The Social Paranoia of Living in a Small Italian Village
If social interaction is a set of IKEA instructions, I've put the ÄDELLÖVSKOG together all wrong.
Perhaps it is true of all writers, but it is certainly true of me, that my foot likes to live in my mouth.
Call it an artist’s residency, if you will.
But make no mistake, there is very little lag time between a thought and its expression with me because that’s what you get with a writer. Writers hunt for the words, capture them, and then spit them out on a page. And so it is when I venture out and socialize. The thought goes ping, and then it’s out of my mouth like a greased pig in a chute.
Those who love me call it “funny” and “endearing,” but trust me when I tell you, it’s not. I can offend where no offense is intended. Worse, I can offend people I truly like, and most if not all of them are too polite to say anything.
Women have a bad habit of not saying how they really feel. We’re socialized to be this way. Rarely do we pull someone aside and say, “What you did offended me, and here’s why.” Instead, we subtly freeze them out. We vent to other people, making our case over and over again until we’ve thoroughly convinced ourselves that we were right, and they were wrong.
Sinner, meet Sinned Against.
Guys, on the other hand, slug it out when there’s a disagreement. One well-timed punch, and order is restored. No one holds any grudges, and beer is both a social lubricant and a frothy beverage.
In my cheerful and somewhat blundering way, I had always accepted this quality of mine. I’m not much of a retrospective thinker, although I am an introspective one; with me, it’s always full steam ahead. If some of the china gets broken, there’s nothing I can do about it except apologize, but I don’t know to apologize if someone doesn’t tell me I knocked it off the shelf.
And yet lately, I have found myself doing “post mortems” on conversations I’ve had with the people in my small Umbrian village, sifting through the things I’ve said and wondering if I might have bodged something. It’s a new and not entirely welcome sensation. Previously, I’d been able to shrug it off with a blithe, “It’s none of my business what other people think of me,” and be done with it. Now, I was fretting over every stray remark.
It took me a while to realize what was going on. When you live in a small village, it’s like living inside a hive of bees. Or high school. And bees talk to one another. In fact, bees know everything about you. Or think they do. What they don’t know for a fact, they fill in with conjecture. Some might call it gossip, but gossip feels dismissive to me. There’s a difference between evincing genuine concern over a mutual friend, spreading malicious falsehoods about that friend, and/or trying to convince everybody that friend isn’t worth knowing. All of these things can happen in a small space.
Trying to navigate potentially treacherous waters isn’t easy. In such a tiny community, one well-placed rumor, true or false, can make you the town pariah. Being cast from society, as it were, is too much like being cast out of the small nomadic bands we used to travel in back in the forest primeval. Expulsion meant certain death. No one survived on his own. Since our reptilian brains make no distinction between then and now, it can still feel like death.
While this hasn’t happened to me personally—at least, not yet—I do appreciate the dynamic. And on some subliminal level, I must have already done the math, which is why social paranoia was suddenly intruding on my enjoyment of friends. It dawned on me that my heartfelt interest in their stories, lives, and perspectives could be subject to a radically different interpretation than the one I intended. When people find out I’m a writer, they worry that I’m going to write about them (all my fictional characters are made out of whole cloth, but try convincing anybody else of that.)
Someone should make me a badge that says, “No, you won’t end up in my novel.”
Once I started peeling back the layers of my fun new social anxiety, I saw it for what it was: a burgeoning need to control how others perceived me. I understood the consequences of having someone poison the well against you, and it doesn’t just happen in small Italian villages. It happens in offices, schools, synagogues, churches, even families. We all live in fear of what others might say about us because we know the dire consequences—we don’t get promoted at work, we become members of the “out crowd” at school, our entire congregation whispers behind their hands the minute we walk by, we get written out of the will.
“Just stay in your lane,” a wise friend recently told me. “Keep your distance, and try not to leave the house.” And it’s probably good advice. But people will talk about you even when you don’t give them a reason to. They will form opinions based on zero information. Snap judgments are encoded in our DNA, I’m afraid, a holdover from when making one was a matter of life or death.
