This past weekend I attended the wedding of two close friends. Both of these individuals work in the arts at a high level; both have achieved tremendous success in their respective fields. As such, they’ve accumulated a ton of colleagues and collaborators — in addition to their families and friends, of course — who were eager to share good wishes with them. Knowing this, the couple accommodated as many as possible by making space for several rounds of toasts throughout the weekend. All in all, a dozen people got up at different points to share memories, anecdotes, hopes and sometimes even a good-natured roast. Some of the speakers at this wedding had Tony Awards to their names. Others were executives at NGOs, chairs of academic departments. Some were stay-at-home moms; there was a pretty impressive range. You might assume that it was the speakers with the most performance experience, the ones whose jobs involved commanding the attention of large groups on a regular basis, that had the greatest impact. And indeed, there were lots of impressive skills on display, poetic turns of phrases, literary quotes, compelling stories, lots of physical and vocal dynamics to enjoy. Thinking back on the weekend, however, the speeches that have stayed with me the most were actually the ones by the individuals with the least amount of public speaking experience. One of the groom’s mothers, for example, a retired nurse from Indiana, spoke at the reception. The other groom’s sister, a Colombian woman, spoke to us in her second language. Two high school-age nieces grabbed the mic at one point in a sudden and spontaneous fit of passion, and shared their love for the couple through a slobbery veil of tears. These weren’t the smoothest or most polished speeches of the weekend, by any means. In fact, they were full of disfluencies, unintelligible mumbling, broken English, self-deprecating comments, crumpled papers in hand— the sorts of things most speakers in my field work feverishly to eliminate.
So why did these speakers make the strongest impression? It may have something to do with the moment we’re in. All around us, communication is getting slicker and more efficient. It comes out fast and ready for public consumption, largely thanks to the amazing AI tools we now have at our disposal. You know the kind of writing I’m talking about: it’s filled with intricately-woven metaphors, clever alliteration, and it almost always includes ideas expressed in triplicate (like this very sentence!) It comes off as educated and professional, which is probably why so many turn to it. It tightens up our thoughts, gives them a nice sheen, and generally raises the floor on our written and spoken communication. So why would anyone choose to forego these extraordinary tools? To wrestle their own thoughts down onto a paper by themselves? Did the nurse-mom, or the Colombian sis, not have access to strong enough WiFi? Why would they allow themselves to stand up in front of others, in such a high stakes setting, and clumsily attempt to — God forbid — “speak from the heart”? Especially when they knew they might lose their train of thought, ums and uhs would undoubtedly creep in, that they would likely end up walking away from the microphone knowing they could have said any number of things more succinctly, more clearly, or just … better. Why would they set themselves up for such enormous risk?
The effort to shape one’s thoughts into words is, for so many, a terribly exhausting one. It takes time. It inspires deep insecurity and embarrassment. And it often ends up falling short of one’s ideal. Yet what became exceedingly clear to me in the audience this past weekend, is that it’s the experience of that effort — often manifested in awkward pauses, clumsy phrases, ungrammatical sentences — that we receive as the texture of human expression. It gives us the sensation of watching a living being yearn, reach out, wrestle with the difficulty of pushing their internal truth out into the external world. It’s what Shakespeare calls “unpacking one’s heart with words.” And it’s not easy. But it’s undeniably human. It’s that roughness that gives human speech its distinct character. There’s a reason why so many of us are getting quite good at recognizing when an e-mail or a presentation has been too heavily doctored by AI. It’s because we can recognize that materiality, that texture, is missing. It’s a little too smooth. It lacks the graininess that makes us certain there’s a human being behind the words, shuffling through the crates in their mind to find the right phrase to capture precisely what they think, or feel — and often falling short.
We all fall short of saying what we want to say. All the time. Maybe that’s what connects us. Human expression is about never quite finding the optimal shape. It’s about fumbling forward. Perhaps it’s in the gap between what we want to say and what we actually say where our true humanity resides.
What if, instead of trying to avoid that gap, we embraced it as the ultimate signifier of our aliveness? What if we decided that offering others that effort, that vulnerability, is what will make our communication memorable? That texture is what will ultimately bind us together — as one big species of awkward, inefficient nonrobots, flailing about in this too clumsy world.