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I’m jealous. There, I said it. And I can see you doing it. You know that? It’s like you’re suddenly looking at something two meters behind me, the angle’s all wrong and I know you’re in your head again. Talking to that voice I never get to meet. I hate that when we fight, you get to stand there processing, turning things over and structuring them in neat little “if X, then Y and Z”s so your next sentence comes out perfect while all my brain gives me is red and wrong and memories of past injustice. It’s not like I’m not thinking. It’s just the way I think isn’t the way the world has decided you’ve got to think during arguments or discussions and if I try to think like you I’m always four sentences behind—I lose—but if I think my way, if I let you in on the muddle and- and the imagery and all that extraneous crap you look at me like I’m a child. And you always go “you didn’t respond to my point” and “I already addressed that” and I get it and I know that must be frustrating but just once I want you to see my frustration; I want you to see yourself leant back on the kitchen counter with your whole body crossed and stern expecting me to make these words that slot perfectly into, I don’t know, some blank line in your inner script.

It feels like the whole world has been built for people like you by people like you. Like, do you realise— how do I put this— do you realise how many things we do where it’s a huge huge advantage to think in words? Not talking, obviously talking isn’t an issue, I mean how abstract the world is now in a way that rewards you having an inner monologue. Mortgage payments. Okay, think about mortgage payments. The payment goes up with our rate, right? So for me- I can’t do that. Not fast. There’s no big one-thousand number that appears in my head and then it twists and turns and poof it’s one-thousand-fifty. I can do it visually, I can chop it up into little pieces and then add another one, but then I look at you and you got it a million years ago because you- I guess you’ve got all this fancy verbal pattern-matching equipment that just makes the sentences for you. “5% of one-thousand is like 5% of one-hundred which is..” and then you pull that figure from memory, yeah? “which is 5, so times by 10 and it’s 50, one-thousand-fifty”. Right? It’s so fucking fast and you have no idea. I can do that but I have to remember to do it—it’s a conscious thing—it’s not automatic like it is for you. And we do this stuff all the time and it’s like you’re completely unaware of how much potential cognitive fatigue you’re just waltzing on past while it sticks to me like these little strands of spiderweb coagulating to cocoon.

So yeah, I’m jealous, and the more I think about it now the more I’m rotating around this massive sense of injustice, because it’s only something like forty percent that think like you. I looked it up, it’s like forty percent that have a frequent inner monologue. That’s normal, I’m not saying you’re the weird one, I’m saying that’s sixty percent that are more like me than you and yet it’s become a thing that if we’re not so good at verbalising things, if we feel out logic or we sense what’s right or, again this is more my experience specifically, if certain arguments have this really strong scratchy red to them and that’s how I know I don’t agree with them, but then I’m slow to put the reasoning behind the red into words because my language model isn’t churning all the time… then I’m apparently gaslighting you? You’re gonna go to your mom and tell her you said this and I just said you were wrong and brought old fights up and stuff. And she’s going to validate everything you’ve said and yes maybe I’m a gaslighter because that’s what moms do. I get that, no, I’m not having a dig at your mom. What I’m saying is she doesn’t have access to my inner world. She can’t see that I don’t think like you guys. So she’s going to assume that if I don’t come out with this precise, you know, arrow of a response that hits the target you set up so accurately that it survives being passed onto her a week later, then it must be because I’m trying to pull all these emotional levers on you. But I am the emotional levers!

Language is a really good way of doing logic, I know that—it sucks for me—I can see how good you are at everything, I tell you I’m proud of you—but it’s not the only way of reasoning. Or, shit, existing. I feel like I’m totally allowed to have a disagreement with my girl where it’s an actually full exchange of perspectives. Not just this reasoning battle happening up here. It’s cool if that’s part of it but there’s so much subsurface stuff that isn’t reasoned, too; it’s not words the way I experience it. And I need to be able to let all that pour out of me and be able to trust that you’ll try to live it the way I live it, for once. I’m so sick of third-wheeling this conversation you’re always having in your head. I love you, I love all of you, but I can’t talk to your internal monologue the same way you can’t see my reds, and I just hate that when we fight like this it feels like I’m not talking to you anymore, there’s this little voice in your ear that’s like a pseudo-you judging everything I say except there’s no way for me to ever respond or defend myself. I just want you to be, y’know, you.