words do not really matter

because meaning is often felt, not said

Hanging out with animals for a while as someone who prefers writing gives you a sense that there is language beyond your comprehension.

This was already substantiated by lots of interactions I’ve had to dissect in the last year. But take a cute cat who is meowing at me and will certainly not understand me if I ask her what she wants without moving my body in any discernible direction, and my autistic fixation on rhetorical precision, and you have me scrambling to make meaning out of my five senses in a humbling way.

“Marnie, I can’t figure out what you want,” I said helplessly to the little sweetie I was catsitting, who kept waking me up at 6am to express her displeasure at something. Was her litter box bothering her? Was she hungry even though I’d already given her a can of wet food? Was she just bored? As I scrambled to figure it out, I found myself reflexively falling back on asking her she wanted. She’s a cat! Why the hell would she be able to directly tell me?

My reliance on words at face value was failing me. This would not be the first, nor last time, even that week, I had to accept this. Boy has it been a journey. But a good one.

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I got super sick of no one paying attention to me as a kid. If I got hurt, was scared, felt sad, no one had time to analyze what I really meant. No one was paying attention to me. I learned to disassociate into books, into memorizing what each and every word on the page in context meant, and learning how to use these words to convey what I meant. It became fun, like a party trick or puzzle to gamify what was going on inside me and use words to figure it out, trying them on like different outfits. Eventually I developed a sense of style, a way of communicating with the outside world. When people didn’t like what I had to say, at least now they knew exactly what I was saying. If they weren’t going to guess what I was thinking, I had to figure out how to get it across without them doing the work. Then all they’d have to do is react to it.

Soon, I learned to string together words to figure out what other people were feeling and thinking and putting it into words for them. As time went on, this became less and less effortful and more and more fun. I didn’t need to be closest to the people who were also good at words; I wanted to be around the people who appreciated my gift, and found it exciting to be around a verbose, chatty person with a lot of ideas to convey.

The hard part was those who did not comply. The hard, anxiety-inducing aspect was trusting what I got really good at picking up, especially if people used their words to forcefully tell me no. The problem is they were often lying! To me, or to themselves.

This proved to be a terrifying junction, because now words weren’t just ways to create understanding. When I figured out that words are often a distraction from what someone is trying to convey, but may be limited in comprehension to, that’s when I hit a vital, necessary block in my worldview.

Could I learn to accept that there were languages and ways of communicating that were nonverbal? Could I let go of my crutch for a while and learn to float, use my body and my eyes and my heart to understand the words of someone’s heart that transcended actual language?

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What’s funny is, through this all, I noticed that I’d never had a crush on or feelings for or even a fling with another writer. As I got older, I noticed I’d never really been impressed with the way people wrote, or what they got across. I was always impatient to cut to the chase, to hear how people were thinking, to really explore what was going on inside others. I didn’t need someone to be similarly good with words for me to admire them. Instead, if I could hear the essence of their character ringing through them, that was what I’d respond to. Words became my accomplice for teasing this out. But they aren’t the meat or even the main course, only the serving plate.

I don’t get full off a lot of words. I get full off of how they are lubricant for the sustenance I need — which is really, someone’s substantiated character.

Soon, I noticed that I could actually hear better if less words were being used. Words, especially ones on platforms like X/Twitter, have become a distraction in the digital age, where people spend hours pouring over the perfect caption that will convey what they want, or spin their wheels about a concept that isn’t capturing exactly what they really feel or see. Now it came down to me seeing the negative inverse image of what the words were hiding at times. Silence started coming through to me — as Freud says, what someone doesn’t say is more revealing than what they do say. This is certainly true of me.

As a little experiment, I’ve decided I’m going to actively start writing about the “boring” parts of me, the things I don’t think to talk about, and bring those to light, hoping they reveal something I couldn’t have even if I wanted to.

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I have the luxury of knowing so many words, having practiced writing and speaking so many times in my life, that I always feel like I have an accurate pulse on being able to say what I need to say to feel satisfied, somewhat. I don’t leave much of my inner world unsaid unless it’s an unconscious mechanism. I try to exude as much of myself out there, so it protrudes in an unignorable way. I poke into others’ consciousness because I am so afraid I don’t occupy any space in them otherwise. I don’t even know how much I do by default.

But what I seek is someone that can communicate with me without needing words. Someone who uses his eyes to see into me, someone whose warm touch on my shoulder can stop me in my tracks, someone who picks words so carefully and, even if he fails at getting his point across, still touches my heart in the abstract realm while I react to the literal. I have so many conversations with people on a daily basis that don’t linger in my head, but who someone is can make an impression on me even if they’re not as verbose.

Walking around Manhattan, sitting together quietly, observing a landscape in a park or watching the snow fall around or feeling the hot stickiness of summer melt our backs together as we sit on the grass — all these moments come back to me, as so often it is the memories that speak to me even if you didn’t say exactly what you wanted to. It’s probably best if you don’t, because I need to learn to listen without relying on the mode I’m always in.

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But Crystal, if I’m bad with words, how do I become better?

Honestly, it comes down to reading a lot more. It comes down to reading, and practicing talking back and writing back to those voices. Those don’t need to come to light, but the practice of expression, even done under cover of darkness, can help you with listening. Not to others, for you’re probably better at that than you need to be, but to yourself. Listening and learning the language of your own thoughts, and materializing it in a concrete way, will help you in the call and response period when you need to get it across to others.

You don’t need to impress with perfect grammar, you don’t need to demonstrate you paid attention, you need to figure out what you want to say that is representative of who you are in absolution. Words convey authenticity of the self, not just who you are in relation to the person you are speaking to.

That’s really what matters the most. Speaking in dialogue with that person who is you, emboldens you to be that verbose person with others.

Or if you want to take a shortcut, you could practice with ChatGPT lol

That could def help me talk to Marnie next time…