The Loneliness of Being Almost Understood

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Ever been around someone who suddenly looks at you like this? It happens after about three seconds’ worth of conversation. Maybe someone just said something strange or awkward and the light clicks on in their head — “Oh! This one does NOT get me.”

It’s subtle, really. A flicker in their eye, maybe. An audible switch in register as their voice becomes a bit more polite. You know what I mean. No slamming doors or anything — no need to cause drama or call your therapist.

I love these moments when I’m almost (but not quite!) understood by someone. And yes, it’s lonely… but honestly, that feeling of being totally misunderstood sucks much harder. At least you know where you stand, you understand why the connection isn’t happening. And while being lonely sucks, you do have a chance at bridging that gap. Like standing on opposite banks of a narrow creek, knowing exactly how to cross the stream but unable to find the spot where the rocks will hold.

Back when I was younger, I always thought that if I tried a little harder, if I focused my attention more closely or asked better questions, then eventually we’d be able to connect. I learned early on though that trying was not only futile… it made things worse. If you try too hard to be understood, it can push the other person away. They’ll feel that connection attempt and move back out of range.

This moment of connection between us locks down at some particular point for every single one of these misunderstandings… like we’re suddenly feeling this invisible lock clicking into place around our understanding of what happened right there. There isn’t an easy way to describe how it feels physically as this lock clicks down, but it always makes my skin crawl when I think about it…

I never quite capture that split-second exactly where we go from ‘there is something very clear happening here’ to ‘the silence is absolute.’ We end up walking away, clinging desperately to the interpretation that fits best with everything else going on in our lives. That’s pretty much all the time we ever spend on it, too—because if we thought about those interpretations more than a little bit, we’d realize we don’t have them anymore.

What’s really bad, though, is recognizing you’ve been the one who didn’t want to hear anything else and was trying to walk off while giving the impression you did want to understand better. Yeah, that sounds like it might work—I mean, you’re not rude! You’re just not seeing it the same way. You aren’t being mean—you’re just being human, etc.—but no, I’ve seen what it looks like and I’ll tell you right now… zero love in being “right” about another human’s flaws. If you care about someone, then you will absolutely hate yourself forever if you realize it wasn’t actually your intention to do that.

Misunderstandings are probably the most intimate mess two humans could possibly create together, if you ask me. We wouldn’t misunderstand strangers—we would have absolutely nothing left on the line to miscalculate… so obviously strangers aren’t doing it (or if they are, they’re weird). You have to be intimately familiar with someone’s personality to be able to hear the wrong meaning behind their words. They know your silences better than anyone else. This is why it bugs me. This is why I’m writing this. Maybe it’s a weird way to reconcile some stuff… maybe I’m making things too big again. It’s late… I’m too tired to think through stuff tonight.

I remember thinking about our last conversation where I made sense of everything… we weren’t actually on the same page anymore.

We were sitting face-to-face and I could finally let loose all the stuff I’d been biting my tongue over for months. It was nothing monumental, really, just the soft whispering of something profound, if only because I believed in it with all my being at the time.

Then, after I fell silent, there was this sweet little smile and “What I think you mean is…” – filling in the blank space, of course. I wanted to open my mouth up and tell her how far off-base her interpretation of things had been, but realized that no matter how much I explained, it wouldn’t change anything because ultimately, I knew that she thought she knew best and that was that.

So that night, I decided to stop forcing it. Perhaps some people will never reach beyond the water’s edge where you stand waiting with bated breath, hoping and praying that maybe they’ll come a little closer… So what do you say? What could you possibly have to say to a person who might never hear your voice?

There isn’t anything much I can do with all of this though. I’ve got a green drinking glass next to me on the table which has a little chip on the rim that I forgot was there until my lip hit it.

And yet I still drink out of it because it’s been around for years now. And somehow the little chip makes it taste better somehow. If I didn’t have a drinking glass full of water in front of me now, I’d throw mine out.