The Language Nobody Taught You to Read
I cleaned my entire apartment for someone I claimed not to care about.
There’s a specific kind of self-deception that humans are remarkably good at.
Not the big lies we tell other people. The quiet ones we tell ourselves — with complete conviction, while the evidence sits right in front of us.
Here’s the most relatable version: the crush.
Someone asks about a person you’ve been seeing. You go one of two ways — you admit it, or you play it cool. “I mean, they’re cool. It’s not that serious.”
And then you go home and spend forty-five minutes cleaning your bathroom.
I learned something about myself somewhere in my thirties. I can gauge exactly how I feel about someone by what I do before I see them. Not what I tell my friends — what I actually do.
The baseline: tidy the room, take out the trash, make the bed. Solid 6/10 interest.
Car wash before pickup? Something real is happening.
But recently in Tokyo, before seeing someone I'd been telling myself I was "on the fence" about — I steamed my clothes. Scrubbed the shower. Wiped the dust off my full-length mirror. Vacuumed every corner. Emptied every trash bin in the apartment. Sprayed room scent inside the shoe closet. And genuinely considered getting on my hands and knees to check under the TV console.
I thought about it. I want to be clear about that.
You can tell yourself you’re not that interested. But you cannot say that while filling a mop bucket that hasn’t been touched since move-in day. At some point, your actions stop cooperating with your narrative.
Once I noticed it in myself, I started seeing it everywhere.
Over the course of shooting more than four hundred weddings, I had a front-row seat to one of the most honest displays of human behaviour imaginable. Weddings are extraordinary because the stakes feel enormous — and yet how people actually behave in those hours reveals everything.
I’ve watched brides spiral over centerpieces while their partner stood quietly to the side, waiting to be seen. I’ve watched grooms refuse to step outside for a fifteen-minute sunset shoot — the one part of the day the bride had mentioned wanting for months — because it was either too hot outside or they were more comfortable at the bar with their friends. Nobody was being malicious. They weren’t thinking about what their actions were communicating. They were just doing what came naturally.
And what came naturally, in some cases, wasn’t presence. It wasn’t attentiveness. It was protecting their own comfort on a day that was supposed to be about something else entirely.
That gap — between what people say they feel and what their behavior quietly reveals — it’s one of the most human things I’ve ever observed.
You see it in parents too.
My father loved us. I don’t doubt that. He said it, and somewhere underneath everything, I believe it was true.
But love was also the word he used to explain the beatings. The discipline that came without patience, without teaching, without a single apology in all the years I can remember. He genuinely believed that because the intention was love, the experience of it must be love too.
What I received and what he believed he was giving were two entirely different things. And the gap between them couldn’t be discussed, because in his mind, there was no gap.
That’s the quietly devastating version of this. Not malice. Just a man who never learned to read the distance between what he felt and what he showed.
And then there are the people with the idea — or in some cases, already living it.
I managed a music artist for years who genuinely believed he was going to be great. And maybe he could have been. The talent was real. The vision was vivid. When he talked about where he was headed, you almost believed it alongside him.
But he missed soundchecks. He missed rehearsals. He wanted to grow his brand but refused to spend money on events, music videos, or any kind of promotion — every conversation circled back to finding a sponsor, finding someone else to carry the cost. He wanted to work with the best producers in the industry, and then balked at every fee that came with actually doing so.
The dream was real. I believed him every time he talked about it. But somewhere between what he said he wanted and what he was willing to do to get it, the truth was already visible — to everyone around him, and probably to some quiet part of himself he wasn’t ready to hear yet.
That’s the thing I kept coming back to across all of it — the apartment I cleaned, the sunset shoot that never happened, my father’s silences, the missed rehearsals. In every case, something was being communicated. Clearly, consistently, without a single word.
Actions are a language. They’ve always been a language. We just don’t get taught how to read them.
We’re taught to listen to what people say. To take words at face value. To believe the story someone tells about themselves — including the story we tell about ourselves. But words are easy. Words cost nothing. Words can be assembled to say almost anything, and they often are.
Actions are different. Actions have weight. They require something — time, energy, sacrifice of some other option. And because of that, they tend to be honest in a way that words rarely are.
Once you start reading actions the way you read words — in others and in yourself — something shifts. You stop being surprised when people behave exactly as they’ve been showing you they would. You start noticing when your own behavior is quietly telling a different story than the one in your head.
It’s not about judgment. It’s about clarity.
What story are your actions telling right now?
Not the story you’d like them to tell. Not the story you’d give if someone asked. The story a stranger would piece together if they followed you around for thirty days and never heard you say a word.
That story is already being told. It’s being told every day, whether you’re paying attention or not.
The only question is whether you’re one of the people listening.