This is an OLD post from 2001, written by a good friend of mine who seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth. Joel, if you’re out there… This one’s for you.
Quick warning: there is some swearing in this post. I don’t normally like to swear in my posts, but I also didn’t want to ruin the original post.
Learn to shut the fuck up
Originally posted Jun 27, 2001. Written by Joel Etherton.
That is a lesson I don’t think I’ve ever learned. That’s probably one of the large reasons for this site. I’ve never learned when it is appropriate just to shut my fucking mouth and keep it to myself.
I’m sure my intentions always seem grand or noble (or some other austerely connoted word), but the result always seems to be the same. Lack of appropriate silence at appropriate times always causes an inevitable alienation of the other party.
This alienation inevitably leads to continued silences, but silences of the wrong kind. Here are some of the silences that you make encounter in the event you don’t learn to shut the fuck up:
- There is the angry silence. This is the steaming silence where an offended party attemps to make the sound of his/her breathing as audible as possible by minimizing all other audible actions.
- There is the hurt silence. This is encompassed by a general malaise and mopiness on the part of the offended party. This silence is characterized by muffled noises such as speech, motion, action, entertainment volumes, etc. This silence is extremely volatile and may erupt into boisterous sobbing and emotion.
- There is the betrayed silence. This is the silence an offended party will belay on you when they feel you have abused their trust in some manner. This silence is characterized by a complete lack of speech. Other noises hence become much louder by comparison simply because of this obvious lack. This one rapidly descends into the angry silence. If this occurs, groveling may be your only recourse.
- The worst of all silences is the cheery silence. This silence is characterized not by the lack of speech, but by the presence of misleading speech. This is evident in the manner in which the offended party addresses you with cheerful greetings, happiness, and smiles. It is very difficult to determine if you are being given the cheerful silence because the offended party will refuse to tell you. In fact, the offended party will often resume cheeriness and shrug off requests for information as trivial. The only positive method of identification for this brand of silence is 3 questions. Ask the offended party 3 questions that are not out of the ordinary, but that the party would normally elaborate on. If the answers to these questions are single word (or worse, single syllable) replies, then you are in serious shit. There is no known cure for cheery silence.
Anyone can be punished with a silence. Often, a silence is the most brutal form of punishment because it assumes guilt. Worse, a silence leaves the offender without a sense of what went wrong. This often lets the imagination run wild on an insane trek to find out what it was that caused the silence, but in the end only leads to the destructive mental ramblings of an idiot.
When confronted by a silence, it is often best to wait the silence out. A silence can often be generated by an offended party’s need for privacy or unwillingness to confront the problem. Forcing the issue will only make it more difficult for the offended party, and your chances of increasing the silence go up on an exponential level. While it sounds completely stupid, often waiting the issue out will bring out the greatest efforts of communication. Eventually the cause of the silence will build in the offended party to a “boiling point” at which that person will bring forth a confrontation.
Don’t take the idea of forcing the issue to lightly. You must at least ask once what it is that you did wrong before you begin the waiting game. If you do not, you will be considered inconsiderate, and a new silence will begin for a new reason (basically back to square one).
Under no circumstances should you apologize for an action unless you are clear what action it was that caused the silence. The following statement could land you in a world of shit: “Whatever it is that I did, I’m sorry”. This may seem on the surface to be a very apologetic statement, but it is extremely ingenuine. It shows that you’re not sorry for what you did, but you are sorry for what happened because of this. Sometimes this may bring an offended party out of silence, but only to scream at you for 15 or 20 minutes. On the rare occassion this venting of emotion will ease the silence and help solve the problem. It is very rare. I suggest not using the global “apology”.
A lack of appropriate silence on your part can cause an inadvertent excess of silence on the part of someone else. Don’t fall victim to your own stupidity. Learn when to shut the fuck up.
Right now, I’m going to shut the fuck up.
One Comment
Hey Lesley, just finished reading your entire post. First off, the angry silence about how breathing dominates all sounds, I almost laughed because I don’t see it happen very often but when people do do it…they are pissed.
Also the part about being insincere when apologizing. I think people are very uncomfortable dealing with negative emotions between two people so they would rather apologize than understand their mistake. If we don’t know what the mistake was…we’ll never be able to correct it.
Swearing in blogs is okay once in a while