Communication Essay by Madi Cordle

It’s unfortunate that nobody gets to choose what hurts them, but everybody gets hurt. As humans, our only avenue of true healing is devoting time to the healing process. Talking, crying and laughing with others, learning from others, lifting and being lifted by others until we feel we’re on solid ground— that’s the only path to renewal. To be happy, we have to collect our hurt, sort through it (or don’t, as my dad taught me, drugs are always an option), go through the motions, and rediscover who we are after trauma. We can’t skip ahead, there is no shortcut; “The only way out is through” (Miller 27). My father’s texts, letters, fantastical and futuristic promises, drunk and raging slurs of speech, rabid attempts to prove just how much he will “sacrifice” for his “everything,” skew my perception of proper communication in this world, so different from the communication I accepted as normal before I knew I had the choice not to. His words left bruises in my consciousness that make navigating the intricacies of human interaction—unalienable love and total heartbreak, utmost success and full-fledged failure, humility and confidence, selflessness and self-care—the primary challenge in my life.

“If you ever decide to act like a respectful daughter, then look me up.” “Hopefully Catie [my sister] won’t have the ability to turn her back on her father and have no consideration for how hurtful she is to someone who has made so many sacrifices just to participate in her life.”

These words from October 17th of last year are difficult for me to type, because they are texts carbon-copied from the last conversation I had with my dad, a conversation I promised myself that I would never read again. Texts are not a conventional writing tool, but they were the most efficient way for my father to convey his point to me, whether I wanted him to or not. He wrote and I read, and though my scars are not visible, they are noticeable and concerning to people who knew me before his words lashed my cheery spirits. His communication with me relentlessly poisons not only my life, but also the lives of all of the people who care about me as they watch me falter under the pressure of depression, stress, and anxiety and commit themselves, their time, their energy, to lifting me up and lessening my load. I never understood why people devote their lives to writing, to creating stories to print in pages that strangers flip through and set on a shelf to collect dust, but, as evidenced by the impact my father’s words have on me and the people who surround me, writing is a powerful mode of communication and a weapon of great influence, abused by some like my father and appreciated by others like Karl Ove Knausgaard, a genius author whom I’ll talk about later. We have to communicate with other people both to learn from them and to teach them in order to educate ourselves and grow into better people. Education is best acquired when people allow themselves to soak up other people’s knowledge, and train themselves to influence and be influenced by others, as Paulo Freire suggests. Writing our own and reading each other’s transparent, vulnerable, and experienced accounts of living and growth, like Richard Miller writes about, is a prime opportunity for collaboration. It is possible to be a hermit, to live and not be heard, to be and not be seen, but what a pathetic life that is. Whenever one reads or writes, learns and teaches, open and honest communication between all parties involved is key to growth and meaning. What an utmost privilege it is to communicate through reading and writing.

Dictionary.com defines to better oneself as “to improve one’s social standing, financial position, or education.” “To do things (such as improving one’s education) that will make one a better or more successful person,” is Merriam-Webster’s version of to better oneself. The Macmillan Dictionary suggests that to better yourself is “To improve your social status by educating yourself.” Three separate, respectable dictionaries agree that education is of great importance in the process of bettering oneself in collaboration and in competition with other people. Acquiring valuable insight, knowledge, and perspective, becoming a better person, requires a mutual exchange of ideas with somebody else. Paulo Freire, in creating a “liberating education” system that mandates equality between students and teachers who solve problems by finding common ground within the shared human condition, has proven that the pursuit of knowledge is useless without mutual communication. A “problem-posing” education system requires teachers to not only restrain from narrating the learning experience for the students but also to humble themselves to the student’s worthy knowledge and perspective (Freire 216). Freire makes the following statement that summarizes the principals of his method of education and explains the importance of communication in the process of acquiring knowledge:

The teacher cannot think for her students, nor can she impose her thoughts on them. Authentic thinking, thinking that is concerned about reality, does not take place in ivory tower isolation, but only in communication. If it is true that thought has meaning only when generated by action upon the world, the subordination of students to teachers becomes impossible. (Freire 220)

Freire does not believe that student’s inexperience compared to the teacher makes their thoughts less valuable, so the teacher should not subordinate them by explaining a topic, but instead converse with students about the topic at hand. Knowledge is only meaningful to a student, teacher, citizen, leader, spouse, or friend when the factual concept is integrated into the experience of the person seeking to understand it and applied to that person’s views of the people around her. The only way to accomplish this sense of a complete “reality” is through communication.

