I’m wrapping up part of my social work program, which meant saying goodbye to some people today. As I was leaving and giving people hugs a few of them said things like “you’re going to be such a great social worker!” and “you’re going to change the world, I know it!”
These are just the types of things that people say when someone is leaving a casual group of colleagues they’ve spent some, but not a lot of time with. I doubt very much that anyone I talked to today thinks that I will actually change the world. But I’m still sitting here, several hours later, thinking about whether or not they did.
I think too hard about things like this because words tend to stick with me, and my brain is like an irritatingly thorough surgeon, cutting them open and looking for hidden meanings that may but usually do not exist. I have had this tendency since childhood, which made me a very earnest and gullible tween whose search for hidden depths in words meant she often missed that she was being made fun of. Worse still, my tween and teen self often interpreted what were very obviously just polite niceties from young men as a hidden secret, conveying in code their deep feelings for me. I am hardly the only teen girl to have ever overanalyzed the brief communications of an uninterested male acquaintance she thought was cute, but when one of my fellow 16-year-old over-analyzers turned once to me with pity in her eyes and said “I think you need to move on”, it felt like I had a deeper problem.
Since tweenhood I have learned to identify most examples of When Someone Means What They Say vs. When They Are Joking Or Otherwise Not Being Serious; my many thanks go to the members of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, the cast members of Saturday Night Live (1999- present), and especially Tina Fey, mastress of word twisting. I still get tripped up sometimes by extremely deadpan delivery, à la Tig Notaro or my partner J’s dad. I am a fairly joke-y person, in fact, but it sometimes feels like a second language. When I get tired or a little bit sick, much like I might slur my German adjective endings, I have difficulty thinking up witty comebacks or recognizing that a recent acquaintance doesn’t actually have a horse in his backyard, as he has just proclaimed sarcastically. While I am sometimes taken aback by its abrasiveness, I appreciate traditionally German directness when I experience it: if the lady in the shoe store is yelling at me, she is mad that I put my muddy shoes on her chair. I don’t have to wonder, and that is sometimes a wonderful break.
This is all a very long-winded way of saying that anxiety, especially in social situations, is exhausting. It has been such an integral part of how I interact with the world that I didn’t even recognize that I had it until talking with my therapist when I first started eating disorder therapy. We were discussing the fact that I often binge eat (or drink) at parties where I don’t know very many people because I feel nervous. This has been true since before my age had double digits; it had never occurred to me that that wasn’t how most people navigated their interactions with other people. When I don’t want to or can’t mindlessly put things in my mouth, I will weave my fingers together or wring my hands or snap my fingers– anything to ease the intense discomfort I feel when trying to juggle all the normal parts of human conversation. There is so much noise in my head at all times– trying to understand what someone said, whether or not it was problematic in some way (thanks, social work), whether or not it was serious, whether or not it was meant to be an insult… then trying to formulate a response that matches the tone and content of whatever was just said. It’s just talking, and it’s the most natural human thing but it is also so exhausting. This is one reason I tend to write so much— it’s a way to slow down the process of having a conversation enough that I can actually understand what’s happening (though it can also delay the agony of wondering whether or not I was wrong in my interpretation). My close friends all know that when I really need a listening ear they should await not a phone call, but a gmail notification from me (texting works too, in a pinch).
Sometimes I just wish I could turn off this part of my brain– the part that also makes me a good writer and student and problem-solver– and just take in everything exactly as it was presented to me. And the problem, when your brain is constantly poking and prodding at all the words you hear and think and say is that that’s almost impossible. You could tell me every single day that you are glad we are friends, or that I do good work, or that I’m smart and capable and I will nod and smile and blush a little maybe, but I will never really believe you. Underneath what appears to be coy acceptance of praise, I am remembering the one time you were frustrated and said something you didn’t mean that my overly analytic brain has chosen to remind me of every time we interact. I am discounting everything you have just said with the knowledge that you are just being nice, you just want me to go away so you can be with your real friends, you need me to do something for you, etc. It is incredibly unfair to both of us but it is how I am wired, and it is a constant battle for me to remind myself that negative sentiments aren’t the only ones that are true.
You might wonder, given all I have just said, why on earth I would want my career to focus on listening to people talk, when the process of communicating with others clearly makes me tired and uncomfortable. But really, what better place for me than a room with another person where I am parsing their words and helping them learn to communicate better? And what better place to direct this analytic energy than on something that exists outside of my own head?
Maybe one time, once every few years (maybe more frequently now thanks to intense introspection and therapy) someone will say something nice and I will fully realize what they’re saying and the weight of whatever the words are, like “you did a really great job on that project” will sink in and for a glorious few minutes (or maybe few days, if I’m lucky) I will get a rush of love and confidence that makes me feel like I could build a house in an hour. It never lasts, but the more often it happens the more often I am able to remember that it is possible. Today, much more so than yesterday or a year ago, I am willing to believe it’s possible that my now former colleague believes I’ll be a good social worker. Maybe tomorrow I’ll be even closer.
weary traveler 