Hi reader, much has happened since we last chatted. I went to Mexico (again), performed stand-up in front of a few crowds (yikes), and faced the fallout from a small leak in the roof of my building that turned into a massive flood. I could write in detail about any one of these events, and I’ve tried. But it’s been difficult to find exactly what I want to say.
On that note…
I was scrolling through Instagram and came across a post from Aisling Bea, the actress whom I would no doubt most like to have a beer with, preferably in a pub in Ireland. She wrote and starred in “This Way Up,” which is a show about recovery, among other things. Her character, Aine, is like a cooler, more vulnerable version of Hannah Horvath, if Hannah were also Irish and more likable.
Anyway, Bea posted a video from the show’s finale. The scene is a flashback of Aine talking to her support group about her (heavily hinted at) suicide attempt. She says: “I think that words can save you, if you hear the right ones, or you know the right ones to use. Because I think a lot of people don’t have enough words, just to be able to say what you need to say…even if they talk a lot.”
I’ve been thinking about the power of words a lot lately, and the powerlessness you feel when you can’t find the right ones, when you’re silenced, or when you say — or hear — the wrong ones.
The morning my building flooded, I (allegedly) called my building manager and shouted the following: “The building is under fucking water!” When asked what building I was referring to, I yelled out my address and asked, “What other fucking building would it be?” He said, “Would you talk to your father this way?” And I hung up.
I blacked out during the actual call, which I made while spastically throwing my hissing cat into her carrier and evacuating my apartment in a panic. But my words are immortalized in an email written by the head of my property management company. (In my defense, had my landlord fixed the leak when it started in April, we could have avoided the flood crisis in July, but I digress…)
The email, which goes on to call me “vindictive,” “malicious,” and a “liar,” is both fascinating and horrifying. I can’t help but cackle while I imagine my building manager dictating my words to his boss: “THEN she said, ‘What other fucking building would it BE?”
For someone who thinks thoughtfully about verbiage for a living, I’ve never been skilled at controlling what I say during heightened emotional moments, especially if the recipient seems deserving of my rage. And while I don’t feel particularly bad about offending a rotten slumlord, my words have no doubt made my life more difficult in the past three weeks and were, frankly, humiliating to see typed out in bold, black ink.
I had a similarly jarring experience earlier in the month when a (silly, throwaway) Tweet of mine went viral and was re-posted by a popular Philly Instagram account — where more than 100 strangers debated my use of “sexual harassment” in the comments. There’s quite possibly nothing worse for your mental health than reading the opinions of strangers on the Internet. I know this, and yet, you read them anyway. Certain words in this newsletter have been misconstrued or misinterpreted, causing me to tread more cautiously and second-guess nearly everything I begin to type.
In Mexico, time spent with a non-native English speaker and our mismatched expectations led to miscommunication. I felt a pang of shame that he could transition between three languages, while I was restricted to one, trapping us in a bubble of inevitable confusion and exhaustion. “What do you mean?” I begged him to tell me during a painful conversation, but he didn’t have the words.
I’ve sometimes thought that talking could save a relationship. Words, after all, give me a sense of order and control. “Just tell me exactly what you’re thinking, and we’ll be OK,” I’ve thought so many times. I once had a boyfriend say, “You don’t get to access every thought inside my head,” which drove me crazy. But life isn’t a novel, and people aren’t characters that you can manipulate to serve the main character’s story arc. We’re all just living our lives the best we can, making our own selfish choices, miscommunicating, apologizing. Rinse and repeat. Sometimes, we don’t ask the real questions we have, because we don’t want to hear the real answers. Sometimes, we talk in circles and end up nowhere productive, even when we speak the exact same language.
What if we were all perfect communicators? Would our relationships be stronger, easier, less volatile? Is this the appeal of an AI boyfriend or girlfriend — a robot to tell us exactly what we want to hear when we want to hear it?
I don’t know if words can save us. But maybe if every thought we had was sanitized and spit back out through ChatGPT, words would have less meaning. Maybe it’s the “fuck yous,” and the “I don’t knows,” and the misinterpretations, and the silences, and the stares that are the most powerful. Maybe we can’t always know exactly what to say, and maybe that’s OK. Maybe it’s the trying, and the getting it wrong, and learning someone’s language, and then trying again — maybe there’s beauty in that. Maybe it makes the scripts of our lives more interesting.
Do you know what I’m saying?
Choices. It's always about choices. Regarding the landlord interaction:
Anger is a symptom (not a cause) and whenever it materializes you have a choice:
1) Do I want to figure out why I'm angry and actually go about the steps to try to constructively solve the problem? (Hint - it wasn't actually the flood that made you angry)
Or, 2) do I just want to vent?
That fork in the mental road is where much of the magic of real self-care resides...
Just a thought ;-)