There is a “lack of creativity, transformation, and knowledge in this [education] system” (Freire 216). As a student locked into the system of “banking education,” I’ve experienced the dry learning environment Freire is referring to, but I have to give credit where credit is due. Cheers! To my third-grade teachers, for granting us learning autonomy and fueling our creative juices with frequent games of telephone—the ultimate lesson on the perils of foggy communication and the necessity of obedient collaboration. My favorite telephone game sentence transformation happened in my computer science classroom during free time. The sentence began with something along the lines of “Hannah peels bananas like a monkey,” and epically transformed into something to the tune of “Anna feels bonkers like a donkey.” Playing the telephone game gave us a chance to practice “problem-posing” education with immediate black-and-white results and unified the class with the freedom to create a result dictated by our own governance, not our teacher’s, while simultaneously dividing us as our creation transformed in the hands of each student (Freire 221). Though we individually contributed to the shifting sentence, the result was our shared “reality,” stemming from our network of communication. We collaborated with each other, mastered the problem and completed the task together, and learned by the grace of our shared creative freedom that a text message, set of instructions, novel, presentation, game, in this case, etc., will never yield productive results without clear and honest communication.

Reading and writing are commonly used as modes of communication, but why are they so successful? Humans by nature tend to lock tight boxes around thoughts and communication that have the potential to set them apart from everybody else. When most people write, they restrain themselves, write and revise, cut this or that because “goodness knows what a horror it would be if that got out.” On the other hand, writers like Knausgaard or Mary Karr, author of The Liars Club, write dialogue from their soul, something meaningful to themselves and others who relate to their situation. Richard Miller capitalizes on Karr’s ability to impact her readers in his essay “The Dark Night of the Soul.” Karr writes about her confusing and traumatic childhood to find herself and discover the truth about what makes her, her. After uncovering the what’s and why’s behind the hardships that remained scrambled in her mind throughout childhood and well into her adult years, Karr comes to terms with the fact that her mother made her feel unworthy and unloved because she herself felt unworthy and unloved. Karr uses writing as an outlet to come to a place where she values herself as a person with meaning and worth.

Miller includes Karr’s story in his essay to show that the process of writing through trauma helps people like Karr gain “access to the light of the universal” or find happiness in the dark corners their life (Miller 24). Miller’s essay claims that writing and reading are only important if they hold personal importance to the writer or reader. A reader’s receptive abilities and openmindedness compliment a writer’s willingness to surrender fragments from her personal narrative to add substance to writing. Transparent communication facilitates this connection between total strangers, creating a channel of open-mindedness between readers and writers and an opportunity for learning through other people’s experiences.

Since I was old enough to understand what spite feels like in the form of words, I have been searching for somewhere, some way, to expel my hurt or turn it into something meaningful. I found unexpected solace in the writings of Karl Ove Knausgaard, specifically in a handout given in AP Language that presents a segment from his pensive book Spring. Here, he attempts to communicate life lessons to his infant daughter. In the process of writing to his daughter, Knausgaard recounts his deeply personal ponderings on the human condition and creation compared to the condition of the world outside human reality. The world of “mute reality” belongs to plants, often animals as well, who are scientifically real, but can never prove it themselves, never have the urge to prove it. The human consciousness is what sets us apart from the rest of nature, and the way we communicate our reality is what sets us apart from each other. I needed somebody to show me that thoughts are not stuck to the skull, that I, along with every other literate human on this planet, am capable of bringing other people to understand and outwardly relate to the turmoil inside of my head.

Knausgaard needed to write Spring to better himself just as much as I needed to read it to better myself. He writes with raw vulnerability in the process of addressing his downfalls as an apology to his daughter and opens himself to the critique of other humans. The risk in being vulnerable is worth taking for Knausgaard, though, in exchange for the quiet peace derived from the ability to successfully communicate his burdensome thoughts and release his inner ruckus into a world of other humans who may understand. I understood. Knausgaard’s paternal advice and apology to his daughter for his downfalls stand for me as a representation of everything I want to hear from my own father. It pains me to think that Knausgaard’s daughter may take her father’s clarity of mind and honest communications for granted, because I’ve always wished for and never had the same from my own father.

