Explaining as suicide

Why I am so tired

In this episode of “what is wrong with that woman?” I’m considering the answers to the question of why I am so bone-tired, so depleted, so incredibly unable to find motives to act in the world that don’t amount to desperation. One of these answers is painfully simple, as it turns out.

Some uncounted number of months or years ago, a man with an unidentifiable, sexy accent made a Tiktok that I never saw because I don’t have Tiktok.¹ However, the video migrated to the Old People Social Media Platforms eventually due to its universal appeal and I saw it there. In it, a man describes exactly how little interest single women have in men right now, which is a topic that really speaks to me, having had my entire life and psyche burned down recently by a divorce. Honestly, if I never see another man again, it will be too soon, so sexy-undefinable-accent man was really speaking my language.² Besides all that, this man is smoking hot in an oh-excuse-me sort of way and happens to have the shockingly improbable name of Eros. In the Tiktok, he describes what it’s like to try to date a woman who has been single for a long time.

Here’s the one that got me:

“You try to check in emotionally. ‘How are you feeling?’ [you ask]. She’s feeling fantastic because you’re not here. When she says ‘I need space,’ she doesn’t mean ‘I am upset.’ She means she wants to lie face down on her bed for three hours without explaining it to anyone,” Éros said.

If I’m asking myself, why am I so fucking strung out? Why is it when that when I wake up in the morning, I dread every moment? Why is it that when I get into conversations with some people, I end up feeling like a filthy rag, wrung out and still grimy, sloppy wet but empty, unseen, a little disgusting? Why can’t I write?

Answer: I am tired of explaining myself.

I’m great at explaining. My entire job, probably my entire life past and present, is explaining. I explain scholarship, structures, history, details, abstractions, logic, philosophy, practical skills, bureaucracy, morality, behavior, rules, reasons, justifications, positions, expenditures, savings, projections. There are days when I start explaining at 6am and I don’t stop talking for essentially twelve hours. I come up with a billion ways to explain a million things. I narrativize, go step-by-step, assess what the other person knows and doesn’t to meet them where they are. I solve the technical problems that get in the way of explaining. I write it out, I speak it out, I have others speak it out, I print it, make a slideshow, give references, explain the references, provide questions for people to ask themselves while they are reviewing the references. I use tactics like logic, emotionality, play-acting, role-reversal, the alternating of heavy, dense material with light, easy material, modeling, humor, slang interspersed with formal language, speaking from the heart. I access daily every moment of ever acting class I ever took. I also show others how to explain – how to speak, how to look, when to pause, who to engage, who to leave alone. Ask questions, or don’t. Employ silence. Engender excitement with affect. Tone it down, somehow. Use expertise or cede the stage. Allow for silliness, and then rein it in at the right moment. Give time to practice. Put my figurative hand over someone else’s figurative hand to make them gesticulate or inscribe in a certain way, to use my power over them (which they give me because I am trustworthy) to get them to mimic my thought patterns in order to make those thought patterns automatic so they can go to the next level of creativity with them. Constant negotiation to move knowledge from my head into other people’s heads without them feeling like I’m doing something to them, but rather orchestrate the whole affair so that they feel they are churning the knowledge out of themselves, that they knew it all along and that I am an accessory to their own discovery, not the driver of it. Find a way to get people to own what they’ve been taught by thinking it was all their idea anyway. Lead them here, show them this, scan for progress. Meet their eyes. See their soul. Become their bridge.

Every day, I explain. Constantly.

I also explain, endlessly, to my lawyer. The details of my broken home, my cracked walls, the history of savings accounts, the minutia of a life chopped to pieces by carelessness. The bill for her listening to me explain these wretched things to her is more than the paycheck I receive for explaining via my job.

I’m sick of it. Quite literally ill.

I found myself in the shower today at 5am today explaining the technological problem I am having with my house alarms, which detect all kinds of problems across the property, to some imaginary technical support. I detailed everything, excavating every useful element while not revealing the unimportant aspects, adjudicating what they needed to know in order to help me. The problem with this exceptional and well-crafted description is that there is no tech support for this alarm system and, if there were, they were absolutely not in the shower with me at that time. There is no tech support for this Chinese Internet Crapola company from which I purchased this system. I am the tech support. There is no one to call. In the shower, I was just doing some knee-jerk explaining to the water droplets, to my skin, to Satan himself. You might be generous and try to say I was working the problem through, but I wasn’t. I already knew what the next step was in the troubleshooting.

In the shower, I was hysterically explaining because that’s all I do and have ever done. I have become convinced that, if I stop for a moment, I might explode and/or decide to never speak again, come hell or high water. All day, all evening. Explaining. Explaining like Ripley in Aliens, when she is shooting at nothing and the handsome Marine whose name no one remembers³ has to talk her down, soothe her till she stops firing blindly and lowers her weapon. I keep explaining even when no one is here. I keep shooting even when the horrible aliens of unawareness are on the other side of the base or dead. I keep shoring up, building bulwarks against the endless confusion, ignorance, and unmanagability of other people’s minds, for which I am endlessly responsible.

