X and Y

Sometimes I hate the South. There, I said it. I don't worry about repercussions. Nobody reads this blog. 

I've lived in East Tennessee going on 16 years. It's beautiful, it's calm and people are mostly kind. It's not Deep South-y like Alabama. But it's the South.

The thing I hate, today, is this relational collision that happens where people are hurt, or offended, or something, and they don't talk about it until somebody blows up. There needs to be a zippy name for this but I haven't the energy to think one up today.

There are lots of sociological reasons why the South, or perhaps more rural places in general, are fertile ground for this kind of misunderstanding-based problem. I think it's a tribal fear of conflict, a fear of seeming uncooperative, troublesome, or different, and complete avoidance of the inevitable little irritants that come from doing life with other humans. It's complete, unhealthy denial that relationships can be work. Living in the South is like living with a newlywed who wails that you should have known what she wanted for her birthday without having to ask. 

I find myself in the situation, again, where I showed up at my workplace or my music-place or my social-place as my authentic self. Time ticked by, and things got weird. Someone is angry but also smiling. Perhap they are noncommittal: you never get a true "yes" or "no." "That's an idea," or "we could do that," or "that might be cool" are the sorts of things one gets. I feel like I'm trying to work with someone who is a shell. A smile, a sheen of vague positivity but I glimpse something seething underneath that is what I would call being normal. Good days, bad days, moods, being bugged by some things they can't explain, normal insecurities, vulnerability, baggage. 

Why the mask? Why the sheen? Why the vague, maddening, unpositive positivity? It's the South, y'all. The huge, dysfunctional, Rule Number One around here is Be Nice. Rule Number Two is Conflict is Bad, and Somehow Your Fault. Rule Number Three is Avoid Conflict. How's this working out for you, The South?

Badly, that's how. 

When someone rubs you the wrong way for long enough, all the Rules of the South are gonna get broken. Unless you can do the time-honored Southern thing and disappear, cut someone out of your life, ghost. But otherwise, you can't keep being nice when someone enrages you. You can't avoid conflict when someone enrages you. But you don't have to be enraged, you could have just... talked about it. 

This sounds basic, y'all, and coming from the non-South, I wouldn't have dreamed that Talking About Stuff would be seen as a painful and perhaps shameful thing. Although, I will say, I have some extended, uh, people, not from the South, who also seem to favor the smile-until-you-explode strategy. 

I have a better strategy. Here's how it can work. Someone comes up to me, (and has, so many times), and says "Can I talk to you?" or some such. I say "okay." They then say something that I said or did, and how it made them feel. It's easy. When you did X, I felt Y.

I have done this so many times. I'm quite good at it. I then say "okay", slightly ascending on the end of the word in what I hope is an inviting "tell me more" kind of way. 

Then they tell me. It falls into, usually, one of three categories. 1) What you said 2) How you said it and 3) Who you said it in front of. I have come to understand each of these three offenses, having committed them all so many times.

Because you know what? I show up as my authentic self, and I can be sharp-tongued and angry. Usually sharp-tongued/angry are the frosting atop many different emotional cakes: grief, fear, insecurity, sadness, etc. But because many brave people have had the "when you said X, I felt Y" conversation with me, I now understand a lot more about how, as Mater says, "to not to."

Knowing the specifics of whether I said X, said it in a certain way, or said it in front of people, is crucial information. If I said X, I can discuss whether that was automatically hurtful and regrettable, or whether it was open to interpretation. If I said it in a certain way, that tells me the person I said it to might have particular sensitivities that I can be careful of, or decide are not really my problem. And there are a world of things that just should not be said in front of the whole room.  

"When you said X, I felt Y" is a gift to me every time it happens. The times it has happened are the guardrails of my social interactions. I can realize, hey, that's actually never funny, stop saying it. Hey, that's how your anger leaks out. Stop letting that happen. Hey, people are more sensitive that you might expect, avoid commenting on, well, a lot of everything. 

The beautiful conclusion of the XY conversation is almost always 1) apology and/or explanation. I'm sorry I said that, I meant something different or I just shouldn't have said it or it was open to misinterpretation. Then 2) understanding. Oh, I'm glad you apologized, or I see where I was quick to take offense, or we misunderstood each other or all of the above. Then, almost always, there is forgiveness. When someone approaches to have an XY conversation, they are usually ready to forgive. And then there is 3) restoration. We get to be friends again, sometimes stronger in the broken places. Sometimes there is just a cessation of hostilities. Sometimes there is just understanding. I know who we are, I know what happened.

And this is where it gets unfair. I am my authentic self, expecting that when I say X, someone will tell me. But here in the South, they don't. (To be fair, some do. And my good friends always do. And my close family does). It reminds me of an old friend who was born without a sense of smell. He is doomed to go through life without feedback. Do I smell? I don't know. Will anyone tell me? God, I hope so. 

Am I stepping on your toes, am I pedantic, am I arrogant, did I just hurt your feelings, am I intimidating, am I just annoying, do you have a problem that might just be your problem? I don't know. Will someone tell me? God, I hope so. 

And after waiting way too long, they do. With rage that seems to come out of nowhere. With gossip, shunning, social exclusion and tactics best left back in fifth grade where they belong. And often with the suggestion that I should have somehow been more awesome, nicer, smoother. I should have fewer rough edges that might snag someone else's mask of Nice and yank it off. I have been asked to be more positive, more supportive, less negative, and less sarcastic. This is all quite laudable, and also impossibly vague. I think I was handed my own mask of Nice in that conversation. Leave your real self at home, I was told. Put on your mask. Be more awesome. Or pay the price.

As you may have guessed, I won't have it. And I also physically cannot do it. Being Nice and Not Talking About Stuff constitute keeping secrets, to me, and to quote all of our good friends in AA, we're only as sick as our secrets. In the South we can be very secret-ridden, and very sick indeed.

Despite my alleged courage in all this, refusing to wear the mask, encouraging some of my fellow travelers in the South to take theirs off and talk about stuff, I'm scared. I have been shunned and excluded. I have spoken out and low-key whistleblown the situation. Whistleblowers put a lot on the line, and I have put a little bit of a lot on the line. I swing quite wildly from elation that I shrugged off a sick secret to social terror. 

The funny part is that in the furor over Talking About Stuff or avoiding same, my actual social crimes have not yet been addressed. I'm oh so shunnable and vaguely bad for not wearing the mask, but I still don't know what I said that caused one of these people to become silently angry at me for years, and another to orchestrate painful social punishments. What's my X? All you had to do was say. 

Ah, but when you tell me that I said X, you then have to open up enough to tell me what Y you felt. That does not compute when Southern folk love to say "you're fiiiiiine," with at least four pitches within, in response to many an attempted apology. What they're really saying is "I'm fine, I don't want to talk about how I feel, so yeah, you did X, but you're fiiiiine." When you are so, without a doubt, not fine in their eyes. Not a bit.

It's not that hard. Try it. Right now I'm feeling a lot of Y because someone else would not name their X. No matter how much you might think bringing up someone's X will cause pain, not bringing it up will be worse.