Here is a short and sweet post for you.
Letting in you in on a little piece of my stressed out mind.
I love words. I love reading and writing, and listening to a really elegant speech. I just love how words can make an image and invoke a feeling and create a world. I love words to an incredible degree.
They also cause me some of the most anxiety ridden moments of my life.
I can be talking away with a friend, coworker, church friend. I will be blabbing on, so pleased I am finally making a connection with another person - because socializing is hard and scary - when they stop me mid sentence asking "What does that word mean?"
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad they ask. I'm glad they don't just smile and nod and have no idea what I am talking about, which means all of my efforts trying to make a personal connection are lost.
But this question is the bane of my social life.
Usually it is because I was not trying to talk at a 'high level'. I do know a lot of words. That comes from reading thousands upon thousands of books over the years. I know lots of strange, big, unusual, or just out of their time words. But I try really really hard NOT to use those weird ones in public when talking to others. I was not trying to speak over their head. I'm not trying to make anyone think I am smarter than I am.
When people ask this I feel like I have been doing really well communicating in what could be considered a second language to me. The language of to-other-people. I am in my own head a lot, and then maybe on paper, that communicating to another is difficult and stressful and, I feel, full of all sorts of unexplained rules that I don't understand or get the context for. So I have been doing so well, speaking this language. And suddenly I am thinking that I have messed it all up. That I slipped in a word that isn't part of their paradigm.
I struggle at this point. Hesitate and looked pained. I know this because people tell me. I am not pulling a face. I am internally panicking and trying desperately to translate a word.
Going from a 'big' word to a 'little' or 'normal' word is not dumbing it down. People need to stop thinking that, because it doesn't do justice to anyone. It is translating the word.
So I stand there, frozen in fear trying to translate a word that I thought WAS in their language. And often I can't come up with the translation, because the word just IS.
While I am trying to translate I am also stressing. Because that is what I do.
I am thinking that I have come off like a total snob. That I look like I was using a big word to make them feel less, which is certainly not the case. That I was talking like I am intelligent, when we all know that is not something I self profess. I am so worried that I have been sounding like a pretentious know-it-all when I was just trying to express a passing thought. This makes translating that word hard. Because I am sorting through where I know the word from and how it is usually used in context to see if that is why the word seems foreign. My brain demands to know if I used that word correctly, and if in my blathering I just misused a word and it is all my fault. I try to remember what decade that word is from. Often I am a generation out. Or more - as I have a serious love for Victorian, Edwardian, and Elizabethan time period writing.
This is all happening in my mind as I struggle to also come up with a more common, but just as poignant, of a word. Something that will convey the exact same message, but that the person I am talking with has most likely heard before. This is usually the most difficult part. So I usually just give a brief definition and worry that I sound like a dictionary recording.
I don't write this to get people to stop asking me what words mean. I want clarity, and if you don't know what in the world I just said, I need you to tell me so I can be aware of what I am doing, and also to explain myself so if I blunder again you will have some sort of idea what I just said. And I prefer people to be honest with me.
I am relating this part of my anxiety to reason away the stupid look on my face when I do this panic translation. I am aware some people misconstrue this expression to be distaste, dislike, annoyance, or like I think they are the most annoying scum of the earth I just found on the bottom of my shoe. I apologize, I have natural stank-face. When I am not paying attention to my expression it often reverts to a look of disgust and hatred. I don't know why.
It drove my mother crazy as I was growing up, as when she would say something that I had to think about she thought I was pulling a face at her when I was just computing the information. I thought hard, which made me look like I hated her and thought she was an idiot. Not a great face to revert to in front of my mother. Don't do that.
So if you ask that question, "What does that mean?", and I suddenly look like a woman that can't stand you, I'm sorry. I don't mean it. I am going through mental files and concentration makes me look like a jerk.
Please keep asking what words mean. I love words and want to share them all with you. Please don't pretend you understand what I'm saying if you don't. We both deserve better than that.
Just know that my social anxiety often looks like I hate you. Oops.
I hope that clears something up for a few of you, and gives most of you a laugh. If it does not now, just imagine every time I pull that face that there is actually the sounds of stressed-out-whale in sound rehearsal that I am internalizing being vocalized. It will most likely make the situation more bearable for both of us.
Smile Always.
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