I explained myself to a uniquely unreceptive man for fifteen years and nearly died of the misunderstandings. The moment I stopped explaining everything all the time without any expectation of being understood, our marriage collapsed. Some people demand constant transparency and it turns out that those people are usually the most opaque, so if you are well-trained to explain hysterically, a certain kind of person will find you, sit next to you, and stare at you until you marry them. Stop explaining yourself to people who won’t explain anything back. That’s the lesson there.

I write to explain even here. All I do. Explain.

On the phone with my mechanic, I explain the sound the car is making.

Therapists say I should journal, but journaling is more explaining. The wrong sort of writing is just frenetic elucidation and it makes me vomit. Explaining it to myself, when myself doesn’t give a shit. My Self wants nothing, and I mean nothing, more in this world, than to [redacted] and watch a movie with my friends. My Self wants to never speak again. My Self wants you to do some fucking explaining, for once. It wants someone else to run the show. Why doesn’t someone explicate themselves to me for a while? I can sit quietly and never reciprocate just as well as anyone. Let’s have me do that.

If I’m being honest, my self really wants to come to a balance, but what I’ve got instead is a really intensely swinging pendulum. I explain for days on end, tending ecosystems of knowledge that water worlds. Suddenly, then, I trip the line into the desert and lay like a lizard on a rock, daring people through alien and slitted eyes to speak a single word to me in hopes of a response.

Hence, being unable to write. Feels too much like bleeding.

Yeah, sure, over-explaining is a symptom of a certain kind of childhood. It’s a habit I developed to keep myself alive in a particular kind of situation. I enter a room, memorize all details, revisit them constantly, and have the ability to tell you the whole history of everything, with evidence, with clear assessments of “next steps,” all before you’ve even registered that you’ve crossed the threshold of hell. I have never been able to break this habit of cataloguing, archiving, analysis, and scanning for threats based on prior knowledge. I expose everything before I am even asked.

Guidance counselors and other life coaches will tell you to play to your strengths! Find what you are good at and pursue it! without considering the origin of the skillset you have and how maybe one might find something else to do instead. I found a job doing exactly what destroys me and even outside of work I keep doing it. When apparently I don’t get enough explaining at work and in my personal life, I do it on substack. Whenever I consider a career change, or what kind of book I might write, it always involves these practices of data collection, aggregation, analysis, metanalysis, and reassembly into consumable products that explain shit. It’s all I have to sell, these days. I imagine futures of explaining even as the explanations desiccate me in the present and injure me in the past.

I sure am good at it. It sure earns me a paycheck. I am also just as surely exchanging my lifeblood for cash, because explaining constantly and without end to people with no reciprocity is like sticking a spigot into the trunk of my body and cranking it open, letting all my viscera liquify and run out onto the floor. People rejoice. They fucking love it. They feel seen, understood, helped, catered to. It’s a service I provide. It’s a thing people have loved about me. Let me just say that again – the thing that is killing me is the thing that people love best about me in addition to being the only thing people will pay me for.

I want to lay facedown on my bed for three years and not explain myself to anyone.

She said, explaining herself, dying.

Maybe that’s what makes Eros so attractive. For once, someone else was explaining something (me, in this case) and getting it right. Not requiring me to explain, but doing it himself. Clever fellow. Knows his audience. Good explainer. Extraordinary hairdo. Not someone you have to knock talk out of.

I want to luxuriate in the expertise of others. To know that, it’s ok, someone else has got it, or at least, they have their half of it well in hand. To enter the society of competence and clear vision but where the future is not yet written, only presaged by our current virtuosity. To be delighted to watch another person carry a huge, strangely-shaped load with aptitude, to sometimes help them carry it, for them to cheer me on as I carry mine, across tightropes, chasms, scaling walls. For us all to laugh, in the dirt, at what we’ve accomplished. To grow strong with practice and to witness, be witnessed. To abandon all jealousy in relation, due to lack of time, since every moment is needed for joyful enactment, rehearsal, soaring doing-ness, a loping run and a grinning snout in a field of wonders and creations.

I’ve spent so much time now in the purgatory of the not-quite-dying that I realize the truth about what my home looks like. A place where my explaining is not a stretcher on which I carry others all the time toward their wholeness, pumping my blood into their veins as we go, but where it is the skin that holds my own viscera in. A skin that is touched, not breached. When I locate the place where I end and you begin, and I find it intact, holding water, up to the task, I’ll wake up from this dream ready to live.

1. He’s French. It’s more exotic to be unidentifiable.

2. I say this with chagrin, because I have several male friends on here, in the internet, in my phone, and in my real life who I value beyond measure. It’s not the men I am avoiding like a rotting corpse, it’s the romantic relationship. Men are good.

3. It’s Hicks. I remember. Another man who knows, explains, and is beautiful.