Big Talk

It’s the unknown unknowns that’ll get you.

I was in my mid-thirties before I figured out that when other people say “How are you?” they don’t actually want a real answer. It took that long for me to clock that my honest and thoughtful replies were eliciting nonverbal expressions of startlement, irritation, impatience, and discomfort just a little too often to be coincidence. I was first astounded, then baffled; after all, when I asked someone how they were doing, I sincerely wanted to know. I couldn’t for the life of me think of a good reason why anyone would ask a question they didn’t want answered.

I had also naturally assumed that everyone was telling the truth about being “good” almost all of the time. If someone replied “fine” to my question and they obviously weren’t — like if they looked like they had been crying — I figured that was code for “I don’t want to talk about the problem,” which was disappointing but okay. Otherwise, I did actually think that you guys all had your shit together and were just sailing through life while I was over here being a hot mess.

This did not do wonders for my youthful self-esteem.

Once I figured out that the base expectation of society was to pretend that you were good even when you weren’t, I was not just confounded but contemptuous. I thought the whole ritual was stupid and pointless at best, cruel at worst. Saying I was “fine” or “good” or “okay” when I wasn’t (which was nearly always) was viscerally uncomfortable for me, and most of the time I stubbornly refused to participate.

Not until 2019 did I stumble across the key piece of information I had been missing. For completely unrelated reasons, I had gone down a linguistics rabbit hole in my research, and I ended up learning the term ‘phatic communication’.

For anyone unfamiliar: expressions are said to be ‘phatic’ when the semantic content — what the words actually mean — is intentionally irrelevant. The point of phatic communication is a purely social cue. And for most people, it serves an actual purpose, reassuring them about the intentions of the person they’ve just encountered.

This blew my mind.

And it was a bit disturbing, to be honest. I thought of myself as being highly adept with language, and I’d spent decades actively studying psychology and sociology. I didn’t understand how I could have missed something so apparently basic about how people communicated.

I mean, I’d figured out some of it? Unlike Gandalf, I knew that people say “good morning” even when the morning isn’t good (although I myself just shorten it to “morning”, which is a nicely incontrovertible fact), and that the word “hello” doesn’t actually mean anything except “I acknowledge that I see you.” I thought content-free communication like that was weird, mind you, but I was aware of the convention and followed it. And I understood, for example, the usefulness of giving minor non-interrupting “I’m still listening” cues when someone else was talking for an extended period.

But the idea that a grammatically complete sentence like “How are you?” might be functionally interchangeable with “Hello” had never crossed my mind.

I wanted to know what made people sad, or angry, or hurt. What made their eyes light up in excitement, or go fuzzy and soft with affection.

Similarly, I had never been able to work out the rules of small talk, which is another, less-scripted form of phatic communication. As far as I could see, small talk was exhausting and pointless. Why, with all the interesting and important subjects that we could be talking about, would anyone discuss perfectly ordinary weather? I mean, if we’re expecting a hurricane, sure, but otherwise? No.

I always wanted Big Talk, even with total strangers: I wanted to know what made people sad, or angry, or hurt. What made their eyes light up in excitement, or go fuzzy and soft with affection. And I wanted to share all those same things about myself. So when I started talking to someone new, I often busted right through the norms of polite conversation like the Kool-Aid Man through a wall of styrofoam bricks.^[1]

Some people loved this. They were amazed at how easy it was to talk with me, charmed by my honesty and openness, relieved to be sharing something they’d never discussed with anyone before.

Other people — I have to assume — were quite put off by me, although they didn’t tend to explain why. Perhaps they found me intrusive, or creepy, or simply boring. All I knew is that something about me inspired polarization: people either thought I was the cat’s pajamas, or they wanted nothing to do with me. No middle ground.

And that was fine with me, quite honestly; I was not a middle ground kind of girl.

Later in the same year that I discovered the term ‘phatic’, the other shoe dropped: I accidentally figured out that I’m autistic. I was forty-nine. Like I said, it’s the unknown unknowns that’ll get you.

Within the framing of autism, my obliviousness to / misunderstanding of phatic communication suddenly made all the sense: phrases like “Good, how are you?” and “Awfully cold out, isn’t it?” are hiding social messages that my brain’s operating system is incapable of perceiving.

I mean, I don’t feel any lack, except when people react badly to my saying the ‘wrong’ thing. Whatever socio-emotional need is being filled for allistics by rote phrases or meaningless chitchat is a need I have never possessed, and I’m perfectly happy rolling along without it.

But knowing that there is a function being fulfilled, even if I can’t discern or even quite conceptualize it, has ended my contempt for phatic customs. I still find them exhausting, and I won’t ever be adept at the more complex ones, but at least I can respect them. (That, too, is an autistic thing — needing to know there’s a reason for something before you can accept it.)^[2]

Over the years I have, with a lot of active self-examination and deliberate work, become somewhat more comfortable with middle ground in my life, and I now see working to become okay with sometimes saying, “good, how are you?” specifically for the sake of putting other people at ease as part of that.

But my personal preference for Big Talk remains undimmed. A couple of weeks ago, an author I admire wrote an essay that was all Big Talk, a story from her past and the shitshow of our present spun into a skein of rage and sorrow and love and hope.

I already knew Cat was an excellent fiction writer (I read her novella The Past Is Red earlier this year, and it didn’t so much break my heart as shatter it like spun glass and then lovingly gather up the shards and melt them into something new), but that post was the specific kind of excellent writing that I aspire to in my personal nonfiction: eloquent and insightful and utterly unsparing in its emotion.

I’d been thinking about rebooting Nine Lives for most of a year, but I held off because I feared that it was a doomed attempt to recapture a vanished past. That all everyone wants now is the quick quips, the shitposts, and the memes. Or they want the pretense of a perfect life, flawlessly staged and gridded in dreamy pastels. Or the dollar-quantifiable value proposition, a promise that these six tips will catapult you effortlessly into the upper echelons of capitalism.

And none of those things has ever been me.

But repeatedly seeing people react favorably to that essay of Cat’s suggested a different story — that maybe there are still people out there who want something deeper than small talk, something truer than huckster marketing. Who not only don’t mind sometimes hearing “actually we are not fine at all,” but who welcome it. (You can’t possibly fix a thing, after all, if you refuse to acknowledge there’s a problem.)

Whether I can find those people (and they can find me) is an open question. The algorithmization of the web has buried the long tail and intensified the brutal winner-take-all dynamics.

But I’m willing to try — to send my five-tone theme out into the unknown, and wait to see if anyone plays it back.

Five tones

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Hello. I see you.

How are you doing, really?

I’m still listening.

Are you?

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