Margie Clayman

For the last several weeks I’ve finally been doing the smart thing – I’ve been catching up on Dr. Who (just starting with 2005). Last night I watched an episode during which The Doctor has a chance to finally tell someone he loves that he loves them. The moment is perfect. She’s waiting for it. You’re waiting for it. But instead he says, “Does it really need saying?”

I think a lot of people have been in a position where, given the opportunity to say, “I love you,” they instead say something completely hokey or maybe even something kind of mean to deflect away from the situation. The reasoning is almost always the same. To the person, it is obvious that they love the other person. Why does saying it make it any more real or meaningful?

There are three reasons why I feel strongly that it does need saying.

Humans are insecure and self-absorbed

OK, that’s not a very nice thing to say, but as a species, let’s face it…it’s pretty darned true. We are just sure that in the grand scheme of the universe, we are wastes of space. We also are obsessed with anything having to do with making us feel better about ourselves. With that activity keeping us busy, and with our lack of confidence in the affection of other people, is it any wonder that we might miss the signs that seem so obvious to others? As a friend once told me, getting up and getting someone a glass of juice will not be universally translated as “I love you.” They had a point. We need to say the words not just so the person feels loved but also so that they don’t have to guess anymore.

Saying the words is brave

It was poignant that the Doctor could not make himself say the words. He faces all kinds of fierce opponents throughout the series. He is known throughout the universe. But a letter and two words – he couldn’t make it happen. I envision saying “I love you” like you are giving someone a little piece of your heart to hold in their hands. You are saying, with those 3 words, “OK, look, I am fully invested in your well-being. When you are glad I’ll be glad, and when you are sad I’ll be sad, but I’ll try to make you feel better too, and I want to enjoy the good times with you.” That’s a lot. And you know, it almost seems foolish. We give other people the chance to hold a bit of our heart in their hands? There is so much risk! They could squish it up. They could drop it and just leave it on the ground. Something could happen to them and our heart could break. Geeze. Who wants to go through all of that? Yes, saying “I love you” is brave. Only the bravest can do it, but bravery can be developed.

You might not get a chance tomorrow

This particular scene in Doctor Who was especially heart-wrenching because it was the last chance he had to tell this person he loved them. He knew that going in and still asked, “Does it really need saying?” Of course as humans we never know when our last chance is. When I was a little kid, I called my grandma to ask if I could spend the night and she ended up talking to my mom. Later that day, my grandma had a massive asthma attack that ultimately ended up taking her life. My mom always said that I had done something great – by calling my grandma I had let my mom say “I love you” one last time. Any conversation, online or offline, could be your last. That sounds dire, but it really is true. Why gamble when saying the words takes only a few seconds and means so much to you as well as to the person you love?

Does it really need saying? Oh yes. Every time. Every possible occasion. We need to tell the people we love that we love them. You can never say it too much. You can never assume you’ll get another chance.

Yes. It really needs saying.

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For as long as I can remember, people have gotten my age all wrong. When I was around 5 or 6 or 10 (those ages are all clumping together at this point) people used to think my brother and I were twins. Bear in mind, now, my brother is 3.5 years younger than me, although he will deny this if you ask him. That is all odd enough. But what makes people particularly odd and unique as creatures is that I am often asked questions pertaining to my age, as if people think I’m one of Ashton Kutcherr’s tricks, here to punk them (channeling my best digital Joe Pesci there).

I am proud to say that I actually had an encounter with a celebrity (of sorts) in this particular regard. Back when I was in college, James Carville came to speak at my campus. I was excited to see the excitable Cajun I had been watching on TV. I have absolutely no recollection of what he said during his presentation although I am sure it was very intelligent and well-said. After the talk, we all got up to introduce ourselves. I waited patiently in line, excited to shake Mr. Carville’s hand. Hey, I’ve been a political junkie for a long time. That’s what happens when Abraham Lincoln is one of your great heroes. Anyway, as I finally approached Mr. Carville, ready to look up at his weird face in admiration and star-struckedness, he asked, “Are you sure you’re old enough to be here?”

I can honestly say I have absolutely no memory of how I responded, if I responded at all. I’m sure I could have retorted with an immensely insightful comeback that would have inspired Mr. Carville to hire me onto his staff or some such, but apparently that was not the outcome.

To be fair, Mr. Carville is not the only person to question my age-appropriateness. He’s merely the most famous to do so. So far. The shining moment of my high school career (and there are many contenders) occurred one sunny day as I was walking down the sidewalk, ready to walk across the street to put in some slave labor I meant to help out at my family’s business. As I was walking I started hearing this, “Hey…hey!” Now, I don’t know about you but often times when I hear someone saying hey, or when I see someone waving, they are in fact attempting to communicate with another person, so I always strive to play it cool. Also, if you are in fact hearing voices you want to lay low a little anyway. In this particular case, the source of the sound became clear as I passed one of the school busses that was lined up, ready to take my little minion peers home. It was a bus driver beckoning to me. I saw many minion faces pressed against the glass of the windows as he asked, “What grade are you in? What grade are you in?”

Have you ever had a moment where you feel like a spotlight has begun to shine on you just as you begin to pick your nose?

Not that anyone picks their noses. But you get my point.

Given all of these experiences, you can’t blame me for having one time approached one of those “guess your age” fortune tellers at a festival. My dad and I thought the prize money would be a gimme. Every other person on the planet misjudged my age. Now I could FINALLY make some money out of that fact. I was about 12 at the time and I believe the person guessed spot on (they had some margin for error of course). “You carry yourself with too much maturity,” they said, seeing my frustration.

There’s a moral in there somewhere.

