2:50pm November 10, 2011

Envy of other people’s communication skills

I don’t know why this memory keeps poking its way into consciousness.

There was a time when watching other people communicate in certain ways put me into a jealous rage. I am not proud of that reaction, and I’m certain that that reaction didn’t show in ways that most people could see. But it was there nonetheless.

As far as I can remember, it happened after I realized that the way I communicated wasn’t the way other people did. I had no handle on how my communication was different. I just knew that it was. I’d developed the art of the surface appearance of semi-normal communication. I could put together strings of words in response to situations and in response to other people’s strings of words. I recombined them from a vast store of word patterns I got from reading books and from listening to other people talk.

I didn’t do this because I chose to. I did this because I grew up with enormous delays in language comprehension, and yet I could tell that responses were expected of me. I learned to mimic without comprehension. As I grew older, my mimicry grew more and more complex, and both genuine understanding of some words and genuine communication began to seep in through the cracks. But it was as if my communication had a very low signal to noise ratio. And I not only had no means of boosting the signal or diminishing the noise – I didn’t even have the awareness that this was what the problem was. Plus I had a lifetime of forming pathways in my brain to work the way my pseudo-communication worked, and this meant that even if I had figured out what was wrong, I may not have been able to bypass the way my brain was used to communicating.

So with that background aside, back to the time period after I figured out something was very different about my communication, but before I knew fully what that something was.

I was truly locked into this mode of communication. I had little control over it. My entire mind was too given over to solving words like a puzzle, to think about control. And this meant my communication was constrained to certain patterns and not others.

Some other people did notice this, but the worst was when bullies did. I remember one instance that went basically like:

Her: Do you Thing X or Thing Y?
Me: Thing Y.
Her: That means… etc.
Me: Do you Thing X or Thing Y?
Her (with insufferable smugness, like the tone of a bratty child bragging): I do Thing Z.

I didn’t say Thing Y because it was true, I said it because I had to. She knew I had to. I didn’t ask the question because I wanted to know, I asked the question because that was how I handled conversation. And she was prepared with an answer, to show me that she was better than me, that she wasn’t constrained in the ways I was.

That was an intentional example of setting me up and lording it over me. Most times I got enraged by things, it wasn’t intentional on anyone’s part at all, so there was really no good reason to be mad at them. But I was anyway. I heard a lot of people saying things that I would never be able to say. Sometimes, after hearing them, I was able to incorporate them into my repertoire, but not as communication, just as repetition. And the more I learned, it seemed like the more I still fell short of the real thing.

This isn’t over, either. Even though I know how to communicate, now, as in say actual things from my head and put them into words as much as anything can be put into words. Even though my writing has made national or international news on several occasions – because it’s saying something I meant to say, not because I’m repeating something I heard. I still can’t fully break away from the strategies that I grew up on. I can more or less bend them to my will, but I can’t escape them. And still, when I see others able to escape them so readily, I have trouble not being pissed off.

It reminds me of a poem Donna Williams wrote once, about climbing a mountain that was so steep and rugged that it scarred her body all over the place. And then seeing someone on a higher mountain, and only seeing that all that she could not have. (The mountains in question symbolized her learning the literal meaning of words, and seeing someone else use them in ways that had personal significance. I can very much identify with that, as she, like me, grew up with serious receptive language issues that shaped her entire relationship to communication.)

And yet, I don’t want to feel this way. It’s very strange to me compared to my other reactions. Normally when I see people doing something I can’t do, I’m happy for them. Like just genuinely, “wow that’s so cool you can do that,” happy. I’m not generally a jealous person. I don’t understand why I can still feel so internally wounded by someone else’s communication abilities. It isn’t right – I don’t want them to not have those abilities. They’ve done nothing wrong (unless they’re like that one bully, but these days I just avoid bullies – now that I know it’s possible to walk away, but that’s a whole nother topic). They don’t deserve my being envious of them. But, sometimes, when it catches me off-guard, I still am.

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