Just Tell Me What You Understand
On coherence, perception, and what we owe each other in conversation
Photo by Gowtham AGM on Unsplash
Most of us have been taught that disagreement is the problem.
That if two people could just see things the same way, everything would be easier.
I’ve come to think that’s the wrong thing to worry about.
What we name isn’t always visible. Sometimes it’s a feeling. A pattern you’ve noticed. A need you’re trying to articulate. Something you’ve been carrying that finally has words.
But for the sake of making this concrete, let’s say it’s an apple.
Say I’m holding one up. I tell you: this is an apple.
You have options.
You could say yes, that’s an apple.
You could say I see where you’re coming from, but I’m not sure I see it the same way.
You could even say that’s not an apple. I see an orange.
All of those responses, even the last one, keep us in the same conversation. We know where we each stand. We can work with that.
What doesn’t work is something that looks like a response but isn’t.
The yeah, sure that evaporates by next week.
The nod that never connects to anything.
The denial that offers nothing in its place.
One-way communication into a black hole.
Those responses feel like dialogue. They aren’t. They’re just the shape of one.
A coherent response isn’t agreement. It’s saying what you actually understand.
That distinction sounds simple. It isn’t. Because incoherent responses are often the peaceful-looking ones, the ones that keep the surface smooth. Nobody’s fighting. Nobody’s walking out.
But underneath, two people are standing in completely different realities, and neither one knows it.
That’s the part that’s hard to explain until you’ve lived it.
It’s not the disagreement that breaks you. It’s never getting to have it. If someone had just said they saw an orange, you could have figured something out. Questioned your perceptions. Negotiated. Chosen differently.
Instead, you spend all that time handing someone an apple and believing they saw one too.
The ask isn’t agreement. It was never agreement.
It’s just: tell me what you actually understand. Share your perspective. Even if it’s different. Especially if it’s different.
That’s what keeps a shared reality possible. Not harmony. Not alignment. Just two people willing to say what’s actually in front of them.
This essay follows Shared Reality Doesn’t Build Itself, which opened this territory in a different register: stanza and voice. The reason these shorter essays exist is to build recognition before the piece it was building up to, Mapping the Territory of Coherence.
"It's not the disagreement that breaks you. It's never getting to have it."
That line stopped me.
Because what you're describing — the pseudo-response, the shape of dialogue without the substance — is something I've spent years learning to recognise and eventually stop spending energy on.
The nod that never connects to anything. The yeah sure that evaporates. The response that feels like engagement but leaves you standing alone in a reality nobody else confirmed.
You hand someone an apple for long enough, and one of two things happens. You start questioning whether it's actually an apple. Or you get precise enough about who can actually see what's in front of them to stop handing fruit to people who were never going to tell you what they saw.
The second one isn't cynicism. It's calibration.
The ask was never agreement. It was just: be honest about what you understand. That's it. And it turns out that's the thing most people find hardest to give.
Beautifully put, as usual. One of the cultural quirks of Utah is a tendency to appear “agreeable” as a moral choice. It started out as religious instruction, “Contention is of the devil” and has since morphed into a rather intense passive aggressiveness that takes a long time for some of us to recognize on the surface, but has very loud undercurrents indeed.
Not a lot of dialogue happens, and frequently, it feels like abandonment with a smile. And I guess that’s what it is, as it’s “improper” to convey disagreement and so people grow up feeling evil for having anger.
Let us disagree. I promise it will hurt less than you pretending to be in this exchange to begin with.