You Can Find Me in the Corner
Guarding My Soul From the Prying Eyes of Strangers
By Amina Ahmed
As someone who has previously advocated heavily on venturing beyond our comfort zone, the following contents may be a tad hypocritical. However, I am also a firm believer that binaries in thought are reductive and small-minded. Thus, it should come as no surprise when I tell you that sometimes… it is perfectly acceptable to recoil from the unknown. These uncharted territories are undeniably frightening and confusing, and sometimes, we are just not ready to handle them. I’ll be the first to say that every now and then I’m a bit of a wimp! I still have one of my siblings take the spider out of my room, I'd have to be knocked out in order to sky-dive, but, most of all, I’m afraid of speaking—especially to people I’ve never met before.
I’ve always found speaking to be difficult. People could simply come up with what they wished to convey on the spot, and that was something I never understood. With an endless pool of words to choose from, I never quite got the hang of picking the right ones that I wanted to say. Sure, maybe there is no right way of saying something, but whatever I vocalize on the spot never seems to fully encompass what I mean to say (hence, here I am, using my preferred mode of communication: writing). This difficulty of mine is only amplified around strangers due to the worst imaginable socio-cultural creation by humankind yet: small talk. The surface-level and ambiguous nature of the conversation is simply unsettling; there’s no way for me to know whether or not you truly care to hear about my day or not.
Small-talk has always been a pet-peeve of mine, even from a young age. In the Oromo community, greetings would often take this form, but I never understood the point of the conversation since it was just repeated surface-level questions answered with equally surface-level enthusiasm. Speaking was just as difficult for me in the Oromo tongue as it was in English because of the ambiguous nature of the underlying meanings that I couldn’t always understand.
Why not bypass the frivolous conversation and speak in honest terms from the start? In an ideal world where social interactions catered to overthinkers like me, I wish there was an unspoken contract to new friendships. For instance, pinky-promise me that you’ll be honest on how your day went, and I promise to eagerly listen and tell you my genuine thoughts. Or tell me about your greatest passions of the world, and I’ll tell you about my dreams at night. Heck, if we want to have a juicy gossip session, tell me your deepest darkest secret and I’ll tell you mine. However, the thing about relationships in this society is that there is no contract or guarantee. There’s no way for me to ensure that you are putting in as much effort and vulnerability into this as I am. It is a gamble to reveal the ugliness of ourselves and hope the other doesn’t run away, and that is simply a risk I’m not willing to take.
And so, I think that is why speaking is so difficult for me. Not only because of the endless possible combinations of words, but also the access to your soul that speaking provides. My thoughts and emotions would be on display for others to gawk and judge. And I know that’s the pessimistic side of me speaking—not every person on this Earth would recoil at who I am, but the possibility of it is still frightening. So for now, I am throwing in the towel. I am choosing my words carefully behind a screen and selecting those who can and cannot have access to me. The person that I am now simply isn’t ready to wear her treasured thoughts and emotions on her sleeve, but maybe one day I will become the person that does.