When I was about 20, I was at my best friend Duckers’ house smoking weed. Smoking tends to dry my eyes out so if I’m wearing contacts I almost always have to switch to glasses at some point. I for some reason felt the need to say out loud “I’m going to have to take my contacts out at some point.” He mumbled some sort of acknowledgement and we went back to (probably) watching South Park. Somehow, and I truly and deeply wish I could remember how, we discovered that he had thought I’d said “You’re going to have to take my contacts out at some point.” This would become one of the most important moments of my entire life.
The fact that he thought I said that and gave no reaction to it made me so utterly upset. Immediately. Viscerally.
The amazing thing is that we both knew instinctively that even though we didn’t yet know why, we both felt deeply that it was a very valid thing to be upset about. So rather than arguing, we launched a two person investigation into the intricacies of this interaction. After discussing for awhile, we were able to break it down into three feelings:
- Why the fuck, after 8 years of knowing me and knowing me well, would you think that I would say “YOU’RE going to have to take out MY contacts.”
- Why the fuck upon registering in your brain that I had said something so utterly absurd did you not say something about how weird it was?
- Oh my god, do you NOT think that that’s an insane thing to say?
In that moment, I suddenly felt like if he thought that that is something I would say so casually that he must not know me as well as I thought he did. Also, I would hope that we are close enough that if we think the other person has said something insane, that we wouldn’t just brush it off and move on. I would hope that we would say “I’m sorry, I hope I’m mistaken here but if you said what I think you said you’re fucking insane and as your close and personal friend I’d like to discuss it.” Lastly, I REALLY hope this doesn’t mean that you don’t find that as insane a statement as I do. Much of our connection is based off of finding the same shit crazy or weird and being able to dissect it and make fun of it. If you don’t think an out of nowhere request for you to remove a contact lens from my eyeball with your hands just ’cause is unsettlingly strange, you must not be the person I thought you were and our connection is a lie.
We didn’t know the depths of this at the time but we were essentially picking apart the main components of true intimacy: understanding, honesty, and respect.
Let’s pick apart honesty first because it feels like the least triggering for me. Honesty and realness is one of the most important things to me in any meaningful relationship. If I have to bullshit with you or I talk about you behind your back about something I haven’t said to you (or plan to say to you), you are not someone I consider a friend. It is still a struggle for me to understand that other people do not handle their friendships with the same philosophy, but it has gotten easier over time. It is weird to have to learn to not hold others to the same standards to which you hold yourself. If I thought that it meant people hated me every time I learned of them having discussed me behind my back, I would have like 2 friends. I know that their actions mean different things for them than they would for me. I don’t fucking know WHY no one else seems to give a shit about honesty as much as I do, but that’s for another time.
My relationship with honesty has evolved over time, though. It used to be a lot more of a burden. In relationships I used to feel that if I wasn’t telling them every single negative or worried thought I had about our relationship that I was being dishonest and our relationship wasn’t real. Thankfully I’ve moved past that, but I still have to fight the urges to puke up my emotions and offer premium access to the Arielle Stream of Consciousness channel. Additionally, I have finally gotten to the point where I don’t feel like I can’t have a real connection with someone if I don’t tell them they have a lot of blackheads that I’d like to fix (I’m serious. I honestly have the thought “well if I don’t tell them, are we really friends?”).
