pardon the interruption

I once overheard a stranger explaining a brilliant theory about modern architecture to his friend at a dinner party—something about how buildings reflect our collective anxiety—when the friend's eyes suddenly brightened and he proceeded to cut him off mid-sentence to share his own story about a parking garage in Cleveland.

Yes, Cleveland. The mistake by the lake. Where dreams go to get a sensible job in manufacturing.

The architect-philosopher's carefully constructed argument about societal malaise through glass facades was derailed by a concrete structure in Ohio. The words immediately died in his throat. And I saw it playing out in his physiology in real time: that flash of heat in his chest, the indignation, the sudden deflating sense that maybe his theory wasn't as brilliant as he thought.

We've all been there. Someone speaks across you, hijacks your punchline, or simply can't wait their turn. But here's what I've been thinking about this week: that split second when you register the interruption—before you respond, before you recover—that moment actually has a lot to teach you. Not about manners or social graces, but about the person doing the interrupting, about the conversation itself, and maybe most importantly, about what's actually happening beneath the surface of the exchange.

Learning to read an interruption is like learning to read weather patterns. At first, every storm feels personal. But gradually, you start to notice the signs, the patterns, the different types of disturbances moving through.

Take Tom, who complains constantly about being interrupted at work. "Nobody lets me finish a thought," he says, nursing his grievance like a craft beer he's not sure he actually likes. But watch Tom in conversation, and you'll see him lean forward when others speak, practically vibrating with his own thoughts, waiting for the smallest pause—or even just a breath—to jump in. He's got the conversational patience of a golden retriever who just saw a squirrel.

He's not listening; he's loading his next volley like a verbal trebuchet, and you better just hope it's not about the Browns, because that's a whole different kind of suffering. When he interrupts—which is often—it's enthusiasm. When others interrupt him, it's rudeness. The peculiar blindness we all share: we overestimate how often we're interrupted and underestimate how often we do the interrupting.

Psychologists have actually mapped this terrain. They've identified at least three distinct species of interruption, each revealing something different about the interrupter. There's the power interruption—someone asserting dominance, marking territory. There's the rapport interruption—an excited "Yes! Exactly!" that's trying to connect, not compete. And there's the anxious interruption—someone so uncomfortable with silence or the topic that they rush to fill the space with words, any words. They're like conversational whack-a-mole players—any silence must be immediately bonked with words.

Once you learn to distinguish between them, it's hard to unlearn. That colleague who keeps cutting you off might not be dismissing you; they might be desperately trying to prove they belong in the conversation, like a middle schooler who finally knows the answer. Your teenager's constant interruptions might not be disrespect but an awkward attempt at engagement—the conversational equivalent of a baby giraffe learning to walk, all knees and good intentions, zero coordination. The friend who finishes your sentences might genuinely think they're helping, like someone trying to push your stalled car while you're still looking for the keys.

Lincoln was a pretty fascinating example of this. He was a master at quietly catching, categorizing, and ultimately combating these attacks and interruptions on him in a more constructive way.

In the winter of 1862, Edwin Stanton, Lincoln's Secretary of War, publicly called the President "a damned fool." Not behind closed doors, not in private correspondence, but in a room full of witnesses. Word got back to Lincoln, as word always does. When asked how he would respond to such blatant disrespect, Lincoln reportedly said, "If Stanton said I was a damned fool, then I must be one, for he is nearly always right."

But here's the more interesting part: Lincoln then invited Stanton to dinner. Which is either the height of wisdom or the most passive-aggressive comeback in presidential history.

Those who worked with Lincoln noticed this pattern repeatedly. He had developed what one observer called "an almost supernatural patience" with interruption and insult. But it wasn't passive endurance. Lincoln was reading the room, reading the person, gathering information from every slight and outburst. When Stanton interrupted him in Cabinet meetings—which was often—Lincoln would study him, not with annoyance but with curiosity. What was driving the urgency? What fear or passion was pushing Stanton to break protocol?

This is the advanced course in handling interruption: understanding that the person cutting you off is telling you something about themselves, not about you. They're revealing their anxiety, their excitement, their need to be heard. Sometimes they're showing you their own urgency is so overwhelming that they can't hold back, even at the cost of connection. It's like watching someone eat the frosting off a cupcake before the cake—you learn something essential about their self-control, or lack thereof.

