I’m in Canada this week, helping my mom with a pile of life stuff. It’s personal, soul-stirring work, and it’s bringing a lot of memories and feelings worth exploring to the surface.
But I don’t have time to write about any of that right now. And anyway, I’m still mid-process. Today we are (finally) hooking her up with a cellphone, and putting some things into storage. I’ll have more to say about family relationships and the multiplicity of past selves that we accumulate over the years next week.
For today, I want to share with you an essay I wrote for Human Shift magazine last year. I hope you enjoy it.
Words Fail Me
First published in Human Shift magazine, Fifth Chakra issue, 2022
The words come in a torrent. For me, they always have. I’m still stung by the mocking laughter of my third-grade classmates the day my teacher said I had “verbal diarrhea”. An ugly phrase, especially to a sensitive eight-year-old, but he wasn’t wrong. I do love words, and can’t seem to get enough of them.
Words can be bouquets, and they can be bullets. Shields and salves. Dance steps and disguises. Magic potions and magic carpets. Their range of utility is breathtaking.
As a child, you don’t think about language as more than speaking. You just pick it up and play with it, as if it was a stick lying on the ground. But language isn’t a natural element of the earth; it’s a human invention.
The concept of etymology and the revelation that every word has its own origin story blew my young mind. Not only that, but languages, themselves, follow evolutionary paths, growing into complex family trees with common roots and divergent branches. Learning that words are not the things they describe but symbols for them was practically a mystical experience. And that some languages don’t even have words for concepts that I talk about every day, yet they may have multiple words for things my own language does not bother to name.
I can still see my teacher writing the word connotation in chalk on the blackboard, explaining, “The word cur has a very different connotation than the word pup, even though they both mean dog.” She explained further that the connotation or even the basic meaning of a word can change depending on its context, the words nearby, or the order of those words! A fair maiden is very different from a fair deal, and a state fair is nothing like a fair state. Don’t even get me started on metaphors, colloquialisms, or double entendres. English class was a sorcerer’s laboratory, and I was being handed the spell book.
I was learning that language is both endlessly malleable and devastatingly precise. I wanted to plunge my hands deep into that substance and see what wonders could be wrought with it.
Naturally, I became an editor.
An editor is an author’s first reader, whose job is to advocate for every reader’s understanding and enjoyment of the work. But really, the editor is just as much the author’s advocate, making sure that the words are not only correct and comprehensible but also that the author’s deeper meaning and emotional expression are conveyed as intended. In this way, the editor is like a translator.
I adore this work. It is so satisfying to comb the knots out of a tangled piece of prose, and the harder I have to work at it, the deeper my satisfaction is. Editing is a sacred duty, an act of double-ended empathy that calls for insight into the needs and experiences of both parties in the exchange.
The point of using words is not just to express, but to communicate. At their best, words are the instruments of telepathy, forming an etheric bridge between me and not-me. We are, all of us, isolated in these meat bubbles we call bodies, and words are how we transcend the flesh barrier to link minds with another human being. That’s especially true for the written word, which can’t lean on vocal intonation or body language to get its point across.
When we express ourselves, whether verbally or nonverbally, we yearn to be received as we intended. It is the very basis of connection. And connection is what we’re all after, almost every moment of our lives.
There’s nothing like the flash of recognition, the softening of the gaze in the eyes of a person when you have poured out your heart to them and they have taken you in. The words in this moment are often simple:
“I get it.”
“That makes sense.”
“I hear you.”
So much of the pain we experience as humans comes from interactions in which this fundamental activity goes sideways.
The very power that words hold can make them dangerous, and we frequently abuse it. Fashioned into the weapons of sarcasm, contempt, insult, or coercion, words can wound their target profoundly.
Even innocent or ignorant clumsiness in our use of language - an insensitive word choice, an unintended insinuation - can rupture our feeling of connectedness and even estrange us from each other if not skillfully repaired. And we aren’t typically any better at the mending than we are at avoiding the fracture in the first place.
When I was in my twenties, my then-boyfriend Vincent and I got into a debate about whose job it is to make sure a message gets communicated effectively, the speaker’s or the listener’s. He was upset that I’d misunderstood him, and said that it was my job as the listener to make sure I’d grasped his intended message. On another occasion, I was upset because he had misunderstood me, and this time he insisted it was my responsibility to get my point across more clearly. I laughed at this glaring double standard and told him he couldn’t have it both ways. But I did resolve to try to get better at both.
I have spent a lot of my life feeling misunderstood and agonizing over it. I know I'm not alone in this - most relationships are plagued by epic failures of communication. Few things are more painful than feeling misinterpreted, especially by someone we love or rely on.
