I think it’s a commonly known enough idea that our language, the tools that we use to describe our experiences, will also necessarily color our internal perceptions of said experiences. If it’s not a common idea to you, or if it’s something you’d never considered, I invite you to take a bit of time, and try to consider the ramifications of such an idea.

This idea is not a one-way street, however, and to illustrate this point, I invite you to imagine an often downcast friend or coworker who is frequently dejected about that old bastard known as “himself.” It shouldn’t be hard for you to imagine a guy like this apologizing for having to borrow one of your cigarettes or paperclips while you weren’t around for him to ask you directly, and saying that he’s “stupid” for not simply waiting for your presence to ask if it would be alright, then muttering to himself that he “shouldn’t call himself such things,” all the while maintaining an aura so dismal that you wish you could towel off whatever gunk he seems to believe he has accumulated.

The point here is that some ideas are resistant to language changes, due to the strength of the internal state of the speaker, and how these strong ideas will always overexert their control on the speaker’s half-conscious whispers and exclamations.

However, many ideas are not held so firmly in ourselves, and these are the ideas about which I intend to talk, today.

I’m going to run the risk of saying something tactless here, but I promise it’s for a good reason. Here it is: I have found myself, over the years, romantically, sexually, or intimately involved with what seems to me to be a relatively large number of people. As I’m sure you can imagine, this fact does not bring me a great deal of satisfaction, as it almost necessitates the similar fact that I have “failed” in these relationships more often than most people have even tried.

Okay, that should be the hardest part of this to read, and it’s out of the way now. Thank you for bearing with me.

Over the course of years, I find myself falling into and out of touch with various friends. I began feeling what I can now describe as sexual intent for another person approximately 13 years ago, and since 13 years ago, I have not maintained a consistent friend over the entire time-period to whom I tell all my so-called endeavors. If we shorten it to half, 6 and a half years, there’s still no one. 3 and a quarter years, we’re getting closer, but still no. I consider my exploits with intimacy and human closeness to be one of the few driving forces that make me truly want to keep living, and therefore they rank very highly on my list of “Important Things.” Yet there’s no one with whom I share all details. And I don’t just mean arbitrary details, I mean the things that I care about. The things that I have some unspeakable desire to share, the things that I almost feel I need someone else to know.

Which gets us closer to my main issue. I often find that the person with whom I can share the details of this or that exploit is a person with whom I have maintained consistent, if somewhat temporally spotty communications and connection for a longer period of time. However, there is a very real chance that this person (henceforth, despite its phraseological issues, henceforth “friend”) will have a complete and utter unfamiliarity with any details about that day’s exploit’s consort, (henceforth, despite innumerable issues, henceforth “lover”) and due to this unfamiliarity, when my friend is presented with some morsel of information that I felt the need to share about my present lover, they may, the friend, ask if so-and-so is the one I had mentioned “from the skating rink.” At which point I, at risk of coming off as someone who thinks highly of themselves and the frequency and quality of their exploits, am forced to reply that, in fact, “that was someone else.”

And now, in its final unadulterated form, I can present my main issue. How do I refer to my lovers to a friend who has never heard of them? I oscillate between such gauche terms as “this girl I’m in love with” and “my friend” and “my ex” and “this girl I’ve been seeing” or just “this girl,” or worse yet, a more specific but still un-proper-named epithet like “calculus girl” or “piano girl” that may arise after repeated referential use, all of which have such differing connotations they make my head spin as a prospective text-sender upon axes my head did not know existed. Using a first name somehow also feels wrong, and doesn’t get around the issue of how, if it’s the first time I’m telling my friend about this particular lover, I need to use some kind of contextual introduction, as I believe using a first name with no context given to someone who doesn’t know the person with a first name is simply inconsiderate. At least toss a “my friend” in there as a prefix.

When composing such a text, I consider a number of things. I consider my relationship with my lover, and for example, if I feel a sense of unrequitedness, I am more likely to describe her as “this girl I’m in love with,” but if I am in a state of comfort or long-term familiarity, I’m much more likely to describe her as “my friend”, even if I think of her deeply romantically. I also consider my relationship to the friend who’s receiving the text, and for example, if I feel like they’re going through a rough time with something interpersonal (then I probably wouldn’t say anything about these topics at all, but if I did) then I would almost always say “my friend,” and pretty much never “this girl I’m in love with,” simply to shy away from a mention of romantic love that I am trying not to remind them exists, whilst also getting my strong need for sharing out of my system in a way that can appease us both.

