notes from the quiet kid

It’s been nice how, since college, people have equated my quietness with deep thinking. They haven’t always been so generous. I’m not saying it’s true, but it’s better than the alternatives, this latest in a series of other people’s comments about my quietness. Anyone who has been called "quiet" or "shy" knows what I’m talking about:

“How’d you get so shy?”

“She's just stuck-up.”

“Why don’t you speak up?”

“Why don’t you like anyone?”

“Can’t you say anything? Say something for us.”

Why quiet folks are singled out for this interrogation is beyond me, given that we probably constitute a near-majority. Maybe it’s just to give more garrulous folks something to talk about when they run out of anecdotes. I’m regularly awe-struck by how much people can talk. We build walls with our talk, and whenever there is the slightest chink to be filled in the wall—a speaker’s pause for breath, the few seconds between songs on a CD—we spackle it with talk. We spackle over places that don’t need it, where there is really no room for extra conversation at all: movies, classes, concerts, crowded & noisy hallways. It’s as if silence is a thing to be feared and avoided at all costs—and silent people pose a problem to be solved. I’ve always wondered why being talkative was so highly rated. I’ve also wondered what my answer to people’s intrusive questions would be. So here goes.

***

Maybe people unconsciously think of talk as a campfire built with the last match—you can’t let it go out, because you could never get it started again. Maybe, thousands of years ago, a group of our ancestors developed their grunts into words and began a conversation. They liked it. Being able to confirm their observations was comforting( “is the sky what you would call ‘blue?’ Or is it closer to ‘azure?’”). Being able to speak a thought helped alleviate uncomfortable and dull rumination (“I’m anxious about our dwindling supply of boar’s meat.”). Their fear of losing the conversation soon transformed it into a curse. It became an obligation, a thing to be constantly tended to. They could no longer go for solitary walks without being accused of dodging their duty to keep the conversational flame burning. They couldn’t follow their own train of thought for too long without periodically forcing it into words. Thus their thoughts became less profound, less unique, less interesting. They had to endure each other’s talk and its increasingly limited originality (“Look at that blue sky.” “You like boar’s meat? So do I!”).

Maybe we inherit this burden when we are born. Our parents rush us towards our first word and then announce it with pride to anyone who will listen. We are inured to the drone of the human voice by hordes of relatives gooing in our faces, we are trained to blather by the T.V. Though we’ve forgotten the original intentions or the value of this never-ending talk, it’s become instinctual in most of us. Children who are slow to talk, or who prefer sounds other than their own voice, inherit the plight of Neanderthal kids who didn’t like to hunt, of Spartan children with delicate constitutions—threatening to become burdens, selfish solitary walkers living on the welfare of talker’s hard work, they are exiled. Questions like, “Why are you so shy?” “Why won’t you talk?” are well-intentioned, but anyone who has heard these questions has felt and probably retreated from their inherent aggression and accusation. In school, it's not long before a quiet kid loses his or her name and becomes known only as “the quiet kid,” one to be subtly shunned. She’s pretty easy to ignore—it’s not like you’re going to miss out on a great joke or anything.

Maybe not.

***

Here’s where it’s worth really thinking about why we quiet kids don’t talk much. Here’s also where I get personal. I’m not quiet because I’m too busy philosophizing to speak. It’s not that I’m stupid, and it’s not that I’m smart. It’s not because I don’t find people interesting, or because I don’t want to know them or be known by them. The best explanation I can think of is sheer exhaustion. The amount of mental editing I have to do in order to feel safe in a conversation is grueling. Maintaining these conversations is exactly like laboring over an essay in school—and even if you do like to write, you couldn’t do it all day, every day.

This editing that dries up the conversation—this must be something that many of us who live on the margins do. There are places where a conversation must not go for us, because we fear that it is the territory in which our difference will be revealed, or spotlighted. This, we fear, will make people uncomfortable, exceedingly polite, and ultimately cut off from us. Camaraderie is ruled out, real connections are closed down, and courtesy takes the place of sincerity. In order to avoid this, we have to be careful in a casual conversation. And conversation being what it is—winding roads of free-association—it’s a minefield. Editing your way through it is a rigorous mental exercise: Anticipate the possible paths of every possible topic of conversation. Home in on the ones that have little chance of triggering a question that might lead to scary territory, then speak. It takes too long, and it leaves us with pretty boring, or pretty obscure, topics.

