Just Guyton

When I was younger, I thought I had to be a part of every conversation.

It didn’t matter if I actually knew what everyone was talking about. I had an opinion. I had something to say. And if I didn’t know enough about the subject? Well, apparently that wasn’t going to stop me.

Fake it till you make it, right?

Except sometimes you don’t make it. Sometimes you just make yourself look stupid.

I was street smart. I was book smart. But my brain also had this frustrating habit of not letting me use my words the way I wanted to. I knew things I couldn’t always articulate, and somewhere along the way I started believing I had to prove that I was intelligent.

So I talked.

Even when I probably should have listened.

What’s interesting to me now is that back then, we didn’t know I had ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder). I wouldn’t receive that diagnosis until much later in life. Looking back now, I sometimes wonder what my younger self would have thought if she’d understood why her brain sometimes worked differently.

Maybe she wouldn’t have felt quite so compelled to prove herself.

But there was something else she didn’t understand yet:

I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

Eighteen years ago, I walked into those anonymous rooms and learned something that would follow me long after I walked back out:

Remain teachable.

Two little words.

They sound simple enough, but it took me a long time to understand what they actually meant.

Being teachable doesn’t mean believing you’re unintelligent. It doesn’t mean agreeing with everything somebody tells you. It doesn’t mean sitting quietly while everyone else gets to have an opinion.

It means understanding that you will never know everything.

It means being able to say, “I don’t know.”

It means asking, “Can you teach me?”

There’s an old saying that we have two ears and one mouth so we can listen twice as much as we speak.

It took me a long damn time to learn how to use mine accordingly.

I grew up with Schoolhouse Rock! teaching us that knowledge was power. That little show taught us a surprising amount about grammar, math, science and civics while somehow convincing an entire generation that conjunctions deserved their own theme song.

But the older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve realized something:

Knowledge may be power, but you can’t gain knowledge if you’ve already decided you know everything.

There’s a difference between wanting people to think you’re knowledgeable and actually wanting to become knowledgeable.

These days, I read a lot. Sure, I’ll slip a Colleen Hoover book in there every once in a while. A girl needs a little fictional chaos.

But most of what I read is there because I want to learn something. Self-help. Educational books. Things that make me think. Things that teach me something I didn’t know before.

And the Holy Bible.

I can return to Scripture I’ve read before and still find something I didn’t see the last time. Maybe the words haven’t changed.

Maybe I have.

I’m taking classes now, too. I’m still actively looking for opportunities to learn. I’m almost 50, and I have absolutely no intention of graduating from curiosity.

More than 30 years ago, I was introduced to an idea associated with the philosopher Socrates: wisdom begins with recognizing how much you don’t know.

Younger me probably would have hated that.

She wanted answers.

She wanted to be heard.

She wanted to prove that she belonged in the conversation.

Today, I don’t need to know everything. I don’t need an opinion about everything. And I don’t need to insert myself into every conversation just so somebody knows I’m there.

Sometimes the smartest thing I can say is, “I don’t know enough about that.”

Somewhere along the way, I stopped being embarrassed by the things I don’t know and started getting excited about the opportunity to learn them.

Every morning, I wake up knowing there is something in this world I don’t know yet.

Maybe I’ll learn it from a class, a book, the Bible, another person or one of my own mistakes. Maybe it’ll be one tiny, completely useless fact that somehow ends up living in my brain forever.

I don’t care.

If I go to bed tonight knowing one thing I didn’t know when I woke up this morning, then today taught me something.

I spent my younger years trying to prove how much I knew.

Growing up taught me there was far more power in admitting how much I didn’t.

So tomorrow morning, I’ll do it again.

I’ll wake up curious.

I’ll wake up willing to listen.

I’ll wake up ready to learn.

I’ll wake up teachable.

— Guyton