We want to be taken at our word, but our words are unreliable representatives of our internal reality. Our ambiguous utterances can also hold multiple, even contradictory, meanings. “I guess so,” can mean “yes, definitely” and also “absolutely not”, leaving the listener to take their chances with the interpretation.
Worse, we are very often purposefully indirect in a way that’s supposed to be understood as oblique yet obvious. Even statements ostensibly meant to put an end to conflict can be misleading. “Just forget it; I’m fine,” but the side-eye and slammed door belies the truth.
It’s not so easy to set things straight. An editor can always ask their author for clarification and reasonably expect to get it. But exchanges between intimate partners are invariably fraught with doublespeak and shorthand.
We resist communicating with clarity for so many reasons: lack of self-awareness, the urge to preserve our self-image, the tendency to project onto others. Clarity depends not only on saying what you mean, but on knowing what you mean in the first place. We can only be as honest with others as we are with ourselves.
To know what we mean, we have to dig deep under the layers of conditioning and defensive internal narratives to the bedrock truth of what we think and feel.
Knowing that humans are chronically self-delusional creatures, and that I am human, it tears at me to know that I, too, commit these crimes of communication, hurting the people I love and damaging my connection to not-me.
I find it almost unbearable to leave a communication breakdown in its brokenness. When resolution through dialog is not possible, I take to my journals to work it out. Like fixing a bad opening paragraph, I just know that I can detangle this mess. If only I can find the right words and put them in the right order, the misunderstandings will vanish, closeness will ensue.
In my more contentious relationships in which ruptures were severe and hard to recover from, I composed long emails to lovers, defending my heart and explaining my mind. The words came in a torrent. Arguments and grievances, admissions and apologies, justifications, rationales, entreaties, compromises, and proposed pathways to reconciliation.
The choice of words is crucial, as is their arrangement and relationship. They must defend without oozing defensiveness. They must lay out watertight, balanced arguments, harnessing both logic and emotion but sacrificing neither for the sake of the other.
It’s a delicate and time consuming operation. After a particularly bad fight, I might spend the better part of three days, or even a week, on a conciliatory letter. When I feel it is almost just right, I’ll read it slowly, scanning my body for signals that I’ve gone too far with a particular point, or not far enough.
Ah, yes. Here, I am too supplicating. Or look there: in this line, I veer into self-pity. Here, I risk losing support with too harsh a phrase. Have I taken sufficient ownership of my part in the problem? I’m hammering my point home too hard. Should I temper my complaint with a word of contrition? Is this line a balanced, mature insight, or does it smack of condescension?
Finally, I have a letter that says exactly what I mean. And I either send it or I don’t.
My journals, thick as deli sandwiches, are stuffed with painstakingly composed conciliatory phrases. Therapist-approved words designed to melt defenses and restore connection.
These handwritten rehearsals are my attempt to etch a perfect argument in my memory, like an actor drilling lines, in the hope that the magic words will flash on the screen of my awareness when I need them. In a white hot moment when we are shouting at each other in the kitchen, and my hands are dripping with lemon juice. When I am sliced open by a sharp word, and my thinking mind is seeping out of me. When I am hovering somewhere slightly above my body and to the left, the right words will be there. I will grab onto them like a thick and sturdy root in the bank of a rushing river, and I will pull us both out of this whirlpool before we go under.
But the words fail me.
Instead, I say, “Why do you have to be such an ASSHOLE?”
Poor old words. I have whipped you too hard to carry a load you were never designed to bear alone. I should know better than to try to build a bridge in the middle of a rising flood.
It turns out that Vincent was right, both times. It is the speaker’s job to use the kindest and truest words available to them, and it is also the listener’s job to meet the speaker halfway, with a curious mind and a generous heart. And each of us must be both these things for each other.
It doesn’t matter which of us says it first. It does matter that we both say it.
“I’m sorry.”
“I love you.”
Understanding between two people can’t be coded into a string of artful phrases. Understanding, whether of an emotional reality or an inside joke, relies on shared interpretation. And shared interpretation comes not from dictionary definitions but from resonance.
“I feel you,” as people often say these days. We don’t just want to be heard; we want to be felt.
Words fail us when we demand too much of them. Even the best words, perfectly used, cannot force understanding upon someone who is either unable or unwilling in that moment to feel us. When we feel each other, the language can be as clumsy as an old boot and still land delicately.
The first hopeful signals sent across the raging waters are not conveyed with words but with our bodies. The eyes soften. The breath flows out. The hands drop, and the sea parts. And only now can words carry us across the divide.