The kindness that is actually contempt

I have been thinking, with some discomfort, about the way I lower my voice when I speak to certain people. The lowering is involuntary, or it presents itself as involuntary; in fact, if I am paying attention, I can feel the small calculation that precedes it. The calculation is roughly this: this person cannot take what I am about to say at full volume, so I will soften it, for their sake. It is offered in my own head as consideration. I am beginning to suspect it is the opposite.¹

The mark of real respect, I think, is the assumption that the other person can survive your honest sentence. The mark of contempt — the elegant kind, the kind that wears good clothes — is the assumption that they cannot. When I edit a thought down to a more digestible portion before serving it to a friend, I am, underneath all the manners, telling myself a private story in which I am the strong one and they are the fragile one. The kindness is the wrapping. The contempt is the contents.

I notice this most clearly with people I love. Strangers I will argue with. Colleagues I will correct. But the people closest to me receive, increasingly, a curated version of what I think, and I have told myself for years that this is because I do not want to hurt them. I am less and less sure. I think part of me has quietly concluded that they cannot keep up, or cannot bear it, or cannot be trusted with the unedited version, and the conclusion is so disrespectful that I have had to dress it as love in order to keep living with it.

The worst part is that the people I do this to often sense it. They cannot name it — neither could I, for a long time — but they sense the texture of the exchange, the way a slightly off note in a piece of music registers before you can identify which instrument is wrong. They come away from the conversation feeling cared for and faintly diminished, and they cannot explain why, and they assume the fault is theirs. That assumption is also a thing I have arranged. I have arranged a small economy in which my gentleness produces, in others, a quiet sense of their own inadequacy, which they then misattribute to themselves, which leaves me, in the exchange, looking generous. It is an exquisitely efficient piece of machinery and I built it without ever, as far as I can remember, sitting down to design it.²

I do not know what to do with this. The obvious answer — be honest, raise your voice to its natural volume, trust the other person — is correct and almost impossible. The difficulty is that I have spent so long mistaking the contempt for kindness that the honest version, when I try it, comes out feeling like cruelty, both to them and to me. It is going to take a long time to learn the difference. I am writing this partly because writing it is the cheapest possible first step, and I want to be clear with myself, and with anyone reading, that I am taking the cheapest possible first step.

What I would like is to stop lowering my voice. What I am doing instead, this month, is noticing each time I do it. It is not the same thing. I know that. I am hoping the noticing will, by some mechanism I cannot yet see, eventually move closer to the thing itself.

I had a teacher once who refused, on principle, to soften any sentence. He was widely considered difficult. I disliked him for years. I now realize I disliked him because he treated me as a peer when I was hoping to be treated as a child. ↩
This is a confession against my own interests, and I would like to record that I am suspicious of it for that reason. Confessions against one’s interests are, in my experience, often a more sophisticated form of self-promotion. I cannot rule out that this whole essay is one. ↩

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