I’m pretty sure I learned to speak and communicate around the age that most children do. When I was learning to read, I would get frustrated with myself for not being a reading level higher than where I actually was. I always loved reading too. Like a lot. And I mean checking out 10 books from the library and finishing all of them in the two weeks I had before they were due kind of a lot. So, I’m VERY familiar with the English language (except for grammar, don’t ask me what a conjunction is because I honestly never figured it out), yet for some reason I struggle to put my thoughts into words. And here I am writing an article for a public forum, oh the irony.

I don’t really know why, but putting words together in a coherent manner to accurately express what I’m thinking is nearly impossible for me. It can be anywhere from trying to explain my motivation for doing something to trying to defend a claim that I make in an essay.

When I’m doing classwork and a question asks me to “explain," I start internally screaming. When somebody asks me why my favorite song is my favorite song, my mind goes blank and I just start sputtering. I get asked about my favorite trait in my friends and my eyes go wide and all I can think to say is “I don’t really know” (Sorry friends, I know I’m the worst please still love me). Of course being caught off guard and put on the spot with some of these kind of questions always trips you up a bit, but even things like papers that I spend hours trying to put together never successfully incorporate the thoughts that I’m trying to get across.

I feel like this is kind of like what happens when you know the meaning of a word, but you can’t actually give somebody a definition. You have sort of a conceptual understanding of the word and you know how to use it, but explaining it to somebody without using the word itself is near impossible. In my case, I conceptually understand a thought or feeling, but then I can’t actually describe it if asked. Whenever I have to try to explain something, it always ends up the same way. I feel like I’m off to a good start, and then I start to ramble a bit then realize that I somehow managed to veer away from the point that I was initially trying to make but then I stick with it because it’s the best I can do and in the end I’m frustrated because I never got the actual point across that I wanted to, but I have no idea how to actually do it. I’m fairly certain that on a Frankenstein reading quiz junior year in AP Lit, there was a question about the monster’s motivation behind doing something and I explained it the best that I could and I made a note to the side of the question promising that I had read the chapter but my brain decided not to work with me. (Normally I wouldn’t try to get some sort of sympathy for my lack of talent in this area, but my teacher and I were buds and I’m sure she found it amusing.)

Even though I used to spend so much time reading and seeing how authors managed to put their thoughts into a cohesive story, I guess I never really learned from example. Maybe I could blame it on technology and social media. We do with everything else, and because I spend all of my free time on Twitter or Netflix instead of cracking open a collection of another person’s ideas put onto paper, my brain has just slowly turned to mush over the past few years. But, on the bright side, I think this article actually makes sense. I guess explaining my inability to explain somehow worked out in some weird double negative kind of way.