The Illusion of Being Understood. A personal Reckoning.

I graduated from university with majors in English and psychology.
This dude was geared to infuse the mundane thoughts and creative exploits of everyone “out there” with his newfound armamentarium of excellence.

But first, before I could take my brilliant insights and skills into the world, I had to pay the piper: conscription.
That scary shit that had been looming over me for years finally pulled me into its bowels.
One thing I can say about military communication is how precise it was.
Not creative, not enlightening or even conducive to effective processes, but it was precise.
Regardless of the flaws, there was no room left for arbitrary interpretation.
And if you screwed up, you had no quarter for arguments.

Then, after I was discharged, I went to teach for a while, because I had studied on a bursary.
Much to my disappointment, there wasn’t always an abundance of minds eager to be taught, eager to absorb knowledge.
English isn’t my mother tongue, and sometimes, when I revert to what must sound like gibberish to others, I experience that some actually pay attention.
However, even that strategic move did not work in my classroom.
The vast majority of those learners were ESL, English-as-a-second-language speakers. Noise was par for the course.
The big challenge was not to enrich young minds with the intricacies of Shakespeare, Yeats, Keats, or even contemporaries like Stephen King or the like.
I didn’t experience those movie moments: analyzing text, pulling out the weight of being human from those sacred works.
Sucking the marrow from life.
Dead Poets Society. Um, nope.
No, it was more a question of the battle, the constant battle, of getting them to align verb and subject, getting them to say “I am” instead of “I are.”

When I left teaching, I fumbled into the absurdity of corporate communication, and…
I think I’ll stop there. Books can be written about the inconsistencies and vagaries of corporate communication.

But there is a takeaway right there. For somebody who was supposedly well-versed, well-schooled in communication, I realized one thing.
Even before you start talking, even before you start presenting, the chances are very good that people have already misunderstood you.

So it’s not only that a lot always gets lost in translation; that also happens.
But even within fairly homogeneous groups that share a lot of similarities, so much information also gets lost in ego, in what it is to be human.

The great joke about communication is that people think it simply happens.
They think words land as intended, that meaning transfers like data packets: clean, complete, obedient.
The truth is that most conversations are already broken before the first syllable leaves your mouth.
People don’t listen to what you say. They listen to the version of you they’ve built in their heads.
They listen through their wounds, their insecurities, their personal mythologies.

Meaning doesn’t get lost in language. It gets lost in people.
But I also do what others do: I bend their words into something that either suits my needs or not.
The minute I began understanding that, I got less fussed about clarity, pronunciation, enunciation, and vocabulary policing.
Communication is a beautiful gamble.
All the good stuff, like polished grammar and confident delivery, positions you to experience a better chance of beating the odds, but if the dice roll the “wrong” way, you’re cooked.
Within a world where the fracture of disconnection plagues me, I can still hope for that gamble, that rare moment that does pay off: meeting someone where we are, and not where we want them to be.