Let's All Get Disoriented
What if it's not supposed to make sense?
After assigning us the book Dictee during my last semester of college, my writing professor asked if anyone in the class could read French, Korean, or Chinese. When we all said no, our professor declared with enthusiasm that, when we ran across portions of the book in these languages, we shouldn’t try to translate—instead, we should let the words we didn’t know wash over us.
Later that week, I sat in the campus center and skimmed over a few pages of French, recognizing only mundane bits of it from my brief stint in fifth-grade French class. “I have no idea what any of this means,” I joked to my friend, “but apparently it’s just part of the experience.” The whole exercise felt like a caricature of the liberal arts—something I felt too pragmatic to really embrace.
What surprised me, though, was that the English sections weren’t much easier to grasp. Dictee is assembled like a sprawling collage, with writing that jerks between topics with little context, and I ran into diagrams of the human body, portraits of people without names, a map of Korea. Handwritten notes slid off the pages, barely legible; paragraphs halted mid-sentence and were never returned to again. Even the most cohesive passages were made up of fragmented sentences that jolted through hazy references to events that the author, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, chose not to flesh out.
As I read, I wondered if Cha actually wanted to keep preclude us from fully understanding her writing. The book, after all, focuses on the experience of having your native language suppressed until you’re unable to fully express yourself—and reading it felt almost like sharing in the characters’ disorientation.
This was intriguing, but I wasn’t completely hooked until my next writing class when another student made a comment that completely changed my view of the book. “We’re taught to assume we have the right to understand what we’re presented with,” he said. “But this isn’t a universal expectation. Sometimes we’re just not supposed to understand.”
I realized then that the book wasn’t just confusing us to help us connect with the characters—it was also confusing because Cha’s goal wasn’t to cater to the reader but to candidly depict a series of events and the feelings associated with them, by whatever means necessary.
It’s natural to desire comprehension. Accurate predictions of our environment are essential to our basic survival, helping us to avoid threats and meet our basic needs without expending too much energy on constant analysis of what’s in front of us. Studies actually show that our cravings for certainty rival our drives for food and sex—receiving certain information activates the brain’s reward center, while lacking it can generate an internal threat response.
There’s also social pressure to understand. In school, where students’ value is tied to the ability to memorize “right” answers, we learn that knowledge is most valuable when it’s immediate, that confusion is the first step in a sequence towards the ever-present goal of comprehension, that remaining in a state of uncertainty means being foolish or out of touch. In fact, studies show that people tend to view politicians who make instant decisions as more capable, even though hesitation is sometimes crucial to making sense of a complex situation.
Through this, school links uncertainty to the visceral discomfort of looming failure, falsely making the world seem easy to predict. Just take the story structure prescribed by English classes: rising action, climax, falling action, resolution. I remember learning in elementary school that all proper stories are shaped this way—and while I do run into this structure constantly, is this really because it’s correct, or is it simply that so many of us grow up having it drilled into us that this narrative form is unquestionable?
Before that writing class, I was used to assuming automatically that my work should be geared towards the widest possible audience. In past classes, my classmates would comment on how much they got what a workshop piece was trying to say, everyone giving their “wrong” interpretations and then suggesting tweaks to make the real meaning clearer.
This class, though, came with an acknowledgement that a piece’s meaning depends just as much on its audience as it does on the actual words on the page. One day we went around the table listing popular ad slogans, tossing out everything from 15 minutes could save you 15% or more on car insurance to Suffered pain? You need law, and then talked about how easily we all recognized these statements as marketing campaigns. Because of our familiarity with them, none of us had to process the words’ actual meaning to understand their authors’ intentions.
We also talked about who we pictured reading our work. For the first time, it didn’t seem silly confessing to the invisible readers that follow along in my head as I type, their slight reactions urging me not only to add context but to edit out the uncomfortable, the embarrassing, the overly specific.
This was also the first time where I realized how badly I needed to override the rushed edits they inspired. When I brought drafts to my professor, she’d often say, “There’s something underneath this”—meaning my writing appeared like the lyrics I used to murmur when I performed my own songs, the careful muffle that kept the audience from getting too close.
Gradually, I developed a new habit of saying what I meant, of writing without some phantom third party glancing across the page with narrowed eyes. I started to cutting out metaphors, replacing them with what I was actually referring to in my everyday life. I rewrote momentary interactions with my friends that I worried they would judge me for remembering in detail. I even put in a few lines in Dutch, and I told myself I was writing for the sake of the work, not the comfort of its eventual readers.
Dissonance, after all, is sometimes necessary: necessary because it is honest, necessary because the world around us is most often chaotic, uncertain, impossible to capture neatly. In a New Yorker essay on Dictee, R. O. Kwon suggests that Cha refuses to “craft suffering into an easily digestible narrative” despite the intense pressure to do so. In this way, the suffering on the pages of Dictee is brutally honest in its inscrutability, refusing to compromise by catering to the reader.
I’ve never understood why the word “relatable” is automatically taken as a positive when it’s applied to a piece of media. When we’re encouraged to gravitate towards what’s already familiar, we start to expect an impossible effortlessness—as Rebecca Mead writes, in “relatable” media, “The reader or viewer remains passive… she expects the work to be done for her.”
