To Share is to Reduce

I find myself quite obsessed with the concept of how diminutive expressing yourself can be.

And I don’t mean this in a dramatic or sentimental way. I mean that, literally, an experience can’t ever be fully encapsulated outside of yourself. To share it is to reduce it.

In my book, Poesia Canhestra, I touch upon the topic of simplifying one’s existence in order to share it, and have that become again expanded and made complex through someone’s interpretation and internalization. And that works just fine when it’s about art and poetry and all those subjective things. But I’ve been comparing that to literal events lately and finding it to be much more of a struggle.

Don’t get me wrong, I am an over-explainer by nature, and so I feel that even within myself I can’t holistically understand anything, no matter how much I try. And boy, I try. But I vividly remember a conversation during the one semester of University I attended in person. It was a rough semester. My sister’s boyfriend and I attended the same uni, so he would often drive us there, early in the morning, around an hour-long commute. And this particular day, we were so utterly exhausted that we were dead-quiet the whole way, and when we got there, just looking at the distance between the parking lot and the building destroyed any ounce of motivation we had left. We were burnt out, day after day of unpleasant and unproductive experiences. We were unhappy, and struggling, and just so damn tired. Alas, we dragged ourselves over, and he said, “I didn’t think this would be so hard. It feels like I’ve been doing this forever, and it doesn’t even matter.” And I responded, “All of this, just for it to become ‘I graduated at this uni in this year.’ “ He still brings up that comment every now and then. All the daily strife, the details, everything, becomes a sentence in the future. I dated this person, I lived in this country, I graduated from this place…

And because of that, I feel like we often don’t give each other enough credit for what we’ve done. Yes, we recognize big accomplishments, and we understand when others go through rough patches, but I’m talking about even the simplest of things. Maybe this is just my mental state showing, but I find everything hard. When someone says, “I went to the dentist for a cleaning”, this does not sound like a big deal at all, and it isn’t. But just the thought of handling insurance, booking an appointment (god forbid, by phone), dealing with the wait time, filling in medical history, getting appointment reminders, maybe noting that in your calendar, potentially having to call off work which in itself can be broken down into many other tasks, then wake up the day of and feel ten times the normal amount of pressure regarding your dental hygiene in the morning, then having your routine disrupted around this appointment, and getting changed to go, and driving there, and interacting with the employees, and filling out paperwork, and waiting in the room, getting called, getting cleaning done to your mouth, then paying, then driving back home and having to go back to your usual routine even though your mouth just had two whole hands in it. SIGH. That takes a whole lot more energy than “I went to the dentist” could ever handle. I have to book a trip, and just thinking about the logistics of that makes me not want to go at all.

I don’t know if this makes sense to anyone else reading this, but I just felt like sharing that sometimes, even the most mundane of things are really daunting, and you can’t really let that come across. The dissonance between how much of a big deal everything feels to me, and what I’m able to properly convey, it’s both frustrating and amusing. And even as I write this, it bothers me that I haven’t quite expressed my thoughts well enough.

Oh well. Anyway, I wrote an essay.