The Art of Shutting Up
First of all, let me begin this by saying thank you all for your sweet messages regarding my last post. Clearly it has been a New Year’s resolution of mine to get back into writing. Yes, I am embracing my Carrie Bradshaw arc and sharing my emotional struggles via writing to friends and strangers. Although, truth be told, we all know I am actually a Charlotte York-Goldenblatt but enough with Sex & the City references! (For those of you who don’t have an unhealthy obsession with modern media the way I do, I apologize.)
Last post had me thinking about how I love to psycho-analyze every aspect of my own life. I try and look for some sort of reasoning for why things happen and why people feel the way they do. I might not be the best at quelling my emotions, but I am pretty good at reflecting and analyzing. Today’s topic, ironically, is all about shutting up. I thought about this after having a long face-time call with one of my best friends, Whitney. We were discussing how difficult it can be to practice patience. Sometimes you just want to have a conversation with someone or grab them by their shoulders like Cher in Moonstruck and say “SNAP OUT OF IT!”
But that’s the thing about patience: we have to practice it.
It is certainly not easy. Sometimes you’re ready to talk and someone else isn’t! As much as you might want to text them, call them, see them… you know deep down the only thing you can do is wait.
But this goes right back to my last post! Sometimes your mental timing and someone else’s aren’t aligned. You can be ready and someone else might not be. The only hope for connection is if you both meet each other half-way: you practice patience, the other person practices pragmatic emotional sorting to meet you there. But the best way to practice patience, ultimately, is shutting up and giving someone the space to meet you there. Yes it’s frustrating, but I am working on not assigning anger because someone else has a different mental or emotional schedule than I do. I am looking at it through the lens of: “how lucky am I to have someone/people in my life who get to experience this differently than I do and we get to come together to share that!”
But that’s not the only place where I’m learning to practice shutting up. I had a situation recently where I gave advice that wasn’t welcomed. Actually, it ended up hurting someone’s feelings. No matter how nice I could have phrased it, the fact that I was saying something that didn’t fit with their perception of the situation hurt their feelings. I began to wonder:
is it better to shut up and not say anything at all even if I know I would regret not saying anything?
No matter how well-intentioned or kindly phrased what I said was, the person receiving my advice wasn’t at all interested in hearing something that, in their opinion, is an inconvenience. I on the other hand see it as a fact to be acknowledged (sidebar: when I am upset I am known to phrase things in a nasty way #selfaware BUT I assure you here this was not the case!) In this conversation I suggested that the other person ought to consider this circumstance when they look at their situation holistically. It makes me think that perhaps the issue isn’t with what I said but rather with the fact that it was said at all. When things get spoken out loud, there’s a sort of power to them; we have to acknowledge what was said. I’m afraid that me giving my advice in this situation struck a chord with a deep-seated fear or insecurity that this person wasn’t addressing about their situation. That is what I am most sorry about because it was not my intention whatsoever; my intention was to help them look at it from a different perspective.
In the Princess Diaries (shoutout to my grandpa because he loves that movie), Joe tells Mia that no one can make you feel inferior without your consent. But perhaps when we are closest to people, we consent to having their opinions carry weight and power in our lives. Not for validation or assurance, but because we count on our loved ones to bring to light parts of a situation that we might not be able to see. Once again, back to the trees and forest metaphor: we entrust in those we seek advice from to help point out other trees in the forest or even the forest itself when we find ourselves fixating on one tree. So perhaps if we know that someone has an unaddressed insecurity about a situation, and because we know of our closeness to them that our advice or opinion could highlight it, we ought to shut up even when asked if we know that that insecurity or fear remains unaddressed. We can’t fight everyone’s battles for them. Even if it is something they need to hear, sometimes it is better to let someone work it out for themselves or discover it on their own time.
Being a good confidant is hard. Waiting and practicing patience are muscles that we can never seem to get enough good reps in. But sometimes we have to be keenly aware of the way our words can affect others. Sometimes we have to be aware of the timing in which we say them and how that can affect others. Ultimately, we are all just trying our best to be seen and heard by those in our lives. But sometimes the best way to make that happen is to not say anything at all.
I’ll leave you with a Will Rogers quotation that my mother loves to say:
“Never miss a good chance to shut up.”
‘Til next time! Xo
Madeleine