Did the splinter choose this?
thoughts on being annoying and being truthful
Consider the splinter first from the perspective of the giant into whose heel it has become embedded. It stings! It slows her down! It distracts, makes her mind spin and rage.
She wants it out, but, she thinks, I have neither the time nor the narrow fingers for extraction.
Perhaps she can continue onward and just ignore it. Perhaps it will work its way out on its own. Or perhaps it will wriggle its way up into her foot so deeply, it will become a part of her and they’ll both be ok with that.
Down we go now to the splinter itself, a speck that didn’t mean to fasten itself to a giant. It didn’t mean to come unfastened from the wood from whence it came. It didn’t mean to be as annoying as it will most definitely be, and for who knows how long!
But that’s what happened.
The splinter irritates not because it wants out; it irritates because the body in which it is stuck wants it out. Its own irascibility has been forced upon the splinter!
Again, the splinter did not choose this.
(I do see how the splinter might be an imperfect metaphor. But aren’t metaphors imperfect by design? If a metaphor were too neat, I’m not sure it would let us see things in new ways, but rather only old familiar ones.)
Do you ever feel that way? That you have been forced into being the most annoying version of yourself?
Parenting feels like this to me. (I sometimes can’t believe how capable of irking another person I am until I hear myself ask who left their crusty bowl tucked by the side of the couch like a mouse that a cat got to, even though I know very well who did this.) I didn’t mean to be like this, I tell my children. Grown-upness has thrust it upon me!
I often feel like a splinter, like something that is neither extraordinary nor welcome, an everyday pest on various subjects. I’m sure I’m not alone.
I can’t help it, I want to say. This is just the way my mind works, this is just the way my anxiety works, this is just how I am! I know the way I talk about [insert intense subject area], I’d do best to keep to myself. And a lot of the time, I do. I furrow my brow, I clench my teeth, I fume inwardly, and then, the storm passes.
This feeling and the way I’m sure I’m not alone in stifling it reminds me of something I read a few weeks ago in Katie Kitamura’s novel, Intimacies.
“But none of us are able to really see the world we are living in—this world, occupying as it does the contradiction between its banality (the squat wall of the Detention Center, the bus running along its ordinary route) and its extremity (the cell and the man inside the cell), is something that we see only briefly and then do not again for a long time, if ever. It is surprisingly easy to forget what you have witnessed, the horrifying image or the voice speaking the unspeakable, in order to exist in the world we must and we do forget, we live in a state of I know but I do not know.”
Surviving in the midst of horrors nearby and remote does seem to require a certain amount of forgetting.
But I worry about letting too much go unremarked upon.
Are “none of us able” to “really see the world we are living in,” or are at least some of us simply unwilling? Can we will ourselves to see and say more?
I don’t know.
But welcome to this substack, or, better yet, this STUBstack (can a stubbed toe be its own kind of splinter?). Right now, I imagine this as a quiet internet place in which I write about annoying subjects, most small and some less small, others the ones we “must” forget, but maybe shouldn’t.
An example: when I tell people that I try very hard to not shop on Amazon, I know I’ve gone full splinter. Some people are into it, some have been emphatically shopping local long before I began making my own concerted effort, but a lot of people hate it. It makes them feel bad. (Like a splinter.)
I started drinking diet soda again after not doing so for ten years, and if someone were to remind me about, say, the global harm corporate cola companies cause, not to mention how sketchy substitute sugars are, I would be annoyed and embarrassed. But I couldn’t disagree, either.
Most of the time, truthful things, as a great many people smarter than I have said in a much better way, are not what we want to hear.
In her book of essays, Dust and Light: On the Art of Fact in Fiction, Andrea Barrett writes,
“I might finally admit to myself that the words with which we attempt to render the truths of our lives can be endlessly revised, but not the life itself.”
We don’t just curate selves for others to see online; we do this in real life and we do this in our own minds. We tell ourselves who we are and who we want to be, and we leave inconvenient things out and we forget, as Kitamura wrote, what we “have witnessed.”
It is the splinter that reminds us. The truth is under there, no matter how we edit around it.
Back soon to bother you again.
In the meantime, the World Central Kitchen provides food relief to communities in need everywhere, but of all their current distributions, only one has been forced to stop for the second time as of July 20th: relief in Gaza. The World Food Programme says that 100% of people in Gaza “face acute levels of food insecurity.” It looks like famine is imminent. They aren’t starving themselves. We can advocate for an end to Israel’s blockade so aid can come through. If you haven’t called your reps this week, it might feel good to do it today.