We got a few life updates from the SOJD the other day. Nothing earth-shattering, just some stuff. The more interesting part is that before he told us stuff, he felt the need to tell us that someone else had told him to tell us more stuff.
That made a lot of things make more sense.
I've gotten the feeling for a while that he was... "practicing" that, for lack of a better phrase. He's good at displaying how he feels at any particular moment, mostly, but not all that forthcoming with details about his life. When he does let a few out, I get such an impression of intentionality that I've wondered if there was a therapist somewhere, giving him homework. No, apparently; just someone important to him, whose opinion he puts a lot of stock in.
About this time a year ago, I asked him how he was. He said fine, then paused, and, eyes on his phone, casually mumbled, "looking for a new job." I was surprised that he would tell me anything of the sort. I actually teased him about it. "Sometimes I forget you exist outside of this building," I said, and I wished him luck. He posted on his Instagram when he found one, and I wrestled with myself for a while before I commented on it. I was still nervous about reminding him that I paid attention to him. Eventually I decided I was being a twit, he knew how Instagram worked, and if it was up on his Stories clearly he didn't mind randos giving him congratulations on it.
My policy is not to prod him about anything he hasn't put on his public CV, posted to Instagram, or told me in person. I still don't want to spook him.
This is honestly a lot of why he drove me so crazy for the longest time. Humans are hard to pin down; there are an infinite number of reasons why anyone might do anything. Often when someone is very loudly happy to see me but tells me nothing about themselves, it means they're not really interested in being friendly to me, they're just really invested in seeing themselves as a friendly person. It's far more important to them to like and be liked by everyone, or at least look that way, than to really make connections, so they go through all the clockwork motions of "liking" other humans without any element of actual interest in them.
Pretend friendship gives me nothing. I find it exhausting, and depending on how badly my life is going just then, a painful reminder of just how much work I'm expected to do for people who clearly won't do anything for me. So I usually respond by becoming The Receptionist, one of my more successful improv characters. Cheerful, helpful, witty, distant, and more or less a complete blank who will wipe this entire interaction out of memory as soon as it's over. Most of the time this is acceptable, but on occasion I've run into people who just don't like the part where I clearly don't care, and perform friendliness at me louder and louder, trying to get me to follow the script.
I don't think the SOJD is one of those people, but it took a while to settle on that. It was weirdly reassuring when he came in one day super cranky and snapped at me. He snapped at both assistants, too -- but none of the students, ever. I didn't love that he was having a bad day, or that he was letting it spill over onto other people, but it did at least tell me he wasn't being very loudly friendly at me as an obligation, or he would have gritted his teeth and done it harder.
What I suspect is going on with him is that, as much as he genuinely loves being around people, he doesn't have a lot of experience being authentic with them. He doesn't share things frequently, and when he does it's often very sudden, with no real preamble, and the things he chooses are kind of scattershot. It feels like he maybe doesn't have a lot of experience with the gradual process of self-disclosure. Given the abruptness with which he decided he was going to talk to me, and the way he's kind of a big hairy ball of feelings most of the time, he might be fighting a lot of all-or-nothing tendencies. And it would certainly explain why one of his closest loved ones felt the need to be all, 'Boo, you gotta tell people stuff more'.
There are also about eleventy billion possible ways people might grow up to be like that, but the most common one is getting stuck in an environment where your authentic self was clearly unacceptable, and you were punished, subtly or overtly, for ever telling anyone anything they didn't like hearing. The idea makes me sad. He's weird, yes, but also very sweet.
Some of the awkwardness is undoubtedly me. I had to zip up his bag and carry it downstairs to him once, and my only comment was, 'jesus fuck no wonder you have back problems, do you carry your own OED in there?' He does not, but it turned out that a good inch or so of the paper brick inside was a nice quarto that he uses as a combination notebook and scrapbook. He pulled it out, even flipped through a few pages for us -- two of his assistants, and me -- after the rest of the class had left.
I stood back, attentive, but silent. Made perfect sense to me that he'd share something like that with his assistants, who hadn't seen it before either, but a part of me wondered if he remembered I was still there, and would he really be doing this if he did? Reminding people that I'm paying attention to them is a great way to make them so self-conscious they grind to a halt. It's a thing I do to bullies to make them too paranoid to pull their manipulative bullshit on anyone when I'm around. Normally I go out of my way not to do that to people I like -- I can't stop my brain from hoarding data, but I can at least not make it obvious.
It is bizarre and scary to be doing it intentionally to someone whose opinion I actually care about, specifically to remind him that he is visible to other people. It doesn't seem to have backfired yet. He thinks it's hilarious when I backtalk by using his own words. I'm taking the piss out of him, but it doesn't matter; I'm quoting him directly, and that means I listened, and I remembered.
The uneven sharing makes it hard to judge what he's comfortable hearing from me. Most people develop relationships through a process of 'bidding' intimacy -- they show that they're willing to tell you something that personal, and it communicates that they're also willing to hear something that personal from you. Disclose noticeably less in return and it feels very chilly; suddenly dump a lot more on them and it feels inappropriate and icky. I don't think his habit of being taciturn about himself is an accurate reflection of his comfort level with me, but there's no way to know without just trying it, and that's not always a risk I have it in me to take. I have cracked a couple of times and said things to him that I normally would not voice to anybody, and I don’t remember him ever not meeting me there. But I can't really be sure, and for reasons that would make perfect sense if you saw my childhood, I have a particular horror of ever making anyone feel cornered into being nice to me.
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