Short Post on Communication

Talking about mental health is hard. An already nebulous, highly subjective experience is made even harder to articulate precisely because you wish to articulate it so very much. You feel that if you pin it down with words, you might exorcise it, and there's the rub; you never can. Language, whether spoken or written down, is always going to be an imperfect means of communication. Words are a half- way house, whether you're saying 'I love you' or 'I'm hungry.' How much meaning actually makes it to the other person? 30%? 45%?

All communication is a game of Chinese Whispers with 4 players:

1- The speaker

2- The speaker's brain

3- The listener's brain

4- The listener.

The speaker feels something and wishes to communicate it. He tells it to his brain, who puts it into words, then communicates it audibly to the listener's brain, which interprets it and relays it to the listener. By the time it reaches the listener it will have lost much of it's deep meaning.

This is the curse of all fellowship between human beings; we must use sounds and symbols to communicate thoughts and feelings. After that, it depends heavily upon the empathy and imagination of the listener, but often the listener has no frame of reference for the experience being communicated, none at all. This can lead to a lot of frustration for both speaker and listener, not to mention the potential for miscommunication.

Thing is, words are all we have, and so we talk, we write, we sing. Much of human life is taken up by the eternal struggle to be understood more perfectly, not just to be loved, but to be known.