People Who Dialogue In Between The Lines

Yeah, you know who I'm talking about. Those people that can't say a straight line and mean exactly what they say. The ones who claim to say things at "face value" but communicate cryptically or put their terms in broad, analogical, sometimes poetic terms to hide that they can't actually articulate (admit) what they're really feeling. The ones who also undercut spoken dialogue with an entire undercurrent of loaded phrases or words, leaving some half-intelligent person to wonder if there was a subterranean attack launched or if their words meant nothing.

I am one of them.

Yeah, that's me. I have said or have written things that I know will hurt people in vague ways so that I don't have to take responsibility for the outcome of their effects.

Face value.

Why am I admitting this? Well I got on here to write something else, a quote actually, nothing original, found a friend's pragmatic entry on a site, and found it absurd that I could feel contempt for his efforts when I was nowhere, and I mean nowhere, in a place to be looking down on him. It made me remember that "coming clean" about truths that are actually easier than they seem is not that big a deal. Well, in terms of relative sanity anyway. (This would be an entirely different ball game if I had been, say, and ex-con.) It's always harder to be the one working so hard to keep certain truths at bay than it is to be the one judging them, and so if coming here and in doing all that I did by coming here last summer was for anything, it was for ripping through the barriers and screens of my own secret truths and freaking exercising new muscles of genuineness and authenticity.

And also, I'm just getting tired of it. Tired of the cycle of trying to be better than somebody else (the proverbial anybody else.) It's just old. Old news, old like a 1920 newspaper, and twice as mind-numbingly irrelevant. I'm sick of it. I'm sick of hearing my voice on it. I'm tired of hearing the same words come out of the same vocal pipes, and I hate how I sound. I hate how I seem to be so damned insecure that I have to find some vastly-wide sweeping words to zero in on a point that doesn't even work. I'm tired of putting on a facade that I think will somehow make me better. I mean, really. Double-U. Tee. Eff.

With this increasingly inescapable theme of pointing fingers and blame ("for every finger pointing at you, there are three pointing back"; "take the plank of wood out of your own eye before helping someone else with the sliver in their eye"), it has become an irreplaceable, incredible, life-changing tool that, although once a childhood anecdote (or so the repetitiveness of those sayings would seem), is now re-encrusting itself into a sheer, undeniable and fundamental truth in the core of me. I've blamed just about everything and everyone I could get my proverbial hands on, and quite frankly, it doesn't work. I've known for some time that I've had a problem communicating as well as I could have, even in spite of trying to be the "fantastic-est communicator ever," and it boils down to lack of ability to truly articulate my thoughts and feelings. It has always been easier to give a picture of what I'm thinking instead of trying to sit down, think about it, and put them into nouns and verbs that express my feelings and don't actually implicate someone because I'm trying so desperately hard for the situation to NOT be my fault. I actually relied on this tactic too much, and that's the problem. I mean, it's part of my personality, but when it comes to balancing the two sides (there it is again!), the sweeping fru-fru of descriptive language far out-weighed the boring (or agonizing) truth.

And it doesn't even matter how genuine I am, I know I still f*** up and will most likely be f***ing up for a while. I'm trying not to think about that. I'm just trying to think of how to be more articulate, and that requires being honest with myself and being accountable.

That being said, I've been on the other end of loaded words. I think it's seeing this that has, in part, made me realize that I'd much rather struggle to define and articulate my thoughts than hand over one more loaded, double-edged slice of poetry. (The other part is seeing how much pain I've caused by doing that.) I've been the half-intelligent person, too--the one I referred to at the beginning of this entry. I'm fairly intelligent, I'd like to believe, but I don't always catch the intended double meaning, but because I've been afraid to miss it (for fear of looking like a simpleton), I learned how to take almost everything with double meaning in certain situations, with certain dynamics. Screwed up, ain't it? Well, don't laugh too heartily just yet. It was a default program I set up to avoid looking like an idiot.

My poor, poor pride, eh?

My world might have been a little happier a place if I'd chosen not to give those loaded words double meaning. It certainly would have helped alleviate the nasty little habit I got into of giving words double meaning that didn't exist. I chose to write this nasty little confession because I had originally intended to explore this very same trait in another friend, but just could not. For one, me being snarky just doesn't help anything or anyone. For two, let he (or she!) who is sinless cast the first stone. I haven't gotten nearly the start on being genuine as I had hoped when I came here, when I chose to make my life something else, because I just felt so bad about all the pain, uproar, and damnation it caused that I couldn't see past the guilt. But there is a whole other world past my narrow, 2-dimensional point of view, and I'd rather be the person who gets railed at in my blog than to continue even one teeny, tiny little step back in the old direction. Because for every and any bit I could throw out, it is a bit that makes me a self-righteous hypocrite, and, well, we really don't want too many more of those kinds of entries now, do we?