Some people close to me regularly stun and wound me with their observations that contradict everything I’ve ever shared with them.
If you are close to me and yet you tell me, “Great news, Luke….” and then your great news is something that I experience as bad news, that hurts my feelings. It might even infuriate me.
How could you know me so well and for so long and assume I will experience this news as great? Why do you talk to me as though I am the opposite person than what I really am?
I know a man who has been happy for as long as I have known her. I love his happiness. I love his company. But sometimes, both things drive me up the wall.
He is not happy the way people are happy after good news. He is happy the way weather is warm. It does not depend on what is going on around him. He walks into a room of people who are tired or grieving or furious and he brings the same brightness she brought to the last room, and most of the time the room adjusts to him.
For years I filed this under obtuseness. Some years ago he wrote to me before a party with what he called great news. The great news was that a person I had spent decades telling him I did not like was joining us. Nothing I had said in thirty years supported the word great. He used it anyway, and he meant it. I read the email three times looking for the joke, couldn’t find it, and then I went ballistic for the next 72 hours and then I finally turned sullen for a day. On the fifth day, I got over it.
More recently he told a mate who left school before he could write a paragraph, that he should go get a bachelor’s degree. He said it the way you might suggest a nice restaurant. My mate was left wondering what he had been looking at all these years.
The word I reached for was willful. He must be choosing this. Nobody could miss that much by accident.
Then I asked a better question. What is the payoff?
In Debtors Anonymous they say that debting is a disease of vagueness. The debtor does not know what he owes, does not open the envelope, does not add up the month. The vagueness feels like freedom. The bill comes anyway, but it comes to a person who has spent the intervening weeks lighter than he had any right to be.
That is my friend. He runs a vagueness about other people’s inner states, and the vagueness buys him a bliss that a more attentive person could not afford. If he registered how the man felt about school, he could not hand him a degree like a gift. If he had tracked what I said for thirty years, he could not write great news. The not-registering is the engine. His happiness is real. It is also unfunded.
Who funds it? Everyone within reach. When someone that cheerful misreads you, correcting him feels cruel. You would be the one who brought the cloud. So you swallow it, and he goes on, and the swallowing confirms his reading of the room. He rarely meets the evidence that might puncture the picture, because the people who hold that evidence keep it to themselves out of something like kindness. The loop closes. The bliss gets subsidized by silence.
I was the subsidy for thirty years. I answered the email politely. I did not say, nothing about this is great news to me, and you know that, or you should. I said something like, looking forward to it. And so from his side the party went beautifully.
There is a second payoff, and it took me longer to see. A person who does not spend attention tracking the states of others has a great deal of attention left over. He has done more with his later decades than most people do with their whole lives. I used to think the cheerfulness and the obliviousness were two facts about him. Now I think they are one fact, and that the achievement is a third face of the same thing. Attention is finite. He spends none of it on how you feel, and look what he can build with the surplus.
Willful was the wrong word. Willful means he could look and chooses not to. The man who left school got the same treatment I got, and he had done nothing to earn it. That argues for a setting rather than a grudge. Somewhere far back he stopped spending attention on other people’s weather, and the decision has run so long it no longer feels like one. From the outside, chosen and incapable look identical. The difference determines whether saying it flatly would land or just bounce.
I have not said it. I am not sure I will. I can’t ignore it. I can’t steel myself for it. It still winds me up. I’ll never graduate from this vulnerability.
Believe me, my friend could write a more compelling essay than I have given you about the prices he has paid for my company. A disinterested observer would note that I’ve been the taker in this relationship overall. I tend to be exquisitely sensitive to myself and oblivious to others.
What I owe him is hard to say. Some of the warmth in the rooms he walks into is warmth he made, and I have stood in it and been glad of it. The bill for his happiness was split among the rest of us in small amounts over many years, and most of us paid without noticing. I noticed. That may be my own disease of a different kind, a vagueness about nothing and an accounting of everything.
* I’ve changed some facts in the above for obvious reasons.
