The Things We Think And Do Not Say.

A Personal Essay

I've spent years telling agents that character isn't installed, it's uncovered. Then a stranger on a television show handed me a book, without knowing she'd done it, and the principle came home to collect.

I should tell you first that my writing stuttered and stumbled for decades. That's not modesty; it's an audit. I wrote constantly, because writing is how I think, and for most of that time the words came out wearing a suit that didn't fit. Too serious. Too clever by half. All my life, people who cared about me have offered me the same two pieces of feedback, delivered kindly and received badly: don't take yourself so seriously, and your intelligence gets in the way. I heard them. I filed them. I kept writing in the suit.

You can go a long way in a suit that doesn't fit. Books, articles, a career built on words. But there's a specific weariness that comes from being fluent in a voice that's only nearly yours, the way there's a weariness in speaking a second language all day, even when you're good at it. You get everything said and nothing quite meant.

Then, one ordinary evening, I watched Anne Lamott as a guest on Wild Card with Rachel Martin.

The accident

Nothing about it was momentous. Nobody lit candles. A writer I hadn't read sat across from a host I'd tuned into on an unremarkable day, and something in the way she spoke, with candor and kindness braided together so tightly you couldn't tell where one ended, made me sit forward. She was devastatingly honest and completely unarmed at the same time. I'd never seen those two things share a chair before.

I bought Bird by Bird. I'm 80% of the way through it as I write this, and I recognise myself on most of its pages, which is a strange sensation, like finding your own handwriting in a stranger's diary.

Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. - Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

Because here's what Lamott actually gave me, and it took me a while to name it. She didn't give me a new voice. She gave me permission to write in the one I already had. The candor was already mine. The kindness was already mine; they've been two of my stated values for as long as I've had stated values. What was missing wasn't material. It was the nerve to stop dressing it up. The two lifelong criticisms dissolved on contact with her pages, because Lamott doesn't take herself seriously precisely so that she can take the truth seriously. Her self-deprecation isn't weakness; it's a delivery system. The reader's guard drops, and the hard thing walks in through the open door. The intelligence still does all the work. It just wears softer shoes.

The irony, arriving on schedule

Now, the part that made me laugh out loud, in the way true things are sometimes funny.

I have spent years, on stages and pages, telling real estate agents one thing above all others: character isn't installed, it's uncovered. Stop bolting on personas. Chisel away what isn't you. The masterpiece is already in the marble. I have said it so many times I could say it in my sleep, and apparently I did, because I never once noticed it applying to my own prose.

The work we do in service of others is never only in service of others. That's the irony, and I don't think it's a design flaw. I think it's the design. You set out to free other people from suits that don't fit, and one evening, without warning, the message turns around, looks at you, and asks about yours. The teacher gets enrolled. The sculptor discovers the chisel has been working both ways the entire time, shaping the hands that held it. Everything I'd built to help agents become congruent had been rehearsing me, patiently, for my own turn.

The ripples we discount

Consider the chain for a moment, because it's worth following. Rachel Martin books a guest. Anne Lamott turns up and is simply, thoroughly herself for an hour. Somewhere across the world, a man in Durban watches, buys a book, and decades of stuttering resolve into a voice. Neither of those women knows this happened. Neither will likely ever know. The ripple travelled anyway.

And this is the thing I most want to say to you, whoever you are, reading this. We imagine our ripples aren't particularly worthy. We assume the conversation we had, the honest thing we wrote, the way we treated the buyer who never bought, dissipated somewhere just past the edge of our vision. It didn't. Ripples are largely unseen by the person who makes them; that's not evidence they're small. It's just the physics of the thing. Lamott wasn't trying to fix my writing that evening. She was being congruent in public, and congruence, it turns out, is contagious across oceans.

Which means you have no idea, right now, who is being changed by watching you. And neither did she.

What freedom is for

There's a word for what Lamott handed me that evening, and it's bigger than permission. The word is freedom. And freedom is not an abstraction where I live. I write this from Durban, in a country that was forced to think harder about what freedom is for than most places have ever had to, and that produced, out of all that thinking and suffering, one of the clearest answers on record.

The purpose of freedom is to create it for others. - Nelson Mandela

Consider where that conviction was forged. Mandela spent eighteen of his twenty-seven imprisoned years on Robben Island, and for much of it his sentence was hard labour in a limestone quarry. Breaking stone, day after day, in glare so harsh it permanently damaged his eyes. A man in a quarry. And if you've followed my writing lately, you'll know I've been going on about masterpieces waiting inside rejected stone, so sit with what was being sculpted on that island. The stone he was breaking was never the point. Every strike was shaping the hands that held the hammer, and the man who eventually walked out of that quarry came out with his freedom pointed entirely outward. Not I am free at last, but now, yours.

Toni Morrison, an ocean away, arrived at the identical conclusion, and said it with her particular economy:

The function of freedom is to free someone else. - Toni Morrison

Two people, two continents, two very different captivities, one answer. Freedom that ends with the freed person is not freedom; it's just a bigger cell with nicer furniture. Which reframes my whole small story. The voice Lamott freed in me isn't a possession to be enjoyed. It's a debt, payable only forward: to every agent still writing in a suit that doesn't fit, still filing away the honest thing, still waiting for a permission that will arrive, if it arrives at all, disguised as somebody else's congruence. Her freedom created mine. Mine is for creating yours. That's not sentiment. That's the supply chain.

The things we think and do not say

There's a scene at the start of Jerry Maguire where he stays up all night writing the mission statement that will detonate his career, and he titles it “The Things We Think and Do Not Say.” The film plays it as a breakdown. I've always read it as a breakthrough with bad timing.

Because that's where most of us live: sitting on a lifetime of things we think and do not say. The honest observation. The unfashionable conviction. The voice under the suit. We keep it filed away, waiting for permission, and permission almost never arrives on schedule. Mine took decades and came disguised as a television interview I nearly didn't watch.

So here is my one piece of advice, offered bird by bird: stop waiting for the permission and start watching for it, because it rarely looks like permission. It looks like a stranger being fully themselves in public, and something in you sitting forward. When that happens, don't file it. Follow it.

The Deepening

The work we do in service of others shapes us in the doing of it. That's not the fine print of a life spent giving. It's the headline, delivered late, the way all the best news seems to arrive. I set out years ago to help agents uncover their voices. It took Anne Lamott, Rachel Martin, and one unguarded hour of television for me to notice the excavation had included me all along.

Chris Arnold · The Brand Within Worth knowing, not simply well known.

Get The Trust Whisperer Manifesto: A free comprehensive guide to becoming worth-knowing. https://thebrandwithin.aweb.page/trust-whisperer

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Originally published on LinkedIn.