Relationships

“Nothing Personal” Is the Most Personal Thing Anyone Says

By Dr. Donetta D. Quinones, PhD, LMHC, LPC  ·  7 min read

The parking lot behind the restaurant slopes, and Thandi has parked facing downhill, which she does everywhere, for a reason she has never been able to locate.

It is twenty past nine. The dinner was for her mother, who is seventy-one this week. Everyone is doing the long goodbye in the gravel. The air has gone cold in the way it does in the first week that it can, and nobody dressed for it, and there is a general noise of women pulling cardigans across their chests.

Her brother takes off his jacket and puts it around their mother’s shoulders.

It is a good gesture. Genuinely — he does it lightly, without ceremony, and adjusts the collar so it sits right, and their mother laughs and says something about him catching his death.

Then Thandi is in the car with the engine off and her keys in her lap, and she is thinking about the vent.

An hour earlier, at the table, their mother had said she was cold. Twice, in the small apologetic way of a woman who does not want anyone to move. The vent was directly above her, and directly above the chair Thandi’s brother was sitting in, and he heard her, because he answered — he said something about how the food would warm her up, and went back to the story he was telling.

Thandi got up. She found the waiter. It took about seven minutes.

That is the whole event. That is all that happened.

The phrase is accurate. Just not in the direction anyone means it.

People say nothing personal at the exact moment when something extremely personal has just happened to somebody.

It gets said after a firing. It gets said after a betrayal that took weeks to arrange. It is offered as a kindness, a small cushion tucked under the blow: this isn’t about you, don’t take it that way.

Turn it over.

The harm was as personal as harm gets. It happened to your income, your Tuesday, your child’s schedule, your body. What the phrase actually reports — accurately, and in a direction nobody intends — is the other side of the transaction. You were not personal to them. You were a position in an arrangement, and the arrangement changed.

Most of the time this is only noise. A verbal shrug, the thing a decent person says because English never gave us anything better for the moment we have to do something unpleasant to somebody we care about.

Sometimes it is a description.

Two words, given the way I’d give them to a bright thirteen-year-old

Emotional objectification means relating to a person as the feeling they produce in you rather than as a person.

There is an air conditioning unit in the room where I write, and I have never once wondered how its week has been. I want cool air when I want cool air. When it rattles I am irritated, and the irritation is about the rattling, not about the unit, because the unit has no inside. Most of us have at least one person who has quietly become an air conditioning unit.

Compression means squeezing a whole person down into the one part of them we use.

Picture a suitcase with a fixed size. Your friend has two hundred sides; the suitcase holds one. So we pack the side we need — the funny one, the calm one, the one who always answers — and we leave the rest of her on the bed. She is still standing there in the room with all of it, fully assembled, watching us zip the bag.

If that lands uncomfortably, good. It should. I do this. The question under everything I write is do we love people for who they are, or for the emotional functions they perform for us, and the honest answer for most of us, most days, is some of both, in a ratio we would rather not see printed.

The continuum, before anything else gets said

At one end there is the tired version.

We flatten a sister into Reliable. We call the same friend every time we are angry and have not asked in a year what her mother’s scan showed. And when somebody shows us — it is almost always somebody showing us, not us discovering it — we wince, we feel the hot shame of having been caught being smaller than we thought we were, and we adjust. Imperfectly. For a while.

At the other end there is the same move, run on purpose.

For most of us, treating a person as a function is something that happens to our attention. We were tired, we were busy, we needed the thing they give. Further along the same line, it stops being something that happens to attention and becomes the operating assumption. And then the charm, the reasons, the apologies, the whole account of who they are — none of that is machinery for repair. It is machinery for keeping the method running.

Same continuum. Not two species.

There is no line painted on the floor with decent people on one side and something else on the other, and anyone selling you that line is selling you a feeling rather than a description.

So what actually marks the distance?

Not the size of any single act. This is the part the internet gets wrong, loudly, all day.

A person can do something genuinely thoughtless on a Thursday and be an ordinary person having a bad Thursday. A person can do something small and unremarkable — decline to get up and find a waiter — and it can mean nothing at all, because sometimes a story is good and a room is warm and nobody is a villain.

What marks distance along the line is what happens next, and next after that.

Show an ordinary person the vent. They will be embarrassed, and the embarrassment will be about their mother rather than about being seen. Something changes, a little, unevenly, over months. That is what repair looks like from the outside: not a speech, but a different Tuesday.

Further along the line, showing somebody the vent produces something else — a reason, a countercharge, a reframe in which the person who noticed is the problem. Not once. As the reliable output. And after the reason there is no different Tuesday, because the reason was not a step toward anything. It was the point.

This is why I will not give you a checklist. A checklist reads a moment. The only thing a non-clinician can actually observe is behavior over time, and time is not a thing you can shortcut with a list of signs.

The audience problem

Here is what Thandi cannot say at her mother’s birthday, and what took me a long time to be able to say plainly:

The jacket was real. He did give it. Nobody made him.

But watch which of the two moments had people in it.

A jacket in a parking lot is visible. A vent above a chair is not. Neither one is proof of anything on its own, and I want to be careful here, because the reader who is already frightened will take one example and build a courtroom out of it. Don’t. One evening is one evening.

What I would say instead is this: notice where the generosity concentrates. Over a year. Over five. If the warmth reliably arrives where it can be seen and reliably does not arrive where it cannot, that is not a moral verdict about a person. It is a pattern, and patterns are information, and you are allowed to have information about your own family.

And if reading that last paragraph made you think about yourself rather than your brother — that is not a verdict either. Recognizing yourself in this is the ordinary result of being a person who does the small version, which is all of us. It is not a diagnosis. It is just Tuesday, seen accurately.

Thandi is a composite, built out of patterns rather than out of any one person’s life.