Saying the Right Thing

<p style=”clear: both”>So there is the experience of telling someone one of your deepest darkest secrets and having them say “Oh! It’s not just me?” Not once, but twice this has happened to me this week, and it shouldn’t have surprised me. But I am beginning to think that every thinking person I know walks around at least some of the time thinking that there is something secretly deep down unfixably wrong with them. And all the recollection of suffering I can summon and stay sane seems to have this kernel of “something is unfixably wrong with me” and that all of the desolation and ache is an inevitable result of that wrongness.

There have been several moments this week when I have had to summon all of the listening and compassion skills I have to just be present with someone I love who is suffering, and I have had to confront my own failure to find the consoling right thing to say. The willingness to be there unable to find the right thing to say, to shut up and be there anyway may be worth something in and of itself, or it may be a day late and a dollar short. On the other hand, what choice does one have?

I know that I do think better in writing than in conversation and especially with time to revise and sleep on it and re-write. So I jot down what it is I wish I could have said, the composite of the conversations I’ve had with all the friends I have going through the really difficult shit right now.

I don’t know if this is even slightly true for you. I don’t know that I am not being self-indulgent with the projection etc., but, oh, you have loved me enough to go out on limbs and say things that I might not want to hear, so I try to get over my fear of saying the wrong thing. If I could wave a wand and give you faith in anything, it would be that there simply isn’t anything wrong with you. It’s probably oversimplifying to imagine that just that one piece of knowledge would render all of the suffering tolerable, and yet your enough-ness could flow over all the cracks and crevices in your universe right now, and nothing could touch you. You would know that you have been okay, and that you will be okay, that as unfair as the suffering is, it isn’t permanent and that love will find its way to you. That you feel alone but you aren’t alone. When I tell you I love you, I am asking you to accept on faith that I know you this much, that I know you enough to have accepted you as you are and that when I tell you there is nothing really wrong with you I say this as an informed if not impartial party. I don’t say it to just anyone, after all. If the most devastating part of the human condition is our overwhelming separateness, then I have to at least claim the privilege of this platform of standing outside of you to tell you the loveliness I perceive in you you may not be able to see in yourself. It may have been a rhetorical question on your part, or a mere wailing to the universe, when you ask what is the point, but right now, this is precisely the point: this is how things are and why they are, that we have words that we can hold out to one another and that I know you would do this for me if things were reversed, that you have already saved me more than once.