When words haunt
What’s that thing called where you worry about something you said in a social situation? Where hours later you are still replaying it, cringing each time?
Oh, yes. Rumination.
I’ve been ruminating this week about a few words I said after a concert. A friend and I traveled to Ohio to see Brandy Clark and Mary Chapin Carpenter. We were seated next to a woman who had bought one of the last tickets, a single, and she’d come by herself.
During intermission we chatted a bit about the times and places we’d all seen the performers in concerts. We connected in the friendly, one-off way you do with someone you’re elbow-to-elbow with for a few hours.
After the concert as we stood up to leave, I felt the need to say something to close out the evening. My friend told the woman something breezy and appropriate like “Safe travels home!” Not to be outdone, I added my own final words.
“Thank you for sharing this experience with us.”
Our row mate, whose name we never got or asked for, sort of tilted her head to the side, smiled and nodded, perplexed.
Granted, I am weird and have been reminded of it all my life, but what the heck was that? Once we’d left the throng, my friend addressed my parting words.
“Thank you for sharing this experience? What are you, the leader at a yoga retreat?”
“I guess I just felt the end of the evening needed some closure,” I said.
We laughed about it and then moved onto other topics, but I knew what torment lay ahead.
That sentence had been recorded onto some digital memory file, and my brain was getting ready to play it on repeat for the rest of the night. Midnight, 2 a.m. – there it was rolling back at me like a catchy ear-worm song. What could I do to erase it?
I tried to think of intelligent things I did in fact say to the woman during the concert, but there weren’t any. Maybe as a palate cleanser, I could recite the Gettysburg Address? Say Hail Marys? Recite all the names of the states in alphabetical order? Recall the time I said something appropriate and eloquent to a group of people in a social setting? That one was harder than remembering what Abe said in his speech.
Nothing helped. Every few moments my gracious thank you for sharing the concert would come rolling back around. And each time I would cringe, shaking my head and sticking out my tongue as if I’d seen something creepy.
Why do we do this to ourselves – judge and second-guess our words – even our well-meaning ones? At the concert, Brandy Clark sang a song about the internal voice of insecurity inside each of us, the one that judges and mocks the way we look and act.
Mary Chapin Carpenter said something that could be taken as a rebuke of that voice of judgment. She said that one of the joys of turning 60 was learning not to care about what others think of her. I hope to get there some day.
In the meantime, that goofy parting sentiment at the concert is living rent-free in my head. Eviction might require that I say something even more dumb to some other stranger – or worse yet, to someone I know – and then I can chew on that for a while.
Still, the concert was great. And it really was nice to share it.