In this way, media that’s not carefully designed for you starts to feel grating. The current social media landscape, where algorithms generate infinite streams of hyper-curated content aimed at users’ individual interests, is a great example of this. TikTok user @sarahthebookfairy coined the “What About Me?” Effect after a popular TikTok sharing a recipe for bean soup was infiltrated with comments asking what to do instead if you don’t like beans—and she uses this term to highlight the way people fail, foolishly, to consider that not everything is aimed at them.
Not only that, it’s essentially impossible to make something “relatable” to your entire audience. When I was younger and thought I wanted to pursue music professionally, I got sick of the obligation to write lyrics my listeners could identify with. Editing my songs felt like watering them down to the point of meaninglessness, expunging every scrap of realness until I was practically just plugging in codes for certain emotions.
After all, I didn’t know who would be listening to the songs when I played them at open mics in Thursday night bars. I didn’t know their most agonizing memories or what scents they associated with sorrow. To make a song as universally relatable as possible, I had to rely on cliches that were somehow both over-familiar and completely unreflective of anything I’d actually experienced.
That’s what I find especially exasperating about the relatability ideal. Have I ever actually laid on the bathroom floor when I was sad? Not that I can think of. But when I hear someone describe this in a song, I know without having to think that it means heartbreak, despair; I can automatically link the image back not to any tangible memory but to all the infinite lyrics that echo it.
As Alani Hajithomas argues in her essay “The Influence of Music and Lyricism,” “Music and lyricism can lead people to believe that emotions such as grief and heartbreak should be experienced, looked at, and felt in a specific way… However, feeling and dealing with an emotion is meant to be conditioned to a specific individual. There is no universal way to cope.” Music, Hajithomas proposes, actively detaches us from our genuine emotions, teaching us to simply imitate what’s familiar.
And this is why I detest the concept of a sad song. To me, most popular tearjerkers just feel like songs that were lazily curated to cue tears in as many listeners as possible. The songs that really get to me aren’t the ones anyone could recognize as sad—they only feel like a gut-punch because they remind me of something I’ve actually felt, viscerally, in a way I can barely describe.
I used to think I hated poetry, but at some point I realized I just hated the way it was presented in school. Being told to analyze poetry made it feel less like art and more like a math problem: something where you could simply plug in all the correlates and come up with an answer. In the case of poetry, the answer always seemed useless—who cared what the raven or the fork in the road symbolized? What use did that serve to society?
And one of my all-time least favorite poems was “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams. In case you’ve escaped its omnipresence, it goes like this:
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
The poem’s simplicity always felt like a cop-out to me. Couldn’t anyone write a sentence, toss in stanza breaks, and have something pretty much identical? To me, the poem was literally just what Williams saw when he walked outside one day, and anyone who got more out of it was deluding themself.
In my first semester of college, a girl who lived down the hall from me tried to sell me on “The Red Wheelbarrow” by prying it apart into a collection of images and telling me what abstract concepts each one symbolized. When this didn’t change my opinion, she refused to accept that this could stem from anything except for my inability to comprehend the poetic tradition.
Still, I didn’t care if this made me come off as less intelligent. I hated the idea of someone dissecting my own poetry into discreet, obvious symbols. I had no specific goals for each word I included in a piece: I always said what felt right as part of the whole.
What did change my mind was when someone brought up “The Red Wheelbarrow” in the class I read Dictee for. To my surprise, most of the class immediately started gushing over it—even my professor, with her reliably eclectic tastes, agreed that the poem was brilliant.
But unlike the girl who was desperate for me to get my head around the fact that red means valor, no one in the class referred to the poem by anything more than what was actually on the page. One of my classmates said they loved its simplicity, the way you could be immersed in that singular moment, could feel it run across you quick, without explanation.
When I reread the piece later on, I realized its briefness wasn’t too far off from the fragmented prose in Dictee. When I let go of the idea that I was supposed to neatly untangle Williams’ message, the poem stopped irritating me and became infused with a feeling I could not fully be within but could only observe, its narrative piquing my interest without ever promising clarification.
In December, I read Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, a sinuous collage of a novel that’s scattered through with scrawled-out sections, citations for fictional academics, and footnotes that have their own footnotes. On some pages, the text is divided into boxes, stalling mid-sentence when its touches an edge. On others, words are sprinkled on loosely: some upside down, some cascading across the page.
At first, I was frustrated by the sense that most of the book was going over my head—these elusive references I couldn’t keep up with, my eyes skipping over slight details that could later prove crucial. I assumed I was reading the book wrong if I didn’t at least try to make sense of Danielewski’s veiled hints at meaning.
Eventually, though, I got tired of treating the book like a puzzle, and I liked it a lot more stopped trying to solve what was in front of me, when I let myself dissolve into the characters’ pervasive bewilderment as they twined through dark hallways that revealed little of their surroundings.
I want to approach my real life like this, too. To accept that I can never make sense out of everything—and more than this, to see giving up on certainty as a good thing. I can’t predict what will happen next, and that means there’s room for possibility. It’s like listening in on scraps of conversation in public, how when I write down overheard phrases, I’m not seeking out their histories; I’m just intrigued by the opportunity to invent, to consider, to be left just a little oblivious.