What I Wrote in 2018

In July of 2018 I sat down at a keyboard and wrote a post about communication.

I had just come through chemo and surgery to clean out my lymph nodes — my second time with cancer, the first having been in 2004. I was on short-term disability. I was waiting to go back to my desk. I was eager to be around people again.

That’s the context for what I wrote. Most readers won’t know it. I didn’t put it in the post at the time. But it shapes everything I want to say tonight.

Eight years ago, I wrote:

I love words. I love looking at the definitions of words to see how they work… This morning as I started to sketch out the purpose of this post, I started to examine the word communicate.

Share or exchange information, news, or ideas. To succeed in conveying one’s ideas or in evoking understanding in others.

When I first started reading the definition I felt it was incomplete. If communicating only involved the sharing of ideas, we would all be excellent communicators. Just shout what you want people to hear as loud as you can and viola! Job complete… it isn’t that easy is it? In a word, no.

The second part of the definition I outlined brought the meaning into focus. To succeed in conveying one’s ideas and evoking understanding in others. This, in my opinion, is the heart of communication… understanding.

And the post closed with a line that surprised me a little when I read it back this morning:

You have important things to say. You have a viewpoint that you need to share.

That was 2018-me, fresh out of the hospital, writing to whoever would read his blog.

What I Notice Reading It Back

I expected to disagree with parts of it. Eight years is a long time. I’ve read more, written more, lived more. Yesterday I published a post laying out a framework I didn’t have in 2018 — three modes of conversation, communication and negotiation and capitulation, with intent as the variable that moves a conversation between them.

So I went back to read 2018-me expecting to find a writer who didn’t yet see what I see now.

I didn’t find that.

I found a writer whose framework was less developed, but whose convictions were the same as mine. People have important things to say. Bridging our differences so we can hear them is the goal. Understanding doesn’t require agreement. I still believe every line of it. Eight years and a lot of reading and a lot of conversations later, I haven’t moved on the spirit. I’ve gotten more precise about the approach.

That distinction matters more than I expected.

The Constancy Question

Most writing about personal growth assumes the writer changed and now sees what they used to miss. I used to think X, now I think Y, here’s what I learned. That’s the standard arc.

When I read 2018-me, that arc didn’t fit. The 2018 post is generous, optimistic, and trusting — and I’d assumed, before re-reading it, that I’d find a man who hadn’t yet been disappointed enough to know better. That’s the story most people tell about themselves at midlife. I used to be naïve. Now I’m wise.

But 2018-me wasn’t naïve. He’d already had cancer twice. He’d already watched manipulation happen in plenty of conversations. He’d already seen what people with agendas do to people without them. He chose to write generously about communication anyway, because that’s what he believed about people — and because he wanted to come back to his desk and his colleagues and his work and do the thing he’d been doing for years.

The generosity wasn’t innocence. It was a posture. A choice. Made by someone who had reasons to make a different choice and didn’t.

I still hold that posture. I’ve added language to it. I’ve built frameworks around it. I’ve gotten sharper at recognizing when someone in front of me isn’t operating from the same posture and adjusting accordingly. But the underlying conviction — that people have important things to say, and that the work is to bridge our differences so we can hear them — hasn’t moved.

Approach vs. Spirit

There’s a difference between disagreeing with the spirit of something you used to believe and disagreeing with the approach.

When the spirit changes, you’ve moved. You’re a different person operating from a different center, and your old work is evidence of who you used to be.

When the approach changes, you’ve stayed the same person and gotten better at doing what you’ve always been doing. The old work is evidence of the journey, not evidence of who you used to be.

Looking at 2018-me, the approach has gotten more sophisticated. I now know that some conversations aren’t really conversations. I know that techniques used for understanding can be used for manipulation, and that the techniques themselves give you no way to tell. I know that drift is real — that two people can start with shared goals and end up running tactics on each other without either of them quite noticing.

That’s the approach edit. The spirit didn’t move.

When you go back to old work and find that the spirit still holds, you’ve discovered something useful about yourself. You’ve found out what’s load-bearing in your worldview — the thing that survived eight years of evidence and didn’t bend.

When you go back and find the spirit has shifted, you’ve also learned something — what you used to believe and don’t anymore, why the change happened, what the new center is.

Both are good. Both teach you something about who you are. The mistake is assuming you’ll find the second one when you might find the first.

For me, this morning, the answer was: the spirit held. Eight years later, I still believe people have important things to say. I still believe bridging our differences so we can hear each other is the work. I just have better tools now for doing the work.

That’s not nothing. That’s actually a lot.