Whatever Held

People asked me if I was mute. Much more than once. Classmates, teachers, adults who should have known better. A child is quiet, and the explanation the world reaches for isn’t she’s thinking or she’s taking it in. It’s that something must be physically wrong with her. That she is missing a part. I wasn’t mute. I was watching.

I have always taken in more than I say. I notice things, small shifts, who’s
uncomfortable, what someone means underneath what they’re saying. I put patterns together, sometimes before I can explain how I got there. And I feel things deeply, all the way down, in a way that doesn’t always make it to my mouth.

None of that translates well in a classroom. In a classroom it just looks like a girl who doesn’t talk. At home the word was sensitive. You’re just too sensitive. Not assertive enough. My parents loved me and I don’t want to think they meant it as a verdict, but that’s how it landed on a kid: there is a correct amount of feeling, and you have exceeded it. There is a correct amount of pushing back, and you have not met it. So I had two data points before I was grown. Outside the house, something was wrong with me because I didn’t speak enough. Inside it, something was wrong with me
because I felt too much. Both said the same thing, which is the thing I carried for about forty years: your natural setting is incorrect.

And it kept happening. Later in life I’d find out there was a word for the way attraction worked for me, too. That what I’d spent decades reading as something missing in me was just a way some people are wired. I remember the relief when that landed. The specific relief of finding out that the thing you thought was your defect is actually just your description. That’s been the pattern of my whole life, honestly. I kept receiving evidence that I was wrong, and it kept turning out that I was simply unnamed.

Quiet: called mute.

Deep-feeling: called too sensitive.

And a handful of other things I had no vocabulary for until much later, and carried as faults in the meantime. People hand you the closest word they’ve got, and if the right word doesn’t exist in their vocabulary, you get the nearest wrong one, and you wear it.

Here’s what I know now, later than I’d like. The noticing is not a flaw. It’s the reason I can read a room in ten seconds, know when one of my kids is off before they’ve said a word, spot the thing in a set of books that doesn’t add up. The feeling deeply is not a flaw either. It’s the reason any of this is worth writing down. I’m still quiet. I’m still on the edge of most rooms. I never fit with the other mothers on the sidelines and I stopped trying a long time ago. I’d rather be home with my kids and my animals than nearly anywhere else, and I’ve had many people treat that as something to fix.

It isn’t something to fix. It’s just who I’ve been since I was a little girl being asked, by people who meant no harm, whether I could speak at all.
I could. I just didn’t see the need.