Monday, October 12, 2009

Some Things Are Better Left Unsaid

Here is my greatest fear:
To feel good around people who actually don't welcome your company and wish you would go away. Their problem is that they can't tell you to go away because their problem with you is exactly that - you don't seem to understand yourself that your presence is undesired.
This situation, I think, is not wildly uncommon. Many of our social norms are based on unspoken communication and implied agreements. If you are talking to me and I am slow to respond, I am busy. It's not that I'm not interested to hear what you have to say - I'm just focusing on something else. If you keep talking to me, I might just tell you that I'm busy right now and will talk to you later. I will be slightly annoyed when I do this, even though I will probably apologize, since you should have known.
Very few people will stay in the room after a direct reproach and repeated requests for their departure from an otherwise ignoring person. Those who stay in the face of such severe reactions from the environment are indeed very lacking in social skills and would probably use some help from those who care about them and have had good experience interacting with human beings.
We all fail, now and then, in interpreting the unspoken gestures of our friends and neighbors. But the person who gets them systemically wrong is one that lies beyond the reach of our rebuke. If you ask them, at any particular point, to leave or stop doing something you've been insinuating is annoying - they will simply stop, in deference to your request. Your frustration, surely to surface after keeping quite for so long, will only perplex them: if that was bothering you, why didn't you say so? A way to deal with such a person is to constantly tell them what is usually left unsaid, for good reasons. That is not only extremely tiring but could also drive a relatively stable human being fabulously mad. The usual way to cope with such behaviour is to grind one's teeth and pray to whatever god that happens to be available that the awkward person just go away.
The two-sided predicament is not something strange to me. Many times I have been on one side of it. Was I ever on the other side? I don't know, I'm afraid.
And when I say that I'm afraid, what I mean is that I'm completely horrified by the thought.

1 comment:

  1. I am sure you weren't on the other side. Don't worry. Excellent post!

    ReplyDelete