Field Notes on People

 

In the last two months I researched emotional intelligence. Researched is the right word. Not soul searching. I found the books on relationship psychology, on emotional versus logical minds, and I read them the way I read anything I don't understand.

I did this because people are hard to understand, and I am expected to understand them anyway. The expectation is doubled in my case. I work in HR. My entire profession is, on paper, people.

Here is what the difficulty actually looks like, since it sounds abstract until it isn't. Someone says something to me. Anything. A comment in a meeting, a message, a remark in a corridor. Where other people apparently just respond, I run analysis. What did they mean. What do they want from this. What is the correct response, and why is it correct. Every statement goes through this process, carefully, every time. It works, mostly. It is also exhausting in a way I can't explain to people who get the answer for free.

What I wish for is simple. I wish every interaction came with its why attached. Tell me the reason behind what you're saying and I will act on it, precisely and immediately. I'm good at acting on reasons. But people don't hand over the why. They hand over tone, timing, a look, a pause, and expect the why to be reconstructed from fragments. When I can't, the failure is treated as a choice. As if I saw the cue and ignored it.

This has cost me. Not theoretically. Relationships, plural, have run aground on it.

The clearest example is also the one people find funniest. A colleague used to call me "Cute HR." I thought this was a perfectly normal thing to call a colleague. Workplace banter, filed accordingly. It did not occur to me, not once, that a person doesn't hand out the word cute administratively. She was transmitting the entire time and I was receiving nothing. It took me switching companies for anything to happen, and even then it happened because she made it happen. The signal had been sitting in my inbox for who knows how long, unread. That is how we became a thing: she asked, and I finally understood a message by having it handed to me in plain text.

She tried to teach me, later. Actual lessons in emotional intelligence, patient ones, and there was one she came back to more than any other. You fix, she would tell me. You never console.

She was right about the facts. When she came to me sad, with a problem attached to the sadness, I went to work on the problem. Immediately, thoroughly, sometimes before she'd finished describing it. In my head this was the highest form of care available. You tell me what's wrong, and I remove what's wrong. What greater proof is there that I was listening, that it mattered, that you matter? I don't do flowers well and I don't do speeches at all, but I will dismantle your problem down to its parts and hand it back to you solved. That is the dialect I speak love in.

What I never picked up, not once, not until it was explained to me like a syllabus, is that sometimes the problem was not the point. Sometimes the sadness was the point, and what she wanted was for me to sit inside it with her for a while, uselessly, fixing nothing. The concept of useful uselessness did not exist in my architecture. She would present a problem, and I would hear a request for a solution, because why else would a person describe a problem out loud? It turns out there is another reason people describe problems out loud, and everyone except me was apparently issued the memo at birth.

So we spoke two dialects of care at each other. Mine solved things and felt cold. Hers needed presence and looked, to me, like a puzzle with pieces missing. Neither of us was wrong. We were just running different protocols and expecting the other to be compatible.

What she did about it is the part I still think about. When the lessons only went so far, she stopped trying to change how I receive and changed how she sent. She became very direct with me. No hints, no tests, no waiting to see if I'd figure it out. She said what she needed, out loud, before the problem instead of after the fight. It sounds small. It isn't. Most people treat directness as a defeat, an admission that the romance of being understood without asking has failed. She treated it as engineering. She found the interface that worked and used it.

I understand now what that was. It was translation, and translation is labour, and she did it for a long time.

People joke that I'm autistic. It's always delivered as a joke, which is its own interesting data point about how comfortable everyone is diagnosing each other for laughs. My colleagues put it more gently. They say I'm different. Weird, but in a good way, they're careful to add, as if the qualifier were a gift. I don't reach for any label. My own reading is less dramatic: I'm smart and I don't play the social game. I don't perform surprise I don't feel, I don't pad requests with three sentences of weather, I don't pretend to decode what hasn't been said. In most rooms that makes me efficient. In some rooms it makes me weird. It is the same behaviour in both rooms. And underneath the jokes and the qualifiers, what I know is plainer than any label: understanding people is genuinely difficult for me, in a way it visibly isn't for others, and the difficulty is real whether or not it has a name. The man from HR, unable to read the room. I'm aware of how that sounds. I process paperwork about human beings all day and missed the one form addressed to me.

But here's where my two months of reading led me somewhere I didn't expect. The books all frame this as my deficit. Fine. Yet the more I studied communication, the more I noticed that almost nobody is doing it well. People say the opposite of what they mean and call it politeness. They expect offence to be detected without being expressed. They want things they never state, from people they never tell. Then the person who asks for clarity, who wants the why said out loud, is the one who supposedly can't communicate. I've started to suspect the whole system runs on everyone pretending to decode each other correctly, and my only real crime is being unable to pretend. The most functional communication I've ever experienced came from one woman who decided to stop hinting. That should embarrass the system, not me.

The evidence pointed at me too, to be fair. My car horn doesn't work and I don't mind, but the pending oil change bothers me because I want to strike it off the list. Both are car problems. Only one of them itches. If I saw that pattern in someone else, I'd have questions. So I'm not claiming to be the last rational man. I'm claiming the gap between what people say and what they mean is where all of us live. Some of us just can't find the door.

Still, the last two months have been good. I started appreciating life as more than work. I'm brilliant at what I do, but nobody dies saying they were happy to have been the best professional ever. I ran an online workshop and mentored twenty eight people, encouraged them toward adventure, and it made me happy. Teaching, I notice, is the one interaction where the why is always attached. Maybe that's why it comes easily to me.

The horn still doesn't work. That's fine. Some broken things you fix. Some you keep. And some problems, I've learned very slowly, were never asking to be fixed at all.