Ok, it’s not torture, but it often is frustrating.

For as long as I’ve thought about what speaking to others entails, I’ve never stopped feeling as if I never fully cracked the code to communicating with others. I can get by just fine, it’s not like I speak gibberish and Seinfeld quotes (not that there’s anything wrong with that), but talking does feel to me a bit like playing a board game whose rules I keep learning as I go.

There’s always been this filter between what I say and what people get. I mean, everyone has it to some extent, nobody really gets the full meaning of every word you say, they just get the meaning they have associated with said words in their mind, which might be ever so slightly different from yours. But as interesting as it is to consider, that’s not what I’m writing about.

"I never said that!"

People seem to take everything I say in absolutes: if I say I don’t like loud noises, it means I’ll break down and cry every time someone raises their voice; if I say I’m not good at starting conversations, people think I need some sort of accommodation for my debilitating social ineptitude; if I say I’m introverted, people are surprised when I end up loving hanging out with multiple friends at once.

This gets even worse when applied to taste. I can never think something is generally not my preference, because the moment I say I don’t like a movie’s use of slapstick, the colour green on a wall, or how a beer brand’s red beer tastes, people suddenly assign traits to me that I never asked for. Now for the rest of my life and the next one I’ll have to hear “I know you don’t like slapstick, but this movie’s actually pretty funny,” “Right, I forgot you don’t like green decorations,” and “I made sure to get you a different brand, cause I know you hate this one”.

It’s part of why talking about my feelings and tastes proves so tiring to me. Once I put it all into words, they’re bound to be distorted and warped into the feelings and taste of a cartoon character that people think is me.

“That’s not what I meant, where did you get that from?”

If you know me, you’ve probably heard me say some variant of the sentence “People always seek some other meaning than the words that I am saying.” This is one of the most persistent problems I’ve had in my entire life and after almost 22 years, I still haven’t figured out what to do about it.

To know what I mean, you first have to know that I have a tendency towards taking things literally. I’ve learned not to do it, and I can kinda tell what most people mean when there’s more meaning behind the words they say (I have to borrow from my media literacy skills a bit). I write this because I think other people experience the opposite problem with me: I tend to say or ask things without any other purpose than the one expressed in my words, and people take it to mean something entirely separate. If I'm hanging out with friends and I say I’m out of my element, they assume I wanna leave, or if I say clothes make me uncomfortable, people assume I want to have sex with them. I knew there was some sort of logic to it but it wasn’t until recently (embarrassingly recently, like post-pandemic recently) that I realised that the words you say matter, but the fact that you are saying them matters almost just as much. Turns out, words do come easy! It’s just everything around them that’s hard!

The part where I wrote an entire aside on The Sopranos, I swear this is important.

This is going to sound very stupid, I know, but I only really internalised this after watching The Sopranos. In that show, there’s a lot of not-so-subtle manipulation. A threat in the shape of a smile and a compliment, an order dressed like a complaint, layers and layers and layers of plausible deniability that holds the mafia structure together.

There’s this one scene where Christopher goes to The Esplanade, the construction site where a lot of the politicking swirls around, and exchanges a few words with Patsy about these new fibre optic cables and how they’re the hot new thing. Then they stare at each other, and Patsy gets the order; he steals the fiber optic cables without ever being explicitly told to do so. Later on, when Tony gets angry at Christopher for what Patsy pulled off, and Chris confronts him about it, Patsy’s justification is “you gave me a look,” something that Chris dismisses as ridiculous, though we all know that look was 100% intentional.

So, I learned that, while nobody gets that I want someone dead or something stolen when I talk to them, they are trying to figure out what I want from them… when most of the time I don’t want anything (and I say “most” because I catch myself doing this every now and then, though not intentionally).

I’ve also tried to pick up on the kind of idioms and expressions people use, but that’s very fallible. I usually know what they mean, and people usually understand what I’m saying with them, but every once in a while, I find out an expression I’ve been using for years always meant something completely different or something very inappropriate for whatever situation I’m in. This means I never feel truly certain of what I’m saying when it comes to certain expressions. I have to fumble through it, I’ll forget whatever explanation or definition I get.

So, what do I do?

For the “people think I want something from them” problem, I try to wait until the right moment to say things, but I don’t really know what the right moment is, and I can’t just not say them (I mean, I can, but it takes some effort, and why wouldn’t I talk to people?), and I mostly say stuff because they came to my mind.

For that same problem, and the “people always get the wrong impression of what I say” issue, I’ve adopted the wonderful technique known only as “interrupting them to explain how wrong they are.” I do this because it’s extremely hard to correct those misconceptions once they’ve formed. I can’t just say “actually, it’s not that I hate that brand of beer, I just prefer other brands’ red beer,” they’ll just forget it the instant I’m done speaking until the stars align and their chakras open. No, it’s way easier to say it as soon as I can to keep that idea from taking shape.

Another thing I learned to do is add eighteen quadrillion qualifiers to everything I say, cover every base in advance so there’s no chance of anyone getting anything other than what I mean. I don’t say “I don’t like the green in this wall,” I say “I don’t think I like how this particular kind of green looks in this wall when put up against all the other decorations. I’m not saying green can’t look good on any wall, or that it should be changed, because the important thing, ultimately, is for whoever decided to have this wall be green to like it. I just think that I, particularly, would probably choose a different colour for it.”

If you ever get the impression from talking with me that I intentionally choose every word I say, and what tone to say them in, that’s because I do!

And does it work?

No! And I’ve gotten so used to some of these habits that I don’t really know how to un-learn them.

Some things I want to reiterate and clarify in case anyone gets the wrong impression

I am not saying that nobody gets me or that I can’t connect with anyone. Like I said, I get by and I have done so for years. This is not a crippling problem, it’s an annoyance I’ve gotten used to living with and only recently started thinking about. Most of the time, I’m fine being a tiny bit pedantic and knowing I might have to clarify things later on.

I am also not saying everyone but me is a dumb NPC who doesn’t think. I noticed that this whole thing has a very “ugh, I don’t understand hoomans” tone I was never really aiming for and I understand this is mainly my own inability to express myself in words and emote, not people’s incapacity for receiving my message. I’m just sharing what I live with.

Plus this isn’t something that happens with every single person. There’s people who really do hear my words and take them from what they are, ask before coming to a conclusion, and/or are patient with me because they know it’s a little challenging for me.

Plus this isn’t something that happens with every single person. There’s people who really do hear my words and take them from what they are, ask before coming to a conclusion, and/or are patient with me because they know it’s a little challenging for me.

I’m also not calling for an end to implicit meaning and ambiguity, or for everyone to treat me like Data from TNG (well, maybe just a little, as a treat).

What I ultimately want out of this is something I try to practice every day: a little patience and a little charitability. Whenever there’s ambiguity, I try to clarify, or at least find the most charitable interpretation (not that I’m perfect at this, I do struggle with it sometimes). I think we’d all live and connect better if we applied something like this to how we deal with ambiguity.