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When I was in high school, the cards of popularity were pretty well stacked against me. I looked “different,” first of all, which in the world of adolescents is pretty much a curse. Insofar as sports went, to say that I was not talented would be a horrible understatement. The fact is that my only athletic talent was catching spherical objects with my face, regardless of the size of said spherical object. I would get pain in my ribs after running for about 2 minutes. However, there was one thing I did in high school that I unquestionably dominated, and that was domestic extemporaneous speaking on the speech & debate team. Don’t get me wrong – this was no ticket to the popular crowd. However, every Saturday for months at a time, I was the person to beat. I brought home a trophy almost every weekend. I felt respected, in my element.

Then, my team and I went out to dinner before a big tournament.

Imagine going out with a group of people whom you like but whom you also are sort of competitive with at the same time. And then imagine having someone pull your pants down in front of all of those people.

Don’t worry. That didn’t *exactly* happen. However, something that felt similar did happen. As a hostess came over to seat us, she asked one of the coaches if we’d be needing a kids menu. The question, of course, was in reference to me. Suffice to say, I cried, the hostess cried, the waitress cried…I think even the manager burst into tears at one point. It was awful.

Of course, this was not the first nor the last time I would be offered a kids menu or other related material in completely awkward situations. I was eating lunch with my mom at a mall restaurant one day and the waitress asked if we’d be needing a sippy cup. Bear in mind, now, that I was in high school at the time. Did the waitress see a lot of 12-year-old kids that needed sippy cups? Did she experience a lot of young looking people who had extreme eye-hand coordination problems? I’ll never know. However, I did say yes to the sippy cup. That’s how I roll. I didn’t get it.

Perhaps the most puzzling instance in which I was identified as a child was when I went out to a business lunch. I was dressed rather formally  – I think even in pinstripes, and the hostess asked if we’d be needing a kid’s menu. I have often wondered what kind of kids she saw. I mean, this was a Bob Evans, so I wouldn’t think parents would go to the trouble of dressing their kids to the nines in order to eat sausage gravy and biscuits. But apparently children came in their in business suits often enough that the question was warranted. Go figure.

These scenarios used to bother me a lot (see high school experience). Nowadays, if someone offers me a kids menu, crayons, or a booster chair (that really happened) I tend to say, “Yeah!” This infuriates my brother when it happens in his company. He feels I am helping the hostess or waitress demean me. I figure that if they want to give me a dollar hot dog I’ll take it, and I have always loved coloring.

I suppose if I were a truly enlightened person I would take the host or hostess aside and say, “Hey there. I know this is hard to understand, but even though I am small to your eyes, I am actually a big girl. All the way grown up. Sometimes people come in different shapes and sizes, and as you’re in the service business you should strive to be more sensitive.” I may get to that point one of these days. For now, I’ll enjoy my sippy cups.

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It seems to me that humans spend most of their time trying to differentiate themselves from other humans. By dress, by ways of talking, by mannerisms, humans strive to make themselves memorable in some way. And yet, if you have a bad date or encounter a person who creeps you out, you will describe them as, “Uh, kind of different…” It will be understood that “different” is not good. It is not a bragging point for that poor nameless soul.

I am not sure but I would wager that all of us have a moment when we realize we are different from other people or that other people are different from us. Great men like Martin Luther King, Jr., and William Faulkner have talked about this moment when you notice with a start that we are not all the same. For King, this moment came when he suddenly was not allowed to play at a white friend’s house anymore. And Faulkner, betwixt moments of inebriation, wrote about how slave children and the master’s children suddenly realized they couldn’t play with each other anymore. That recognition of difference pops up at the most inconvenient times.

You might well wonder how I could fail to notice that I was “different” compared to other kids, but the fact is that this point eluded me for about the first four years of my life. I suppose I reckoned that I was a kid and kids were meant to be small. The ads for Flinstones Vitamins, which I hated, promised that if I ate one vitamin a day I would grow up to be able to reach the door knob, and I had perfect faith that this was so. If other people were bigger than me it was because they were older. My vitamins and I would catch up. In the meantime I was differentiating myself as a young tot by announcing that Amadeus was my favorite movie and that anything bad I did was actually the responsibility of Margie Stoopee. That was different enough.

My moment of “I’m different” finally came upon me as I was walking in a single file line in Kindergarden. There was a long line of windows that we had to walk by I think on the way to the gym. I was wearing a big fluffy purple 1980s winter coat and felt a little bit like I was a marshmallow. Suddenly, I looked to the right and I noticed, without warning, that everyone else had their heads at pretty much the same level, but my head was much lower. There was a dip where I stood and it followed me wherever I went. What was that all about?

Nobody said anything. There was neither a cue for Twilight Zone music nor a chorus of angels praising my awareness. But from that moment on, I was aware, keenly, that I was different somehow. I asked my parents not to show me pictures from school concerts because there was a dip where I was standing. I hated having my picture taken with friends because I was always standing in a dip. In college I event went so far as to make my friends sit down if we were taking our picture together (believe it or not some of them even squatted or sat on their knees to accommodate me. How cool and different is that?).

The thing about being “different” is that in the end you have three choices, usually. You can make peace with whatever makes you different, you can try to change what makes you feel different, or you can turn a blind eye.  For me, changing what makes me different is not really an option, primarily because I’m not a great athlete and thus I feel stilts would be a bad idea. But I do have the option of making peace with the dip where I stand. It’s always going to be there. And I can try to change what other people say and think about the fact that there is a dip where I stand.

We are all “different” in some way. Even if you don’t feel all that different now, at some point you are sure to be thrust into a situation where you feel like you’re standing in a dip. Knowing humanity, someone may even be there to point it out to you. At that point, you can try to fight it, you can try to make peace with it, or you can try to change how people feel about it.

Which path is yours?