awake,
or a break­ing line may dis­cour­age them back to sleep;
the sig­nals we give—yes or no, or maybe—
should be clear: the dark­ness around us is deep.

Every two weeks some of my friends and I cre­ate new posts on the same topic. This week’s syn­chroblog posts about dark­ness are listed below. Please read them, and if you’d like to play along, let me know.

Dark City — nights­bright­days
From Dark­ness, Light — adven­tures of alisha
Fur­ther — m
Into the Dark­ness — pas­sion­ately pen­sive
The Senior Scram­ble — i write to be rid of things
Syn­croblog­ging in the Dark — mud­dled­dreamer