Love Is Learning to Listen

You don't know someone for fifteen years without either being or becoming a bit like them. In some ways, having such long-lasting friendships is one of the best parts of my life: I know who I can turn to for support, because they've been there through every teenage crush, hangover, and bad decision. In other ways, it's less of a blessing— where we've accepted things about each other that baffle outsiders. "I'm not sure I understand your desire to 'return to the wilderness from whence you came,'" my husband says. "Is it like, a very specific form of seasonal depression?" Outside of my idealization of returning to nature a lá Walden (except with more wilderness and less tax evasion), one of the things my friends have accepted about me in my complete inability to succinctly verbalize emotions. It's not that I don't feel things, of course. I feel them deeply and oftentimes very physically. It's more of an illusion-of-shared experience, where I believe that what I'm feeling is a universal emotion and not tightly wound around my own view of the world. This makes it hard to explain myself to people who don't share my view of the universe— which is mainly everyone. (What can I say? I'm a poet.) Interestingly, one of my closest friends has a similar issue. He's not a poet. Far from it, he spends most of his time writing highly technical legal documents where the value of each word is measured and defined. Every word must add value, and the meaning must be precise, unable to be twisted for anyone's means. I won't say it's the opposite of poetry, because what truly is? But it's something outside my realm of written expertise. This friend is one of my closest confidantes. It's a strange and stuttering thing to share confidence with him, because he too can struggle with finding the right words to express his emotional state. He waits to explain himself, choosing each word carefully. Better to not say anything than to say the wrong thing! I take a different approach. I tend to think out-loud. What comes out while I'm trying to explain myself is a verbal processing. It can go a bit like this: "It's not that I'm mad. I'm just not sure why she would have said it that way if she wasn't upset with me. I didn't like the way she talked to me. I might have been a little snappy with her. No, I was a little snappy. I'm still snappy. I think I'm still mad, you know? Yeah, that's it. I'm mad that she thought it was okay to talk to me that way." Yes, bless my friend for sitting through that outpouring, because when he speaks about his emotions, it goes like this: "I'm feeling pretty hurt that she said that to me. It was dismissive and I felt like she was implying that I was incompetent." The same situation, processed two ways. The same emotions, compressed and chewed up and spit out like we had to taste them before we could know they were real. Sometimes this gets misconstrued. People think I'm over-explaining myself, that I think they're upset. It's not that, really. (My writing is the same way. Some of this is superfluous. Is it? Emotions aren't tidy.) Sometimes my friend gets misconstrued as well, pegged as cold when he's trying to be concise. His need for concision and my tendency to elaborate beyond all useful definition come together, some days, to drag our feelings out of us until they've stuttered and ran through. They've been worn out like old tires, flipped on and off like light switches. No— this essay is an example. I'm not bad at explaining my emotions. It's just that we're all terrible at understanding what we haven't felt. As we rush from one moment to another, squelching thoughts which don't fit neatly into our worldview, we hear someone staggering through an explanation of an emotion they're struggling to accept. We think "oh, they're not explaining this correctly," and we superimpose our own experience over theirs. Whether you want the words to pour out like water from a garden hose, or you want them tightly wrapped like a Christmas present wrapped by your mother, maybe we're all good at explaining our emotions. Because they're ours. The explanation is an outpouring of our own minds; I don't think in short sentences or steady paragraphs. My friend doesn't think in constant poetics, like how I am revising even as the words leave my mouth. Like a poem: write as much as you need, then delete most of it. Explaining myself: say as much as I can, then go back to what I meant. This is the thing we all want: the human experience of feeling seen as we are, and accepted. If our bodies are homes, we are cracking the front doors. We are tossing them open and standing on the front porch, saying "I love you. Come in." You can't know someone for fifteen years without accepting a few of their idiosyncrasies. The metaphorical crooked paintings on their inner walls, the clock that chimes slightly off the hour. For my friends, we've accepted our shared experience as a two-way mirror: we are seen when we struggle to explain ourselves. While it may take another several interactions to determine the way we best communicate, we can always come back to each other. "Yes," we'll say. "Go on. I have learned how to listen, even when you haven't learned to speak."