Saying what we mean

Has anyone ever told you to just say what you mean? Sometimes that’s good advice, but often times people take that advice overboard. When I was a little kid, I announced to my teenaged cousin that her hair smelled like vomit. I was going through an ultra truthful phase. So even though I probably embarrassed her in front of our whole family, I thought that I was providing an important service.

When I was a kid, the grownups around me always seemed really excited to talk about the stuff that displeased them. So I thought that I would become involved in that process, and relay displeasing information. Since that’s how people talked, I tried helpfully providing them with more subject material. I thought I was being grown-up. Instead, I just got into trouble for blurting out shitty things.

Somehow during the process of growing up, we learn not to just open up our mouths and devastate one another with the truth as we see it. We learn over time that too much honesty can lead to hurt feelings and heartache and arguments. So we begin fibbing and lying to one another. Society teaches us not to speak the truth, because it might just be rude, inappropriate or hurt someone’s feelings.

And we don’t usually like confronting one another about shit, so we all kind of agree to fall silent about the things in our lives that we notice. But it’s surprising how far that little piece of programming can seep into our psyches. By the time we’re adults, we are woefully bad at just saying what we mean. In fact, we end up not even knowing how we feel, because we’re not used to being honest with ourselves.

This can really mess up our lives if we let it. It also makes it very hard to write. Have you ever tried to write something and found that you couldn’t even get to the point? I do this all the time. I can spend a whole page dancing around a subject that I want to scream out to the world. Why is it that when we sit down to write something, we suddenly get so goddamned vague? Why can’t we just come out and say what we mean?

Maybe it’s because we have socialized the truths out of ourselves. But the good news is that we can still go searching for our own personal truths and find them again. One trick I use to accomplish this is to ask myself two questions every time I sit down to write.

They are: What am I really trying to say? and Why should anyone else give a shit? This prevents me from taking the easy way out and writing a bunch of corporate robo-speak that ultimately means nothing except that someone was paid to write it.

We all look for ourselves in a piece of writing. That’s because we are each individuals. That means we are all the stars of our own show. However, we’re still connected. So when someone’s reaching out from the world to come read our writing, then I think it’s our duty as writers to reach back out to that person and acknowledge them. One of the best ways to do this is by keeping it real.

Maybe it would help for us to think back to our childhoods. When we were young, we knew instinctively how to assert who we were and interact with others. Back then, we pretty much did nothing else but go around announcing our needs to the world. But it was so effective! So maybe it’s okay for us to be a little self-focused, especially when we’re writing and speaking to others. That way, we will truly know where we’re coming from.