[Got an anonymous confession or rant you just have to share with the world? Submit it to I, Anonymous HERE!—eds]
I still think about this profile I read years ago of a professional lip reader, somebody whose work was respected enough that courts relied on it, and the one thing that stayed with me was that she stopped watching sports because she couldn’t stop reading what people were saying after bad calls. Everyone else saw a game. She saw contempt. I understood that immediately. There are things you can’t unnotice. After a while you stop hearing what people say about themselves and start seeing what they repeatedly choose instead. The indifference. The little betrayals of their own values that don’t even register anymore because everybody around them is making the same compromises. The strange gap between the person they sincerely believe they are and the one that’s actually moving through the world. That’s the painful part. Not hypocrisy exactly. More like watching something inside a person keep trying to become itself while the rest of them keeps forcing it into whatever shape will earn approval from the room. You see it most with people you knew when you were young. They used to feel singular. Now sometimes it’s hard to tell where they end and their tribe begins. How you can feel their fear and anxiety with doing anything that would stand up or disappoint their regressive social group, . Then, for a second, the old person flickers through and you remember they were in there all along. Maybe that’s why some rooms feel unbearable. Not because the people are bad. Because you can feel how much effort it takes for them not to be themselves, and after a while it’s hard not to grieve for someone who’s still alive.—Anonymous