Unproductive Discourse

When Italians speak to me in Italian, I know just what they're saying.

Italians are expressive, and their language is close to French and Spanish, which I've studied, and this triangulation results in me understanding much of what they're saying.

But I can't speak Italian back to them.

I have recognition of Italian but not production. I can understand it but cannot communicate in a way that will be understood.

This happens with relational language as well. If relationship is a technology like speech, relational assumptions are languages, like Italian and English.

Sometimes a person comes at me from another relational assumption. I say they come at me because this is the energy, as if I am doing something wrong, when I am simply doing something they cannot recognize. It's as if every sentence I wrote in English had a phonetic Italian dupe, and they read the sounds as Italian without knowing what I mean in English.

It would likely sound like nonsense.

This is why I never insist on my perspective and I do not care to be right in the eyes of any others, especially strangers.

When they speak to me about what they think I'm saying, they reveal to me their relational assumptions. Their relational assumptions are based in a reality I don't occupy, but I do recognize. I do not produce anything these assumptions value, but I recognize what they are attempting to convey.

One of these assumptions is "I can know what's happening for and with this other person based on how I perceive them."

I get this one most often in social media comments, I can tell that someone is sold on the idea that their perception of me is indicative of my reality. They expect me to answer for their perception of me, and when I don't, it reinforces their perception of me.

Being free means being ok with all of this, watching it happening, knowing I cannot produce anything in that language to communicate what is real for me. I let it go as it happens, seeing another person in a set of assumptions foreign to me, accepting difference in the world, accepting the other's relationship to our difference and selecting how I will be.

I know there is very little I can know in this world. I find peace in the unknowing and the unknowable, but I also know the terror of it. I would leave anyone who wants to know in their own experience, knowing they won't find satisfactory knowns from me in any case.