And now, this is where we can return to our idea from earlier, the idea of language informing our internal beliefs and vice versa. For many years of my life, I considered essentially all of my experiences to be for the purpose of acquiring a good story to tell, later, or at least considering everything, internally, in terms of its composition as a story. Thusly, my problem has become that while I am “experiencing” things, I struggle to be present, as I’m too focused on writing diary entries in my head that never get written down, or if they do, they’re dissatisfying; or having half-baked conversations with ideas of people in my head, where the people often say the worst thing that I can imagine, which these days is further from “You’re a terrible person, and I hate you,” and closer to “Oh wow. Anyway,” or any other fundamentally uninteresting response.

So I frequently find in myself, that when I am with a lover, I am attempting to figure out how I would word a brief, punchy text message description of whatever I am doing to some friend or another, or else diary entry, or else “quick way to think of it” for just the peace of mind of my own thoughts. How would I describe it? How would I get it across without being too wordy or base? Are there any misconceptions that could arise from using “my friend” or “this girl that I’m in love with” that would justify the use of one, the other, or a different one altogether? Does this particular friend who happened to pop into my mind for an imaginary text message have any idiosyncrasies that would justify the use of some or another description? Or worst of all, can I easily imagine a negative reaction from said friend, causing me to start the entire process over with someone else?

Sometimes I receive texts like these from one of my friends, and I wonder what inside them determined how to refer to their lover, about their special one. But one of the things that strikes me most about this entire situation is how truly incapable a short, pithy text is of communicating really just anywhere close to what it is I’m trying to communicate. This text that gets composed on ethereal air and often doesn’t have an addressee has multiple legitimate hazardous effects on me. For one, I am less present while I’m attempting to compose it. The sad truth is that the beauty of a moment strikes me, and I am, then, forcibly taken away from it in some sense, some fragile part of me cursed merely to describe, and never to experience. For two, these descriptions can all too easily fall into the dangerous trap of trying to put something in a box where it doesn’t belong. By identifying too strongly with our verbal notions of ideas, we start to think that these words, meant as tools to describe, are the capital-T Truth, and these words, formerly servile but now a cruel master, form limitations on our rich inner worlds, and on our clear perceptions of an outer world.

In describing things to others, we often seek validation of our own ideas, we seek comfort, we want to feel like we understand something for certain, and we are trying to hold on tightly to something that is, by nature, unholdable. We want to feel 100% certain of the value of whatever experience it is we’re trying to describe, and we describe it to others for this positive feedback, sometimes even for the smallest possible positive feedback, that of any response at all. But I’m sure all of you know as well as I do that you can twist words, often unconsciously, into all sorts of shapes, and make them sound good, make them sound right, or agreeable. It’s not terribly hard to paint anyone as a hero or a villain, regardless of their actions, by manipulating the manner in which you speak about them, and we do this constantly, unconsciously, to ourselves, and to others, but because words are the best thing we’ve got, we treat them like a perfect tool. And if you think you’re above this, I recommend you try paying closer attention.

Here’s the thing, for me at least, and maybe for you too. It’s an ill-adjusted pattern. There’s some part of me that wants something, and it doesn’t know what it wants, but it tries to find it by reliving, by telling stories about something it cares about, it tries to find it by validation in others’ understandings of vague situations, but none of these things truly help it. I think, in the end, these little reaches out are for a kind of comfort. I think that when I text somebody something like “I just got done hanging out with the girl I’m in love with, we went ice skating and got funnel cakes,” there’s a true, genuine sadness in me. There’s a longing for that experience that’s gone, taken forcefully from me by time, and there’s a subtler sadness that I wish I could’ve been more present to experience it. Memory is unreliable, and shallow, and when I send these texts, I am looking for something in the present. I think, honestly, that I just want a hand against my cheek.

And now I guess I’ll go to sleep with the girl whose bed I’m in. My friend? As I write this, she’s been asleep for hours. I could write that I’m in love with her, but what would that really tell you? I could recall countless stories about her and me, but in the end, I think I’d still feel the same way inside.