When we first discover the feeling of a crush, our little hearts give us volumes to talk about. This might be the moment that I began editing—finding myself in the awkward position of having that first, terrible crush on someone who was out of bounds, I silenced myself in those conversations. Perhaps I could have been very brave; perhaps other children are very brave, talking and enduring the playground consequences, but I was not brave. I became quiet. I thought about my crushes as much as anyone, but I never spoke the feelings, and therefore I was not a player in the most frequent conversations among friends. The thing is, it’s got to be nearly impossible for pre-teen girls to talk for more than thirty seconds without the conversation veering inevitably towards boys:


“Did you watch The Dukes of Hazzard last night?”

“Of course. Who do you think is cuter: Bo or Luke?”


“Let’s lip sync ‘Islands in the Stream’ again.”

“Okay. I’m going to dedicate it to Chris Bonino this time. Who are you dedicating it to?”


“Can we watch a movie on your Betamax player?”

“Oooh—yeah. I want to watch Tom Cruise dance in his underwear some more. Isn't he gorgeous?”


Figuring this out, eventually, I began to manufacture crushes on the athletic and good-looking boys, pinning my feelings for the athletic and good-looking girls onto Kevins and Christophers and Shanes. This gave me things to talk about, and people to dedicate lip sync performances to. For a while. As my friends grew out of the all-talk, no action phase, they increasingly gathered deeds to back up their talk—first kisses, tacky but symbolic jewelry, visits to each metaphorical base—and my fountain of talk quickly ran dry. I had no experiences to describe, I didn’t particularly wish for those experiences, and I did my best editing in hopes of preventing the conversation from going to the place where I admitted either fact.

By ninth grade, I had edited myself into virtual silence. It became too much trouble to participate in most conversations. Not wanting to talk to anyone, I took refuge in another identity: the nerd. Being naturally shy and dorky, not to mention having a string of profoundly bad haircuts, I played the role masterfully. I was helped by Molly Ringwald, of course, who added a bit of glamour to the condition of nerdy datelessness. I had found a well-trodden, socially acceptable, she’ll-grow-out-of-it territory. I wasn’t asked to explain myself or my silence, and as long as I was scribbling popular boys’ initials in hearts on my notebooks, I avoided being asked about it. Inevitably, friends grew out of their phases and gathered their deeds. For my part, I maintained the bad haircuts, but they turned out to be thin armor, really.

Throughout high school, I actively avoided talking outside of the classroom. I’d seen what was done to kids who didn’t edit themselves, and I much preferred being called “the quiet girl” to becoming a victim of my conformity-enforcing peers. Besides, a touch of black lipstick and a Morrissey t-shirt made my silence look like an accessory to a fashion statement. It made me look outspoken. Out spoken. True enough: if talk was a race, I had been out spoken, fair and square.

Eventually, I was filtered out as something more than just nerdy, not quite abject enough to be gothic. Coming out, I was shocked to find myself in good company—not the creepy gym teachers or girls with rat tails I’d imagined would be my only friends. It felt good—it felt unbelievable—to speak, unabashedly, without fear. I could talk, and talk freely, and stop editing—and I did, for a while. I did my best to fill any space I walked into with my words.

***

Now, I am a school teacher. And I am back, full circle, to painstaking editing of myself, to retreating from personal conversations in the lounge, to being the quiet kid on the faculty. My personal life doesn’t belong in the classroom, of course, and I’m more than happy to keep the two well apart. Yet I’m exhausted, again, by the editing I do, talking to colleagues, fearing gossip mills, parents' anger, the ugliness that might follow if I let anything slip. I’m afraid, again, of well-intentioned questions:

“When are you going to have children of your own?”

“Don’t you have a husband yet?”

“Just haven’t found the right man, huh?”

I tell myself that this is a necessary part of doing what I’ve chosen to do, that this is not the battle I am here to fight. I am a good teacher, and that is my armor now. I have answers to the questions, even if I don’t say them aloud. Still, I’m surprised to find myself quiet again.