Four things I came to realize:
People are crazy. I’m a people, therefore I am crazy. Crazy people don’t see objective reality, just their own skewed perceptions of it.
I control nothing, especially in an asylum of lunatics. The only way to survive is to recognize that my one and only option is to let go.
Tribe recognizes tribe. You will find yours, but only if you’re authentically you. Otherwise, you find yourself in the wrong tribe and then wonder why you feel so miserable and alone.
Would you rather be talked about or ignored? It’s going to be one or the other, and I’m actually not sure the latter is better than the former.
The appropriate response to social paranoia isn’t to deny that it’s there, in which case it will fester unhealthily like a boil, but to acknowledge it, recognize the panic is all out of proportion (and likely genetic), and to accept that people don’t see you the way you are; they see you the way they are.
Things You Can’t Control. Make a list. It’s going to be a very long one. At the top of that list: other people’s perceptions. No one has the power to destroy you. Remember that. And if someone doesn’t like you, make it a point to like them—not because they’re going to see how nice you are and change their minds, which they won’t—but because you want to cultivate a habit of sanity, and few things are less sane than hating someone based on little or wrong information.
Meanwhile, I’ll be careening along in my occasionally tactless but well-intentioned way. When my daughter calls me a “typical Aries,” I’m sure that’s what she means. Just know that my heart is in the right place, even if my mouth isn’t.
Perhaps one of these days I will finally take to heart some marvelous advice given by the novelist Somerset Maugham: “At a dinner party, one should eat but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely.”
Copyright © 2022 Stacey Eskelin
What are your thoughts? There are few things we enjoy more here at Cappuccino than a lively debate. Hold forth! Your comments are welcome in the comments section below.
It is funny that you should light upon this topic, because in my own story telling I stumbled into a situation where two different pairs of characters in two different places wind up talking about the nature of a city. (On this subject, I pretty much take all of my cues from Lewis Mumford.) What one character in one pair recognizes is the need for privacy in order to nurture personality. It is the shadow that makes the individual; when everything is in the light, the personal is destroyed. (Anyway, that's my story.) Villages don't allow those shadows to form. Towns are not much better. It is only with the city that a person can be alone in a crowd, and in that solitude find their own self.
(Just writing that, I am suddenly struck by Whitehead's statement that, "religion is what we do with our solitariness.")
In their book, "The Dawn of Everything," the 'two Davids' (I could look up their names, but I'm not going to) talk about Neolithic hunter/gatherers who nominally spent all their lives with groups of under 100 people. Except they also had trade and contact with groups over a 1,000 miles away. One of the thoughts they speculate on (and which rings true to me), is that some few members of these groups just couldn't take it any more and left. And just kept walking until they found someone who'd never heard of anyone they'd ever heard of. Manufacturing their self by getting out from under the oppressive, all revealing gaze of that tiny, inbred group.
Unlike you, I've always suffered from social paranoia. I've no special love for monk-like isolation. But better that than living under a microscope powered by klieg lights.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeH4vCOKd8E
There’s some great insight and observations that is so relatable, not so much for me living in a small town, but small social settings sometimes. It’s like a balance of the Id and the ego, which one is coming out to play today? I feel paranoia is derived from what people think of you, but essentially it’s meaningless and somewhat irrational if they don’t know you. A waste of energy in the long run. Thus, like you say, it’s something that you can’t control. Hearsay is inadmissible in the court of one’s mind. No one likes to be judged, but generally, the gavel slapper is the one exposing their insecurities that don’t jive with your spirited truths. Fuck’em! True friends should call each other out, or notify them if they’ve been offended. You apologize and move on, it’s sharing and caring, which leads to growth. If people can’t be authentic, trying to appease small town, or big town societal expectations, then apparently these dark alleys need more sunshine! Nobody’s perfect, but acknowledging one’s flaws is admirable. Every rose has it’s thorn, and it’s still beautiful. 🥀