If I’m in a relationship where I’m pretending to know things that I don’t know, or am agreeing with opinions that I don’t really agree with in order to be accepted or loved, I know I’ve become a puppet of my ego and have to step away. I need to course-correct and figure out why I’m being inauthentic. When you’re afraid to be wrong or pretend you know and like things you don’t, you end up in some pretty sticky situations. In the past this instinct led to disastrous ordeals like having to read a guy’s poetry and going to hockey games preceded by an hour of Googling “how is hockey played?” in the parking lot.
Once I started saying “I don’t know” and “I’m wrong,” I may have felt dumber, but I also felt more free. My ego fights me every time, but how am I ever actually going to be right if I can’t admit that I’m wrong? I just recently finally admitted that for the longest time I had been saying “let’s play it by year” instead of “let’s play it by ear.” My whole life I heard the expression and could never tell if it was ear or year, so I guessed year (the one that makes the least amount of sense) and stuck with it. I know, if I had just dedicated thirty seconds of critical thinking to how ridiculous it would be to check in once a year while making plans with someone, I’m sure I would have deduced that it was ear, but I was too busy in my twenties making bad choices to use that kind of logic. When I first heard the expression, if I had simply asked, “Did you just say year or ear?” I would have saved myself a decade of sounding like a cryptic moron every time I made plans with someone. That said, to everyone in my life who heard me repeatedly misuse this phrase for years and never corrected me, you are my enemy for eternity.
In a culture where people are valued by how many articles they read that morning, what school they went to, who knows the most statistics, I say we do something radical and resist the default to need to know everything and be the smartest person in the room. I think deglamorizing knowing everything is the way we can actually really get some insight. In a time when being smug and self-righteous is almost stylish, I’d love to figure out how to make saying “I don’t know” sexy, and not in a gross submissive schoolgirl-porn-scene type of way. We live in an age where we get our news from Instagram memes and our crazy uncles on Facebook, so even the most well-intentioned people are misinformed every now and then. I imagine admitting we can sometimes be idiots is the only way to avoid becoming an idiocracy.
I feel we’ve evolved into a society that prides expediency over accuracy, quantity over quality, decibel level over content. Some of the growth I’m the most proud of in the last couple of years has been developing the ability to shut up and listen, to ask questions instead of making assumptions. I’m hoping this is how I can stop myself from mindlessly perpetuating stereotypes and relying on generalizations to feel safe or smart.
I don’t know a lot of things. I don’t know how my fingers on this keyboard are making words on a big white document that I was supposed to turn in to my editor a week ago. I don’t know how they bind all these book pages together and make them all stay stuck. Is it super glue or tiny yarn? Dunno. And if you’re listening to an audiotape of this, I don’t know why I sound so nasal. I don’t even know how cell phones work, and one is in my hand most of the time I’m awake and half the time I’m asleep. Apparently the signal goes to space and back, but I know that only because of the punch line of a Louis C.K. stand-up bit.
The point is, I can’t begin to pretend I know how a woman feels on the other side of the planet. I barely know how I feel half the time, so I’m better served trying to figure that out so I can lead by example, because as Vera says, I can’t give away what I don’t have.
I’d love to somehow make a dent in contributing to all of us stopping the cycle of pretending to know things we don’t know. Maybe the first step in doing that is ending this book because if I write too much more, I’ll be pretending I have more to say than I actually do. I’ve given you pretty much everything I know, and maybe for now, that’s just going to have to be okay.
Ultimately, I think writing this book and admitting that I wasn’t fine is how I got to a place where I actually was, well, truly fine. That doesn’t make sense? Fine.
In the end, only three things matter:
how much you loved, how gently you lived, and how gracefully you let go of things not meant for you.
—JACK KORNFIELD