That said, I still maintain that if I say something that seems off or offensive or whatever, any true friend should say something about it. I only brush people off or let them say stupid shit if they’re someone who doesn’t mean that much to me (excluding of course grandparents and things like that. I love them dearly but they are old and insane). I’m trying to find the best way to describe this, because it has such a strong and specific feel to it but I haven’t found words that feel satisfying or adequate enough yet. I’m in a hotel room right now and the setup actually might work. Let’s try. So in the middle of this multi-level hotel is basically a covered atrium. It’s like a tall donut if donuts were square. Or like one of those stupid popsicle stick towers we were always making as kids for no one in particular. All the rooms are along each 4 sides of the carved out center, so on one side of my room is a window to the outdoors and on the other side is a window to the rest of the hotel. I can see what everyone else is doing but I’m not actually with them. The way I feel about friendship and realness is like this hotel: anyone I consider a friend is in my room with me. They’re going to hear everything I’m thinking out loud, they’re going to see me naked, and they will smell my poop. And we’re all stuck in here together being equally as naked and talky and poopy. We see the people outside and we might open the door to say shit to them, but they’re not inside with us. We are judging them through the window and talking about their stupid hair or their weird shoes or why they feel the need to use the word “actually” at the beginning of most sentences. Everyone inside already knows it’s weird to do those things, or they’re being lovingly made fun of for it because we can’t keep secrets in here and there aren’t enough corners to run to where we can gossip without being overheard. And it’s not that people on the outside of the room are always on the outside. Sometimes I talk about someone’s hair who’s on the outside of the room but then my friend on the inside talks to them through the open door enough times that I HAVE to bring them inside because with my room you can either be out or in; you can’t stand in the doorway. It’s also possible for me to kick someone out of the room for being a real dick. I do have some boundaries. But, obviously, not many since I just described friendship as pooping in front of a room full of people.
Respect is really rather similar to honesty for me in that I feel if you respect someone you should be honest with them and that honesty is a sign of respect and care. Aside from like the normal baseline level of human respect, I have no reason to respect the woman across the atrium who’s wearing socks and sandals so I don’t really care about whether I’m real with her so if when we’re in the elevator together and she asks me where I’m from and I say Washington and she thinks I mean Washington State I maybe won’t correct her. If a friend of mine made such a mistake, I would feel an obligation out of respect for them to make sure we’re on the same page. A possible character flaw of mine is also that I have trouble respecting people who feel wildly differently than I do about particular things. If you find enjoyment in pop music and don’t listen to anything else, I probably don’t respect you to the fullest extent I’d like to to feel comfortable calling you a friend (there are a few exceptions but these people have won my respect in other ways, not that my respect is something to strive for or anything but if we’re being real I obviously think it is). Lately I have been working on finding it INTERESTING rather than THREATENING when I have a different experience with something than someone else does. It’s still a work in progress. Like I’m at the stage where I still feel irritation bubbling up and I basically yell “HOW INTERESTING TELL ME MORE” at them. But the people who are in the closest circle of my friends (let’s say, on the toilet with me while I’m pooping) tend to feel the same way that I do about a lot of things. I’m not saying this is a good thing. But it is a thing.
Additionally, it, like, really pisses me off when someone mishears something and rather than figuring it out with contextual clues they decide to willingly be an idiot about it despite the fact that the rest of us are trying insanely hard to properly understand people all the time. And they always think it’s hilarious. You know the people I mean. The ones where when you say “How far is it to the restaurant?” and you have to repeat yourself they say “Oh my god I thought you said ‘Plow Mars innit? I’m feeling gaunt.’ And I was like, ‘HAHAHA WHAT?!'” Shut the fuck up, Susan. Respect the rest of us enough to use your goddamn brain for two extra seconds and figure out since we’re on the way to a restaurant that’s PROBABLY WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT.
Now for understanding. This one is going to be rough.
I have a deep, pervasive need to feel understood. I think we all do, although I’m not sure exactly how it manifests in anyone else so I’m just going to talk about what it’s like for me.
When I was a kid, words were constantly flying out of my mouth without permission and getting me in trouble before I even knew what had happened. I was either saying something rude and inappropriate that had somehow passed through the extremely weak, pre-9/11 TSA that is my mouth or the thing that I did mean to say somehow transformed into something completely different while it was being manufactured by my tongue and teeth. My cries of “But that’s not what I meant!” were always met with “You should think before you speak,” as if I had any control over the matter. The biggest emotion I feel when I look back is feeling deeply misunderstood.
