Ever since I can remember, I’ve been painfully aware of people’s listening skills, how most of the time they aren’t listening to a word I say.
So I just stopped talking.
As a child, I knew when my mom was busy, that she had other things to tend to, that I was bothering her. Mom was a good listener but wasn’t good at dropping whatever chore she was in the process of doing to listen. And with an older sister who had daily crises, I just couldn’t compete.
I said little at home.
In kindergarten, I started out a chatterbox until a teacher told me to shut up—not in those words, but my talking, even in an appropriate setting when we were supposed to share, bothered her, annoyed her.
I made sure I never spoke again unless called upon to do so, and even then, I only shared the minimum, never a syllable more. All my teachers would tell my parents that I was shy. While I was an introvert, in those early days I wasn’t shy, only preferred the company of animals to people. And for good reason: animals never told my five-year-old self to shut up.
In fourth grade, I was part of a hand-selected group of students to increase counseling awareness. This was back in the Eighties, so mental health was mostly a non-issue. We talked about bullying and kindness, and how to welcome new students to the school. Counselors pushed their services, wanting to make sure we spread the word that counselors were always there for each and every student.
I was fascinated with this concept: an adult would just sit and listen to a kid talk. No distractions, no overbearing older sister demanding the spotlight, no multitasking. The counselor would be one hundred percent focused on me.
Even though I had no pressing matters to talk about, I would have an adult’s undivided attention for a whole thirty minutes. Maybe I would even tell her how I felt no one heard me when I talked. As a counselor, certainly she could help me.
I had to wait outside her office for almost ten minutes. She rushed to the door, digging for her keys. A sigh escaped her lips when she didn’t pick the right one on the first try. She said, “I completely forgot I had a student appointment this afternoon.” Even on paper I was easily forgotten.
Her cluttered office matched her personality, dust bunnies collected along the corners of the red carpet. She plopped in her chair as though she hadn’t sat down for hours. After taking off her glasses and running her fingers through her short, thick, gray hair, she signed my pass. I tried to make myself comfortable in a hard wooden chair. “Since this is our first session, I’ll have you start by telling me a little bit about yourself.”
There wasn’t much to tell, but I told her about my family and how I spent my time at home. As I talked, I watched her eyes grow heavy, as though her lids were made of lead and she could no longer keep them up. Her head even started to fall to the side. Then I heard a soft snore emanate from her open mouth. Silenced, I sat there, watching her sleep. Was I really that boring? Or worse, so inconsequential that anything I had to say was irrelevant, never needing to be heard in the first place?
With over ten minutes left, I plucked my pass off her desk and left. Another teacher yelled at me for dawdling in the hallway. I only shook my head in disbelief. The whole incident would have made a funny plot on Seinfeld, but it was hard to find the humor in it since I was only about ten years old.
Even as an adult, talking to professionals is the hardest task of any day—they don’t listen either, having already concluded what the problem is, what you want, or how to proceed. When you interrupt them to try to clarify anything, then you become a “problem.” Maybe even a Karen, stubborn, emotional, irrational.
I’ve become one of those socially inept partygoers that either say nothing or interrupt others’ conversations. The only way I can get a in into a conversation is to interrupt, otherwise people talk over me. Most times, I just don’t talk. If I do find myself with a possible listener, I suffer from verbal diarrhea, oversharing as I cram in everything I haven’t said in weeks.
I didn’t work fulltime until my son was in middle school. Being at work for eight hours is socially exhausting—I never find enough moments during the day to recharge my battery, to decompress from an extroverted world. I say little, watching staff and students interact. As a teacher, standing in front of the classroom is the most painful part of my day because I know that students aren’t listening, that only a fraction of them are paying attention. I teach at a juvenile detention center, so I usually don’t have to lead a full class, even reducing the number of whole class activities due to lack of participation. Students all work individually anyway, but I’ve now found it difficult to sit down one-on-one and teach English. I stop teaching the second the student stops listening. When I ask what I just said, the student usually can’t answer. As I’ve aged, I’ve become increasingly frustrated with our incompetent listening skills.
But the staff is more humorous as I watch them talk to each other. Usually it’s one talking, the other just sitting there, looking around the room with eyes glazed over, yet the talker continues to tell the story, their passion ignorant of social cues. What’s even funnier is when the non-listening staff will roll their eyes to me, admit to not listening and wondering why the other kept talking, yet when the roles are reversed—when the listener becomes the talker—they think people are listening to their drivel. Our hypocrisy is befuddling, how we assume the topic of our conversation is worthy of listening, but someone else’s isn’t.
I refuse to speak to people who are looking at their phones. At work, I won’t speak until my intended listener has stopped multitasking—men, especially, cannot listen while in the middle of something else. Most times, I won’t even bother to say anything, just do whatever anyway. It’s so much easier to ask for forgiveness than permission, because when seeking permission, one must have an active listener.
I’ve conducted an experiment several times in a variety of places: on coworkers, students, family, and friends. I stop talking, mid-sentence, when I know they aren’t listening. Most of the time, the “listener” doesn’t even acknowledge I stopped talking. Other times, they may say, “You were saying?” To which I reply, “Nothing.” I should post such an experiment online, turn it into a trend.
Sometimes I do chat ad nauseum, when I’ve tired of listening to someone else’s stories, but I know they aren’t listening nor do they care. It’s funny how fast a conversation ends when the talker is forced into silence by someone else’s verbal noise.
I appreciate Sheldon’s honesty when he tells his girlfriend Amy, “I would like to stop listening to you and start talking.” At least he was listening, and now has grown bored and wants to talk about himself. That’s more than I can say for most people—I’m not sure they were ever even listening to begin with.
Listening and talking are no longer tit-for-tat. Maybe they never were. But our reliance on cell phones, our need to keep up in the digital world has made us fall behind in the physical world, the world in which someone is standing in front of us, wanting to talk face-to-face. We’re so concerned with what some faceless person posted online that we waste our time replying, arguing points, attacking opinions that don’t match our own. Meanwhile, our children, our parents, our loved ones, our coworkers, and clients occupy our same space and we won’t give them a minute of our undivided attention.