I finally dug out my laptop from when I made my last trip to the wasteland. I didn’t have any internet access there, so I didn’t post any blog entries. But I did have a text file of ideas and this is one.
So, this trip. It’s made me a little more sensitive to language in a couple of ways. The first way is what I perceive as the overuse of the phrase, “I’m sorry.”
When I have to tell someone why I’m visiting, I have a choice of what to say, but no matter where I start, questions will always reveal the root cause. Like, “I’m up visiting my mom. Oh, she’s doing ok. No, she’s in a nursing home home. Yeah, she had a stroke.” And at some point, “I’m sorry” will come out. And that irks me, only because I view that phrase as an apology, not as sympathy. And people may not understand that I wouldn’t say that phrase in sympathy, either. I would say something like “That’s too bad.” Because I’m not sorry. I didn’t have any involvement in the process.
Similarly, but not, my GF and I are apart for this trip. And because of the GF’s unreal schedule with work and school, we don’t see each other very often anyway. And we had to work out a difference the other night in regard to expressing how we felt about this. She would tell me, “I miss you” and I wouldn’t really return the sentiment. Most times, I would say something more positive, like “we’ll see each other soon.” So the returned sentiment was that I didn’t miss her. It’s only been recently that I’ve understood this behavior.
I didn’t get why this was a big deal because in my head, I never focused on the lack of the present, I focused on the happiness of the future. I never missed her, because I was always happy that we would see each other soon. It’s a pretty different viewpoint. But the issue was, I was not communicating that clearly enough. By being reassuring and saying, “we’ll get to see each other this Friday”, I was not really saying I cared. It was only addressing her problems. A more relative and truer way to express the same thing would be to say, “I can’t wait until I see you Friday.” That statement makes clear a couple of things: I am not sad about the present; I am excited about the future, and she is the object of my excitement.
Language is a tricky thing. You have to say what you mean and sometimes you have to say more than what you mean.
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