I carry an immense fear of not being able to express myself because something in me wants to avoid ever feeling like I did back then ever again. To this day, my most frequent nightmare involves me being in some form of Locked In Syndrome where I can hear people and see them and I want to respond to them but I just can’t get the words out of my mouth.
When I’m talking, I try so hard to avoid expressing my thoughts incorrectly that I’ll often take such long pauses between words that people think I’m done talking and say “What?” Like I’ll be trying to express how I feel when I wake up and my immediate thought is that it feels like I’ve been hit by a truck but then I think like wait but I’ve never actually been hit by a truck so maybe that’s not how I feel and maybe the person I’m talking to’s sister just actually got hit by a truck and anyways maybe I shouldn’t complain about such a privileged thing at all it’s not like I’m sleeping on a sidewalk but I still want to explain why I’m grouchy right now. But all that’s come out of my mouth is “Sometimes when I wake up, I feel like…” followed by me staring off into the distance. So, no, of course it doesn’t make sense. I was in the middle of a sentence. You have half of a thought. But that’s my fault, not yours.
I somehow got it into my head that if someone doesn’t understand me perfectly on the first try, they’ll never know who I am as a person. Like if they only hear me say “When I wake up it feels like I got hit by a truck” they won’t also know that I understand it’s not a horrible problem to have and that I understand other people have it worse and also that I don’t even know what it’s like to be hit by a car and that it’s important to me to be fair but also that I definitely am a bitch in the morning and am kind of okay with that. And if I can’t fit all of that into one, neat sentence, clearly I’m a failure.
Not only do I think I need to perfectly convey the entirety of my being in one thought in order to express myself honestly, I for some reason feel like if someone thinks I’ve said something that I think doesn’t align with who I am, that that must mean they know nothing about me. And that they’ve never known anything about me. And that no one really knows anything about me. And that no one will ever know anything about me. And that I’m 10 again and in the play Bye Bye Birdie and we’re doing the scene where his groupies sing and I’m one of the groupies and we’re singing “Oh Conrad we love you” except out of my mouth comes “Oh Conrad we hate you” in front of everyone’s parents and now everyone thinks I’m a troublemaker when really I probably just had the song that the non fan group sings in the next scene stuck in my head because I heard them do it, oh I don’t know, 100 fucking times during rehearsals.
So it’s crazy that this extremely simple to explain issue doesn’t already have a word for it, we feel.
We usually just call it “that issue” or “the contact issue.” If I were a better writer I’d have built up to that beautifully and talked about how it really is The Contact Issue because it has to do with HUMAN CONTACT!!! But I’m not cool enough to hide the fact that I was extremely excited by the convenient coincidence and it felt dishonest to pretend otherwise.
After going through all of this with you, though, I think it should actually be called something else. Because while it is a term that describes a certain (EXTREMELY SPECIFIC) misunderstanding, it’s really more about how the issue makes us feel than anything else.
It is my dream to find someone who knows exactly what I’m saying all the time on every single level and knows what I would or would not say. But I don’t even fucking know myself that well. I’m not going to stop being bothered by this and I’m going to still call it The Contact Problem because I love explaining it to people and seeing whose faces light up because they have felt it, too and we can all be in a nice cozy hotel room together. But I actually think it’s more of a Contact Fallacy. The fact that Duckers thought I had asked him to remove my contacts from my eyes probably had nothing to do with how well he knows me and everything to do with the fact that we were high and mostly paying attention to South Park. The idea that the misunderstanding means “I am not understood” is a fallacy. It’s not true. I am really hating every second of writing this paragraph because I want it so badly to be that I’m misunderstood and Duckers and I are special. But I’m trying to be a better person or something ugh.
I mean don’t get me wrong, we are special and I’m difficult to understand. But I want the point of The Contact Fallacy to be to remember to laugh at misunderstandings rather than to have an existential crisis over them. And I’m going to try to remember to prop the hotel door open on that safety latch thing. Except Susan can’t come in. Susan’s an idiot.
Midnight Oatmeal 