I have long been aware of the fact that I do not communicate well, at least verbally. Many times in my life, I have been accused of saying [fill in the blank] and denied it only to be met by the assurance of the surrounding crowd that I did indeed say [fill in the blank].
It has troubled me greatly throughout life, and I have been trying to piece together the cause. My first instinct was to attribute it to malice. It would often happen when I had no friends around to back me up, and to ten year old me, conspiracy seemed a reasonable possibility.
Eventually, though, I had to drop this hypothesis. It began to happen with my friends too. Here, though, I had the luxury of preforming a post mortem.
As time went on, I started to piece together different ways in which I was misunderstood. Context was key. Often, a friend could repeat my words back to me, and only then would I understand how my words could mean something different than their intent. Sarcasm too, was a problem; it is lost even upon the sarcastic. So, I began to adopt more and more precision in the way I spoke.
This, however, did not help. The more precise and definite I became, the less my peers actually heard me. It might take me a paragraph to express consent to the proposition that we all go out for pizza, and by the end of it, I had moved them all into a trance-like state.
I remember one time specifically; I said something along the lines of, “With the exception of ‘X’, I think such and such is true,” only for my friend to reply, “Well, did you ever consider that ‘X’ is an exception?”
It is a maddening life. If I speak off the cuff, people cannot follow me, and if I speak very precisely, they get bored and stop listening.
I have been thinking about this, and I have been thinking about Jordan Peterson. He can wax long on complex issues, and when he is misunderstood, it is almost never in an honest way. His lectures enchant thousands, and he seems to always be speaking in the moment, having no notes and straying far from his podium.
I think my problem is, I’m boring. Even if I had something wonderful to say, I’d probably couch it in so many caveats that by the time I had said it, I would have put my listeners to sleep.
What’s the answer? Well, watching Jordan Peterson, I think that one thing he does that I don’t is a certain type of honesty or intellectual nakedness. He rarely says anything rote. It is, in a sense, from the heart. Whether or not I agree with him, I believe him—I believe he believes what he is saying, or if not believes exactly, it’s what he’s thinking at the moment, it’s an idea popping into his head, his own idea popping into his own head.
Well, that, and he probably has a lot more to say than I do. He is much wiser and more knowledgeable than I am.
I like to think, at least, that what I lack in verbal acuity, I make up for in my writing, and maybe, this practiced verbal precision, though it makes for bad conversation, has helped me become a clearer thinker and therefore a better writer.
Tale Told 