Writing Isn’t Cheap

I hate it when people push me to talk. I communicate best when I write and I think the main reason for this is because I didn’t learn to speak until I was older. I spent the majority of my time at home growing up and my parents hardly spoke to me or even to each other. My father worked afternoons and nights at a Chinese restaurant and, honestly, I can’t tell you where my mother was. I can tell you that my mother worked and she worked long hours, but she worked during the day and I don’t remember a time when she was at home with me and my brother because she never spent time with us. I learned how to talk by watching cartoon sitcoms like ‘Dennis the Menace’, ‘The Jetsons’, and ‘The Flinstones.’ I failed to learn how to say much because there wasn’t anyone to talk to, except for my brother but he was at the same level as me, only a year younger.

Growing up, I taught myself how to read and write and I read a lot of books. Reading consumed most of my day as a child. I didn’t feel that anyone valued my thoughts, so I didn’t express myself verbally much at all. I wrote because I thought that my handwriting looked nice and I liked the way that words looked on paper.

I went entire school days without saying a word. I knew that I was different and it did make me sad when it seemed like I thought more than the other children because they talked a lot more than I did. I can’t say exactly when, but I think that it was sometime in middle school when I realized that talk was cheap. When people talked, the words were gone. When people write words, though, the words stay put a lot longer. Writing is my main means of communicating with people. For a deep thinker like me, it makes sense. I can’t tell you how sad it is when my love for writing, or my preference to write as a means to communicate, is criticized, especially on the job because in the society that I live in, or in the society that my co-workers come from, talking is valued a lot. The skill of being a good conversationalist is actually looked up to more than the skill of being a good writer. I can’t tell you how angry I felt when a former employer pushed me to talk more, and even criticized me for always writing and why I never tried to make small talk with students, when it was obvious that they were studying and they were adults so it was very likely that they were able to ask questions if they needed help or they were independent learners, they weren’t children after all. Why don’t you open up more, why don’t you say stuff? he used to say. And he even went so far as to say that social skills were more important than qualifications, as if talking was the only skill that people used when they socialized. And that guy was only three years older than me, so could he have possibly known so much more than me about life? Could he possibly have known so much more than me about how the world was? How people were? And what was wrong with writing? How was writing not as valued a skill as talking?

He made me angrier after I told him that I expressed myself best in writing and that I wrote candidly in an email to him describing why I liked to write and why I was an introvert. He actually said that he was a very slow reader and, while he did say that got managed to get through my email, he said that I ought to talk about myself and my feelings instead of writing. He repeated himself over and over about how important it was to talk. I didn’t give him a damn. And, yes, that cost me my job; when I continued doing my work quietly, though, I did the best work I could, being a quiet person was my downfall. That guy certainly wasn’t the first person to point out how important is was to talk. Again and again, people in my past have mentioned the importance of communicative skills and what they’ve always meant by that was being a good conversationalist and small talker. I’ve always thought that communicative skills were more than just talk, but were they also about writing? And using gestures, body language? Were they also about being able to perceive how others felt? I’ve always been in disbelief about how narrow communicative skills are defined. Actually, I think that relationships and friendships are mostly built on what people do and how they seem to others by how they appear more so than on talking.

I don’t plan on being afraid of writing my confessions in this blog. I write these confessions because I want to make readers feel less alone in their pain, their humiliation. I want to speak out because I don’t feel that people do it enough. I want readers to feel that there is someone or something that can relate to them.

I write because I hurt a lot.

I often feel unhappy. I personally feel that it’s okay to feel unhappy regardless of how heavy it feels inside. Feeling unhappy is as legitimate a feeling as happiness is.

I live for my thoughts. Because I spend so much time alone with my thoughts and imagination, and the longer that I do so, the more selfish I am. I was told by an Australian woman in China that I didn’t seem to care about people, that I seemed unaware of them and I seemed to be more into my feelings than anyone else’s. She said that because I didn’t ask questions about anyone’s day, I didn’t even greet people, as if they meant nothing. I’m so used to spending time on my own with my books, with my thoughts, and during all that time, I become more unconventional and have ideas of my own. Because I never conform with what anyone is doing, because I don’t follow the status quo, people dislike me. People think that I don’t know how to behave, how to be polite, how to be professional, and they assume that I’m naive. And I think that they are silly because it’s not like I don’t know that small talk is important, or that acknowledging people is crucial, especially in the workplace, but it’s just that I don’t feel like saying anything and I just feel like sitting with my thoughts. It’s not that I don’t know the right questions to ask, I just choose to be completely in my own world. It makes me look bad. I know this very well, but I just can’t lie to myself. I’m too in touch with my feelings to pretend to feel anything else. Perhaps this makes me unlikable. I understand that there’s a time to be emotional and a time to be polite. At work, people are expected to be professional and a large part of being professional is to be cold and even emotionless. I’ve taken part in the corporate world in all of the time that I’ve been in Moscow and I’ve found this to be the case. I’ve known before about the corporate world being a competitive, aggressive place where people act cut-throat toward each other or even not genuine. It’s all about being a good talker, when you’re a good talker then people like you, when you don’t have a knack for it, or if you don’t care to, then no one wants anything to do with you. People in the corporate world don’t want anyone to bring their emotional baggage to work, it’s not a place where people comfort you, or show that they care. Work is work. It’s the production that matters. Money matters. It’s not the employees’ feelings that matter. When your supervisor learns that you’re sad and that you live with your sadness, he doesn’t offer to listen or help or refer you to someone who would listen, he just lets you go. An employee is expendable. There are seven billion people in this world. People are commodities. They aren’t people anymore.

I write because I want to feel good about myself. I also want to assure myself that I do possess some intelligence. I do have sense. I do have my own ideas and I stick to them. I write because there are a lot of people who think that I’m stupid, or have nothing worthy to say. That same Australian woman in China who told me that I was uncaring also told me that the reason why people may think that I was stupid was because I didn’t say much and she sounded like she was criticizing me. She said that if I said more then people would think that I was intelligent. In my opinion, I actually think that thinkers are more intelligent than talkers, but it seems that a whole lot of people in this world would strongly disagree with me.

My past sticks to me. Any injustice, any mean thing that people have done or said to me, any instance when someone has misunderstood me sticks to me. They become a part of me. These are things that I’ve felt and felt strongly toward, so it’s not a matter of letting go of the past, or forgetting about it, but it’s about how to deal with what has happened to me, to make what has happened to me into something that benefits me. I’m somber, solemn, depressed, and any other synonym that describes these feelings. I know that I have to be able to stand this.

Writing does make me feel better about myself. It helps me see my experiences and feelings and it makes me see that what I’ve felt isn’t insignificant. I feel that writing is becoming a lost art, or it’s something that people don’t pursue so much, at least the kind of writing that’s painful to read. I write as a way to shout at those people who have put me down for being quiet. I write because I want to prove to people that how I am is legitimate. Even when those people who’ve put me down aren’t reading this, at least what I write confirms that I do think, that I’m not a brainless fool. I admit that I don’t have a talent for speaking, that people easily refute me and I do become silent because I’m not good at verbally expressing myself. But my thoughts do differ from others’ most of the time. I don’t like to talk but I refuse to remain silent.