Of course, our bodies don't naturally respond with Lincoln-like curiosity. There's hard science behind that flash of anger when someone cuts us off. Researchers have found that being interrupted when we're in the middle of a thought creates genuine cognitive tension—what psychologists call the Zeigarnik effect. We're wired to finish things, and interruption creates a kind of mental itch that demands to be scratched. It's why you'll lie awake at 2 AM still thinking of the perfect comeback you should have said at dinner.

This is why learning to handle interruption is actually learning to override some deep programming. Your brain is signaling "incomplete, unfinished, unresolved" while you're trying to maintain composure. It's like trying to solve a math problem while someone's poking you with a stick.

But here's where it gets interesting: the same researchers found that people who practice responding rather than reacting to interruptions—who build that pause between stimulus and response—actually report feeling more in control of conversations, even when they're being interrupted. It's not about becoming a doormat. It's about choosing your response from a place of strength rather than wound.

I've started, not gracefully, trying to treat interruptions like a strange form of social aikido. To continue the metaphor, I'm so far less 'martial arts master' and more 'person who falls down creatively.' When I recognize the moment, instead of meeting force with force, I try to redirect the energy. When someone cuts me off with their own story, I lean in: "That sounds like it connects to something important for you." When someone interrupts with a correction, I get curious: "Tell me more about that distinction." When someone hijacks my punchline, it feels good when I remember to say, "You tell it better."

This isn't about being noble. Half the time I still feel that flash of irritation. But you quickly notice that when you treat the interruption as information rather than insult, conversations go somewhere unexpected. The person who cuts you off often circles back, apologizes, asks you to finish your thought. Or they reveal something vulnerable that explains their urgency. Or sometimes, just sometimes, their interruption takes you both somewhere more interesting than where you were headed.

The poet Coleridge blamed a "person from Porlock" for interrupting him while he was transcribing his opium-induced vision of "Kubla Khan," causing him to forget the rest of what would have been a much longer poem. For two centuries, that interruption has been cursed by English teachers everywhere—and perhaps unwittingly underappreciated by their students. After all, what if the person from Porlock saved us from a terrible, meandering, drug-fueled epic that added an additional three hours of reading for homework? What if the fragment we got was better than the whole would have been? We'll never know, but we're awfully quick to assume every interruption is theft rather than gift.

I remember trying to tell my niece, who is fifteen years younger than me, a story about my childhood. She was about four at the time, with the curiosity of a seven year old, and a healthy average of 17 interruptions per minute—which, adjusted for toddler inflation, is actually quite reasonable.

Each interruption was a question: "But why did you do that?" "What did your mom say?" "Were you scared?"

By the tenth interruption, I realized she wasn't being rude—she was trying to understand something about growing up, about making mistakes, about whether adults were ever actually children. Her interruptions were teaching me how to tell the story better, showing me what mattered to her versus what mattered to me.

This is perhaps the unexpected gift of learning to read interruptions: they become a kind of sonar, revealing the hidden topology of a conversation. The places where someone interrupts show you where their attention lives, what triggers their anxiety, what excites them enough to break social protocol. If you're paying attention, interruptions can teach you more about someone than their prepared speeches ever will.

The skill isn't learning not to be interrupted—that's impossible. The skill is learning to read what each interruption is trying to tell you. Is this person threatened? Excited? Anxious? Desperate to contribute? Are they interrupting because they think you're wrong, or because you've touched something that matters deeply to them?

Once you start reading interruptions instead of just enduring them, you realize most people aren't trying to silence you. They're trying to be heard, and they're doing it clumsily, urgently, without grace. Just like we all do sometimes.

The real test isn't whether you can speak without interruption. It's whether you can be interrupted without losing your momentum completely—whether you can hold onto your thought while also holding space for theirs, whether you can see the interruption not as theft but as data, not as an ending but as a different kind of beginning.

In that moment when someone cuts you off, you get to choose what it means. Choose curiosity over offense. You might discover that the person interrupting you is actually trying, in their broken manner, to meet you, even if not quite halfway. Choose well, and you'll find that what you thought was stolen was never yours to lose—and what you gain in understanding, about them, about you, might be worth more than whatever point you were trying to make.

John

Thanks for reading The Mayfly Letter.

Your support allows me to continue doing something I truly love.

John Conrad