Poker Face

One of the most irritating and embarrassing side effects of this injury to me, especially early on, has been my inability to conceal my emotions. At first, I was incapable of doing it -- the part of the brain that controls this had seemingly shut off, so no poker face here. It made me realize just how much energy I -- and likely others -- spend hiding how we truly feel in a lot of situations.

So, to the colleague I would normally try to gently coax into volunteering to help with a project, I found myself saying, "You're going to have to do this. I can't do everything."

At the doctor, when asked how I was feeling, instead of saying what I normally would, something in the "I'm okay" family, I burst into tears and told the truth, "It really hurts and this totally sucks."

And when I found myself feeling totally overwhelmed, and feeling like I couldn't handle it anymore on my own, I called home and said exactly that. And instead of trying to continue to tough it out, I went home to be taken care of.

And strangely, I've found that all of this honesty, all of this truth-telling has been actually productive. Sure it could have been presented a bit better with a little more finesse and flair, but I found that, actually saying what I was feeling, well, actually told people how I was actually feeling and what I needed.

Pretty shocking, eh?

And it made me think about how much effort all of us put into packaging up the truth each day -- from little things like answering "I'm fine" when asked how we are, when we're really not fine at all, to bigger things like not letting people know when they've hurt your feelings or asking for help when you need it.

At least for me, I think that I'm being kind and gracious when I tell these sometimes not-so-little white lies. Letting people off the hook. Oh, she's just being nice to ask, she doesn't really care how my day has been ... when we're really cutting people off from knowing us.

Learning how to express our feelings, wants and needs to get the right response is something we learn as babies, but somewhere along the way it becomes really complicated. When babies are small and crying, seemingly for no reason, we desperately think, "I wish I knew what you wanted!" And when children start talking, telling us what they want, it's both adorable and acceptable when they blurt out things like, "I have to pee." We even clap and say "Great job!"

And then, we start censoring them, and as we get older, we take over the task of censoring ourselves. We start to worry about hurting other people's feelings, or, worse, our own feelings -- worried about coming across "wrong," you know, aggressive, stupid, self-centered, weak, or heaven forbid, vulnerable.

Being vulnerable is perhaps the worst of all because it reveals our worst kept secret -- that we're human and we have feelings. And as humans with feelings, we care about our interactions with other humans, and, sometimes, if hard-pressed, we'll admit that we actually care about other humans.

Caring about other humans is the most problematic of all. Sometimes, they don't care as much about us as we do about them, or vice versa. And to protect ourselves, we start to become stingy and keep score and we hold our own feelings hostage lest we reveal too much or reward others for what we deem bad behavior. We might think of someone and want to reach out and then think, "I called that person last so I'm not calling her until she calls me back." And all kinds of similar spiteful sport that really only ends up hurting ourselves because they stop us from being true to who we are.

So why is communicating really so hard? Why is something so simple so complicated? And how do we seemingly UNlearn all that we've learned about how to help get our needs met?

I did an activity last year as part of a leadership training where they blindfolded all of us and had us try, as a group, to match up pairs of colored puzzle pieces simply by using our sense of touch and explaining to one another what it was we were feeling. At first, it was terrifying and a bit of a disaster. I think the technical term might be "clusterf*ck." Until someone smart -- sadly not me -- realized we had to actually all shut up, talk one at a time, and actually listen to one another. It wasn't as much about what each person was saying, the actual words, but moreso that we all listened to one another. I might say, "I have a three sided pointy piece" and someone else might declare, "I have a triangle." We were both saying the same thing in different ways but we all had to keep the message as simple as possible. We also had to trust one another -- that if he says it's a triangle, it's a triangle and not a circle.

So we did the exercise, and we did it "correctly." We matched up all the pieces, and we did it in a reasonable amount of time without any bloodshed. We felt pretty proud of ourselves.

Again, sounds pretty straightforward, but what if we took the blindfolds off?

Without the blindfold, in exercises like this and in life, that's when the real biases come out. Tommy always drops the ball -- he can't be counted on to complete this task. And Margie, she never learned her shapes, God bless her, she must have been sick that day in Kindergarten. Bob is just trying to complete this as fast as possible so he can look good in front of the boss, as always, and Len, of course, is a big old bossypants who always has to be right and isn't letting any of the rest of us get a word in edgewise.

When I think about how I communicate in daily life, when the blindfold is off, so to speak, I realize how much gets skewed, buried, sugarcoated and sanitized through the lens of what we call past experience. Instead of taking people at who they are and what they say, I find I am often guilty of letting my own biases dictate my actions and response.

I find it odd that, in world that encourages us to communicate in 140 characters, it seems to be hard to get to the heart of the matter. Is it any wonder that we're left feeling misunderstood and disconnected?

As I've been feeling better and better, I find myself slipping back into wearing more of the poker face again. In truth, some questions require more complicated answers that we're just not prepared to give sometimes, and some situations require us to look more to ourselves than others. And I think that's okay as long as it's not all of the time.

Because I find that, the more I wear that poker face, the more isolated I do feel, and it's a situation of my own making that doesn't have to be that way. As a wise man once said, as every hand's a winner and every hand's a loser, you just have to know when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em, when to walk away, and when to run.

Because sometimes we're all out of aces, and betting on ourselves is always a gamble, but the payoff can be so great.