The excruciating sound of silence

Is this really okay with people? REALLY?

Dear Writer,

So the other night we went to a friend’s house for dinner and games. We’ve been doing that a lot over the past year, usually Thursdays, but we sort of all got busy and lost the habit. Brought Sarah with us, had great fun playing Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza—the order of which I remembered without even looking it up, #iykyk—and then at the end of the night, Sarah and I were hanging out with these two friends of Ian’s that have become my friends, too, in the course of the last year and Ian was in the bathroom and there was…. silence. Like, not too much silence, maybe 45 seconds or so between the last question I’d thought to ask this couple and Ian coming out of the bathroom so we could go and I felt so awkward, I thought I was gonna die.

The thing is, usually, keeping conversation going and asking questions of people is second nature. Easy peasy. I do it at every gathering whenever there’s a lull in conversation, and it’s often not an effort. But the combination of the brain drain that is drafting and the fact that I pumpkin at 9 every night and it was like 9:15 and that I knew these people well enough that I’d just run out of questions to ask all left me with nothing to say and there was… silence.

It was excruciating.

For me.

So on the drive home, I bring it up with Ian and The Kid, and I say, “Hey, sorry about that empty moment at the end there, I just ran out of stuff to say and there was that silence.”

And Ian was like, “When?”

“When you were in the bathroom. It was terrible. My mind just went blank.”

And Ian was like, “That’s fine. Who cares? Silence is okay.”

I couldn't have been more shocked if he had said, “Tuberculosis is okay,” so my immediate response was an impassioned, “NO IT IS NOT OKAY.”

Ian, in his turn, seemed a little shocked himself… although not too shocked because, you know, he’s met me. “Yeah, it is. It is okay to have silence in social situations.”

I couldn’t think of any response to that, so I just asked a question. “It really doesn’t bother you when there’s silence in a social thing?”

Ian and Sarah both immediately answered, in time, “No.”

And we spent the rest of the drive discussing it because it was like they’d both told me they were flat earthers. I could not understand how it was just okay for there to be silence in a social setting.

And then Ian said, “How many people were there in the foyer waiting while I peed?”

“Four, including me.”

“Right, and everyone was silent.”

“Yes, because I couldn’t think of anything to say.”

“Well… why is that your job to keep it going? Any one of them could have said something.”

Writer, I am telling you. I am almost 52 years old as of this writing and this literally never occurred to me. There are other people there. They could have spoken, too.

It’s not my job.

Mind. Blown.

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It’s been a while since I’ve been gainfully employed with health insurance that covers therapy, so it’s been a while since I’ve been to a therapist. Luckily, I’ve stocked up my therapeutic toolbox enough to keep me in maintenance mode, so mostly, I’m doing okay. There are things I would like to work through—I have a docket list of things that include “stop fixing things no one asked you to fix,” and “it is not your responsibility to be the social campfire in every group”—and I know enough to know that behind every behavior of mine that feels somehow off, there is a trauma source proudly nudging the other trauma sources next to it saying, Yeah, that one’s mine.

Like the other day, Ian just mentioned that he had been talking to his friends about how often I say, “I love you.” I say it all the time, to everyone I love. At the end of every conversation, when I leave their house after playing Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza, to every friend who I’ve become close enough with that I have developed love for them, I say, “I love you.” If you live with me, that’s multiple times a day.

If I leave a room you are in: I love you.

When I go out for a walk: I love you.

When you do something adorable: I love you.

I know there are people who horde their I love yous like precious jewels, keeping them deliberately scarce to up their value. I had a boyfriend once who said, “When I say ‘I love you,’ I want it to mean something.” And I was like, “That's some bullshit. I want everyone I love to know without a doubt that I love them.”

We broke up not long after that.

So while I still land on my side of that particular argument on the emotional economical forces of the I love you, I can see… now that it has been pointed out to me… that this shit is weird. I mean… I say this all the time. If I am separated from a beloved, even by doors in an apartment, and there is even a minuscule chance that I could choke on a hastily-eaten grape or something and die, I want the last words they hear from me to be, “I love you.”

Now, Ian wasn’t complaining. He was just noticing, the way he notices everything and then mentions it to me and sends me off on a spiral of self-discovery. So I took this peccadillo to my therapeutic toolbox and was like, “Huh, why do I do this?”

And my therapeutic toolbox spat out Father died suddenly when you were 12 and his last words to you were not ‘I love you.’ Also No one said ‘I love you’ to you until your highly traumatized best friend in elementary school started saying it every time she saw you, and you picked it up from there.

Huh.

Now, due to many years of consistent therapy, I’m able to work through this stuff with curiosity and very little trauma triggering. Mostly, these are behaviors that come up and make me go “Huh,” and then I realize that this was a behavior I started as me trying to keep myself safe and just because I didn’t really need it anymore to stay safe wasn’t a reason to stop doing it. Now was the time to evaluate, decide if it’s harmful, and if it’s not, embrace it from a healthy place

So that’s what I’m doing, and I recommend my approach. Say I love you. To everyone. For any reason, trauma-related or no. You can process the trauma out of a behavior and let it stand on its own, because you like it and because it’s good for you and the people around you. And since I like grapes a lot and do not plan to stop eating them hastily while I draft, let me just say to you, my dear Writer…

… I love you.

Everything,

L