During one of Mister Rogers’ interviews with Charlie Rose, he expressed concern over how noisy the world had become, saying, “I’m very concerned that our society is much more interested in information than wonder. In noise rather than silence.” That struck a chord with me. Generally, I prefer calm, quiet, and slow to rambunctious, loud, and fast. This is even more important to me when I have to make a big, important decision. In that case, I need to take it slow and let ideas come to me in quiet stillness. If not, I’ll forget important things and regret them later through rushing.
Unfortunately, what Mister Rogers said back in 1994 has only gotten worse since then. Every major decision I’ve regretted has been one I’ve made in a rush, yet the world seems to be moving faster every day and giving me less time to make important decisions. So much of modern life seems like a high-pressure sales situation or an interrogation: a fast, loud, confusing, intimidating, and scary situation meant to overwhelm the other person and make them do what those creating that situation want them to do. Whenever I can, I seek out calm, quiet, stillness, and peace as the antidote to such sensory overload. It’s sadly getting harder and harder to find any or all of those in regular life.
From what I’ve seen, my approach to conversations is vastly different than normal. I prefer to speak slowly in conversation, pause between the end of what someone says and the start of what I say (as well as between my own sentences), take time to formulate a response before speaking, and keep a relaxed pace throughout the whole exchange. I wish others would do the same, largely because that’s where I feel most comfortable, I need more time to understand what is being said and how someone feels about it, and the slower interactions I’ve had seem to have also been beneficial for the others involved, even if they generally operate faster in conversation. Instead, most humans I meet seem to race through everything they say, leave almost no pause between the end of my speech and the start of theirs, say the first thing that pops into their head (even when it’s cruel, irrelevant, or otherwise makes the interaction worse), and act anxiously the entire time. Unless I’m really in the zone, I tend to get dragged along with them into talking and interacting faster than is comfortable for me, which almost always makes me feel anxious and results in worse interactions. I hope to get better at talking and moving at my own pace regardless of what anyone else around me is doing.
I also have a great deal of trouble responding when someone asks me a question and then repeats the same question many times while I’m trying to think of an answer. When this happens, the person often immediately repeats the question less than a second after asking it. Sometimes they ask it a few times in a few different ways and then stop until I say something. Other times they ask it endlessly, only stopping if I finally interrupt. The endless repetition cases are the worst as they prevent me from having the inner stillness and silence that brings answers to mind. Some things make no sense to me until I get enough quiet space inside for what has been said to sort itself out. That can take anywhere from a few seconds to far, far longer, and it sometimes requires lots of clarification. By repeatedly asking the same question, and usually also pressuring me to answer right away, anyone who does this is actually preventing themselves from getting an answer from me.
This has created many issues for me across multiple areas of life. Outside of normal social interactions with others, being slow to understand made things hard at each of my past jobs. Whether it was taking a long time to learn the systems in place, having trouble understanding what someone was asking of me, carrying out a request outside of the norm, and more, all of those would have been much easier if I could have picked things up much faster. It’s also made misunderstandings much harder to clear up. So many folks, especially those I don’t know, are quick to make negative assumptions and speak about them in unclear ways. By the time I’ve understood that there is an issue and what that issue is, they’ve usually already cemented in their mind the negative assumption and started acting with hostility toward me.
All of this seems to have gotten harder after my head injury in November of 2021. It’s hard to tell for sure what lasting effects, if any, it has had. That was certainly a stressful situation at the time, although I was able to return to my normal life fairly quickly. The fact that it happened in the second of three highly stressful years in a row, not long before I left a job that had become more trouble than it was worth, and just under six months before my dog Sawyer’s death makes it tough to know how much of my current troubles are from the injury and how much are from the other issues. I suspect it’s a combination of all of those.
The most painful examples of this all involve Sawyer toward the end of his life. I strongly wish I had been given more time and space to talk about whether or not Sawyer was truly ready to die and the emotions I felt before the decision was made. Instead, I was rushed, guilted, pressured, and otherwise manipulated into going along with a decision that had already been made. My feelings, wants, and needs weren’t considered for a moment. As if that weren’t bad enough, in the rush of that decision and what followed, I assumed that when the vet talked about getting paw and nose prints from Sawyer, that at least the paw prints would be done with clay. To my dismay, they were only done in ink on cardstock. It didn’t occur to me until it was too late that clay prints might have required special arrangements at the vet or could have to have been done elsewhere entirely. While I love having the ink paw prints, I deeply regret not arranging to have clay paw prints made. To top it off, I wish I had been given more time with Sawyer’s body after he left it. Unfortunately, as I often do in extremely stressful situations, I followed the lead of others. This meant that Sawyer’s body was taken away only a few minutes after his death, and I didn’t think to ask what was happening next or to say I wanted more time with his body. When his body was taken away, I didn’t know that I wouldn’t get to see, pet, or visit with it again. If I had known that at the time, I would have made sure to get more than a few minutes, even if I were the only one in the room (which would have been my preference, actually). The unpleasant cherry on top was how Sawyer’s beds, towels, food/water bowls, and most of his other items were packed up and put away by nightfall that day. As if they, and, by extension, he, were never here in the first place. Nobody asked me if I was ok with that, if I’d like to have kept them out longer, or anything else about how I felt or what I wanted. I had to make a specific request to keep his pillow by the front window, and that only happened begrudgingly. The guilt, shame, anger, sadness, and regret around all of these have been incredibly heavy and hard to heal.
How I feel about any of this varies greatly from moment to moment. Sometimes I feel angry and depressed about how things are and seem to be going. Other times I feel calm and hopeful, especially when I see steps in the right direction anywhere in the world. Since I’ve worked through a ton of pain around Sawyer’s death over the last two years, it seems that older, deeper pains are now free to come up for healing. These are proving quite difficult to work through, given how many of them occurred during the first few years of my life and all of them before I became an adult. This “original pain,” as John Bradshaw described it in Homecoming, seems to be the most difficult to heal and to also bring the most freedom when finally put to rest. I hope that I can focus enough on those early emotional wounds to finally heal them and then be able to consistently stick to a slower speaking style and calmer conversational approach. The limited experiences I’ve had in emotional states with little to no fear, guilt, shame, or other negativity have been incredible, and I look forward to seeing how much better it gets when all the old pain is gone.