Why Is “Thank You” So Damn Hard?

A newer student came up to me after class the other day and told me how much she enjoyed reading Move Well Stay Healthy.

It was a lovely thing to say.

So naturally, I tried to talk her out of it.

I don’t remember my exact words, but it was something along the lines of, “Well, just hold your nose through the ones you don’t like.”

She looked at me.

“No. I love reading every one. Thank you so much.”

And there it was.

She had given me a compliment, and instead of simply accepting it, I’d made her give it to me twice.

I’ve been thinking about that.

Why is “thank you” so hard?

Not when somebody holds a door for us. We’re pretty good at that one.

But when somebody says something genuinely kind about us, a lot of us suddenly become world-class defense attorneys arguing against our own case.

“You look great.”

Oh God, no. I look terrible.

“That was really good.”

You should have seen all the things I screwed up.

“I love what you’re writing.”

Here, let me point out why you shouldn’t.

I suppose some of it is humility. Or at least what we’ve decided humility is supposed to look like.

Nobody wants to be the jackass who hears a compliment and says, “Yes. I am extraordinary.”

But there’s a lot of room between that and immediately explaining to somebody why their opinion of you is wrong.

And I think that’s what bothered me about my exchange with that student.

She wasn’t asking me to evaluate my writing.

She wasn’t asking whether every article was brilliant.

She was telling me that something I was doing mattered to her.

That was hers to give.

And my little joke, harmless as it seemed, was a way of batting it back.

Peggy is better at this than I am.

If somebody tells her they loved class, she’s much more likely to smile and say thank you. She doesn’t immediately produce a list of everything she could have done better.

At least not until we’re in the car.

Then I might get the complete postgame analysis.

Maybe that’s part of the trick.

You don’t have to believe you’re wonderful.

You don’t have to stop noticing your mistakes. You don’t have to pretend the thing you made was better than it was. You don’t even have to agree with the compliment.

You can think the article could have been better.

You can know you missed something in class.

You can look in the mirror and know perfectly well that your hair is doing something deeply unfortunate.

None of that prevents you from receiving the kindness somebody just offered you.

Maybe “thank you” isn’t really a judgment about yourself at all.

Maybe it’s just allowing the other person to be generous.

I wish I’d done that with my student.

Not because I committed some terrible social offense. She laughed. I laughed. Nobody was injured in the exchange.

But I noticed it.

And lately I’m trying to pay more attention when I notice things like that.

Somebody gives you something good and your first instinct is to explain why you don’t deserve it.

That’s an interesting instinct.

I’m not sure it needs to win every time.

So if she tells me again that she likes what I write, I’m going to try very hard not to critique her taste in reading material.

I’m just going to say:

Thank you.