Issue #005 — An unscheduled note on something I keep noticing

Friend,

An unscheduled note, because something a friend said this week landed harder than I expected, and I want to pass it on while it is still warm.

We were talking about how I have been describing a project I am working on. She listened for a while and then said, plainly, you are pre-apologising for it. I had not heard that phrase before. I knew exactly what she meant.

It is the small linguistic move where, before you tell someone about the thing you are making, you say a sentence to lower their expectations. It is just a small thing. I am still figuring it out. Probably nobody will care, but — and then the actual sentence, the one you needed to say, weakened in advance. The pre-apology is not modesty. It is pre-emptive defence. You hurt yourself first so the other person cannot hurt you with the same blow.

I have been doing this for years and not noticed. Most of my creative friends do it too. We have collectively decided, somewhere along the way, that it is gauche to describe our work without softening it, and we have mistaken the softening for taste.

The fix is straightforward and uncomfortable. Tell people, in plain sentences, what you are making, why it matters to you, and what you hope it will do. Do not pre-apologise. If you must qualify, do it after, not before. Let the thing land first.

I tried it once this week, with a stranger at a dinner. She asked what I was working on. I said one sentence, with no caveats. There was a pause that felt long. Then she asked a real question, and we had a real conversation. I had been making the small talk worse for years by performing humility. Removing the performance let the actual conversation begin.

I will be back next week with the proper letter. I just wanted to put this somewhere before I forgot.

Yours,
Enova