The first time I heard the phrase; text without context is pretext, I thought someone was scolding me for plagiarizing a Bible verse on Instagram. It sounded like the kind of slogan you’d find on a Baptist church marquee, wedged between a pun about sin and an announcement for the Thursday night potluck.
But it turns out it’s more of a preacher’s joke. Which is to say, not exactly funny, but clever enough to make you nod solemnly and say “Hmm,” as if you’d always known it.
My friend, who once got kicked out of a Waffle House for arguing with a jukebox, likes to throw this phrase around whenever someone misunderstands him. He says it’s why people think he’s mean when in fact, he’s just tired and diabetic. “Context,” he says, “is everything.”
And he’s not wrong. I once judged an entire family at the airport because their toddler was screaming like he’d been set on fire. The kid’s mom was trying to hold him down with one hand and dig through her purse with the other, and I, noble traveler that I am, assumed she was looking for snacks or perhaps chloroform. I rolled my eyes. I sighed loudly. I muttered something to my partner about noise pollution and the tragic decline of parenting.
Then I saw her pull out a plastic bag with an inhaler in it. The kid was asthmatic and having a full-blown attack. And there I was with my noise-canceling headphones and my moral superiority, judging a woman who was quite literally trying to save her child’s life. Context. It arrives late to the party, usually after you’ve already told everyone what a jerk the host is.
My dentist once told me I grind my teeth because I hold tension in my jaw. I told her I hold tension everywhere, like a hoarder of feelings. But maybe it’s not just tension. Maybe it’s the weight of all the things I think I know but actually don’t. The assumptions I make. The stories I build around one glance, one sentence, one poorly timed outburst. I’ve made entire decisions based on no more than a raised eyebrow and a half-heard phrase. Like that time I stopped talking to my cousin for five years because I thought she said my soup tasted like garbage, when in fact she said it needed garlic. Which it did. Desperately.
The trouble with context is that it doesn’t come with subtitles. People don’t walk around with their backstories tattooed on their forearms. You never know who’s grieving or constipated or carrying a secret love for the married guy at work. So you fill in the blanks. You turn strangers into villains and relatives into monsters and drivers who merge too aggressively into the spawn of all that is unholy. It’s comforting, in a way. Righteous indignation is so much easier than compassion.
Plus, it burns calories.
But that sort of self-righteousness builds up like plaque. Eventually you start believing your version of events is the only version worth having. You stop checking in. You stop asking. And next thing you know, you’re forty-seven, estranged from your book club, and yelling at a barista for writing Sara instead of Sarah on your cup.
If text without context is pretext, then maybe we’re all walking around as poorly punctuated paragraphs. Half-written. Frequently misread. We all want to be understood, but we rarely offer each other the chance. Understanding takes time. It requires curiosity and patience and a willingness to be wrong. And being wrong is just so terribly inconvenient.
There’s a man who lives two blocks from me and wears socks with sandals and a Bluetooth earpiece like it’s 2015. I used to hate him. Something about the way he swung his arms when he walked made me feel like he thought he was better than me. Then I found out he volunteers at a senior center, teaches ESL on weekends, and adopted a three-legged cat named Tippy. Now I hate myself instead.
Which is fine. I might as well add myself to the list.
So now I try to give people the benefit of the doubt. I try to remember that people are more than the worst thing they’ve said or done or tweeted in 2011. I still fail constantly, of course. But every so often I manage to pause before passing judgment. I ask a question. I offer a smile. I resist the urge to assume that the person cutting in line is morally bankrupt and instead imagine that maybe they just really have to pee.
It’s not a perfect system. But it’s better than walking into the wall of ignorance like a Roomba with delusions of grandeur. Because that’s the thing about ignorance. You rarely see it coming until you’re chin-deep in it, holding a grudge you can’t remember and a set of assumptions that were never yours to begin with.
And maybe, that’s when context finally arrives. Late. But right on time.
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Cheers friends.