The Magic of Asking

Don't get too excited; what is magic for me might just be Tuesday for the rest of you

Dear Writer,

I am kind of in love with my label maker.

I don’t know when I became the kind of person who labels things. I don’t know when I became the kind of person who organizes things. Like, honestly, one of the happiest days I had in the last year was when I went to Walmart, bought a bunch of clear plastic bins, put labels on them, and put shit inside of them that matched those labels.

Seriously, it’s weird. But I’ll tell you this; right now, I know exactly where my USBA to USBC cords are. They are inside a properly labeled ziplock bag inside a properly labeled bin and that knowledge brings me an absolutely unfathomable feeling of peace.

It’s possible this all relates to my life having gotten wickedly out of control a few years back, and now the security of absolutely knowing where the goddamned cord is relates to some control shit that I need to work out with my therapist… I don’t know.

But joy is joy and I’m not looking it in the face.

If you think reading Dear Writer is great, imagine getting this letter and a podcast of Lani reading it to you for what is essentially the cost of one cup of coffee a month!

A few months ago, well before the move but within enough striking distance of the move that it seemed reasonable to me, I got a bunch of bankers boxes and organized our stuff and packed it with labels and took an entire day to do it. I was so proud of myself and I knew I’d done a ton of good work, but because most of this stuff had been in the walk-in closet (which was most of our storage in the tiny apartment) and had then gone back into the closet, when I told Ian and showed him what I’d done, his reaction was somewhat less than what I’d expected.

“Look what I did!” I said, doing a Vanna-White-level ceremonial arm sweep over the scope of my accomplishment.

“Okay,” Ian said, and then promptly changed the subject to whatever he’d come in to talk to me about.

I interrupted him immediately.

“No,” I said, and motioned once again toward the closet. “LOOK AT THAT.”

“Ummm… okay.” He looked again. Then he looked at me. “I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be responding to.”

I explained how I had taken all of our stuff—much of which had been lying about and stuffed into corners but, in his defense, a lot of which had been in different, unlabeled, and unorganized boxes—and organized it into labeled and organized boxes. In addition, I threw out two full bags of garbage and made a Goodwill run.

“W…wow?” he said, clearly unsure. Then he saw the look on my face and said, “I’m sorry. I know there’s something you need from me here, and I will happily give it to you, but I need to know what it is.”

This is the moment where it could have all gone horribly wrong. I could have thought that he just didn’t care about all the hard work I’d done, that I was being taken for granted, that he was unappreciative. I grew up in a family that failed to love and appreciate me, so that’s a pretty natural space for me to go to in a situation where I have to ask for what I need and am disappointed.

But I didn’t go through years of trauma and therapy to just do things the way I’d always done them, so I thought for a moment and said, “I need you to walk out of this room, then come back in a few minutes, look at the closet and say, ‘Oh my god, honey, you’re amazing, thank you so much, I can’t believe you did all of this!’”

He smiled, relief clear on his face. “I can do that.”

And that is exactly what he did.

Now, when I said this to him, I was mostly being funny. I mean, if he comes in and reads a script, it’s not gonna be the same as him actually saying these things from a genuine place, and my expectation was that it would feel disingenuous and somewhat disappointing.

Writer… I was wrong. He came in, he performed my script perfectly, and it felt fucking great.

Since then, whenever I get out my label maker and Do A Thing, I explain to him exactly what I did and why it’s going to make our lives better, and then I tell him exactly what to say, which is usually some variation of, Oh my god, honey, you’re amazing, thank you so much, etcetera etcetera.

And Writer… it works.

Given that I grew up in a household where I was lied to and manipulated quite a bit, the need for people to be sincere with me is pretty huge. Trust has always been an issue with me, especially because I made a habit of giving my trust completely to people who were similar to the people in my family—possibly because part of me believed that if they could earn that trust it would somehow wipe away what my family did to me. Conversely, the people in my life who were actually trustworthy could never get my full trust, because they could never prove their sincerity to me enough. They had to read my mind to know what I needed, and if they couldn’t do that… well, that was it.

Loads of therapy later, I’m working through that shit. I recognize that expecting anyone to be able to read your mind is unfair. My husband is a great guy, but details are not his thing. To expect him to go into a storage closet and notice the difference between Unorganized Stuff in Boxes and Organized Stuff in Boxes was probably not realistic.

I knew the difference, and I had to tell him the difference, and tell him that what I did was fucking amazing and he needed to speak those words.

You are amazing.

And the thing is… he means it. He tells me I’m amazing all the time. The day we moved and he was actively moving those boxes and we knew exactly where they went and how they were to be unpacked, he told me how amazing I was all damn day. That was great, but it was no less great than when he walked back into the room and read my script back to me.

Since then, as I’ve been organizing and setting up our new place, we’ve done this a number of times. I would do a thing, then I’d grab him and say, “I’m going to show you something, and you need to say, ‘Oh my god, honey, you’re amazing, thank you so much,” and he would do it and it was fucking awesome. Just as good as the moment, weeks later, when he was using the space that I organized and he realized how it works in action and he said it again.

Look, I get it; I’m probably a bit late to this game. Most of you, I hope, learned this when you were young with families who loved you and gave you what you needed when you asked for it. But if you are, like me, someone who has struggled with asking for what you need and want, someone who has been disappointed by the untrustworthy around you, I encourage you to give it a shot. Choose one person, a person you absolutely know you can trust, and start with them. Tell them what you need them to say and let them say it, exactly as you scripted it.

I hope you’re as surprised as I was.

Everything,

L