To Knausgaard I will be forever grateful for allowing me to adopt him as a sort of literary paternal figure. Knausgaard’s effortless ability bring life water to the dry, fatherless ravines left in me proves that writing is powerful if an author’s communicated message is authentic and honest, as Miller would agree. One question tormented Miller into writing “The Dark Night of the Soul”:

Is it possible to produce writing that generates a greater sense of connection to the world and its inhabitants? Of selfunderstanding? Writing that moves out from the mundane, personal tragedies that mark any individual life into the history, the culture, and the lives of the institutions that surround us all?

If only Miller could take my place in the world just long enough to read Knausgaard and feel my relief. It is, Richard Miller. It is possible to learn about yourself and simultaneously help others simply by writing. Knausgaard writes to better understand himself, to give clarity to his daughter, to un-blur the details from his own scuttles with life. I read Knausgaard to feel connected to his grasp on life, which helped me come to terms with my own life. “Thought has meaning only when generated by action upon the world” (Freire 220), and thank God Knausgaard acted on his thoughts and wrote to the world, because his thoughts had major meaning for me.

Miller has “doubts” about “what the literate arts might be said to be good for”; I have an answer, so doubt no more, Miller (Miller 6). Reading makes us think more deeply about our own realities, and good writing renews our curiosity in life’s peculiarities. I made a trip to Whole Foods, obviously to get ice cream, but I was not thinking about the cold and creamy birthday cakeflavored goodness on which I was about to feast. I engaged my mind to think like Freire, problem-posing and drawing connections between Knausgaard’s deep, existential thinking and the events that take place in my own life—a total “emo” mindset, as most from my generation call it. Driving home, my thoughts shifted, like a cloud sliding over the sunshine and dulling the color and warmth from the landscape. Nervous and maniacal, I considered how much power I held in my four little left-hand fingers (the ones that move the blinker lever). I knew that I was turning less than a hundred and fifty feet, but I recognized in the moment right before I pushed the blinker down, how impossibly real it is that 6.5 billion people in this great big world have secret ideas and plans for their future and their loved one’s futures that nobody else knows about. Some plan out of adoration, some out of hate, but they plan no less, and their plans remain unannounced to all the rest. In that moment, I was still traveling fifty miles an hour in a straight line, and I knew that in two seconds I was going to be slowing down and turning, and I knew that the person behind me and the person behind her would also be slowing down because of my decision to turn, but the people behind me were not yet aware of the noticeable effect I was about to have on them. The power that I possessed in choosing to communicate or not to communicate my desire to turn was shocking. The fact that a common, minute indication holds the power to cause a fatal car accident or a simple ease to a slower pace makes me tremble. If such a small action can have that much of an impact, that much of a chain reaction on other people, how do the grand schemes of rich, environmentally-aware business men, or the plans of a woman to have a child, or the desires of a terrorist to harm a whole population, or the dreams of a little girl to follow in her father’s footsteps, affect the world? Would their plan’s impacts upon the world change if those people’s desires were voiced—if the people were willing to communicate their plans and hopes for the future without inhibition? According to Freire, their secret plans are meaningless: “only through communication can human life have meaning” (Freire 220).

Knausgaard, Miller, and Freire explain the power of communication in very different, but equally valuable ways. Freire assesses the way in which humans mature intellectually, suggesting that knowledge is only acquired through collaborative pursuit. Miller highlights stories of people who have impacted him and elucidates the necessity of open communication in order to connect with readers through writing. Knausgaard serves as a stellar example of Miller’s conclusions in my essay because of the deep connection I feel to Knausgaard’s honest writing resulting from my own personal experiences with my father. Knausgaard’s honest writing provided me with courage to write openly in this essay, exemplifying the chain reaction that communication has the power to inaugurate. As humans communicate with one another, share knowledge, read open-mindedly, write without restraint, and exchange ideas, we become intertwined with one another as equally powerful, like-minded, and well-educated beings. We form a community in which we feel comfortable and discover who we are as individuals in relation to other unique individuals. Since the natural human tendency is to remain independent in thought and action and isolated from others mentally, emotionally, and intellectually, communication through reading and writing, I would argue, is our most important asset in creating true and meaningful human connection.