The evening ended the way most of mine do during the week: spending 30 minutes scrolling through TikTok. As I scrolled, I came across a video claiming that the worst compliment you could receive was being viewed as “digestible.”
To be digestible is to be easy to understand, uninteresting or not having the pull to make people want to understand—and this is not going to be me. Digestibility suggests that what people have gathered about you is all that matters, that nothing else in your life would make you worthy of more attention. At first, I was in complete agreement. How dare someone find me digestible? Knowing myself, I believe I have an infinite amount of interesting, worthy-of-discussion aspects to my life.
So, the only way I could think to approach this dilemma of being digestible was to make myself stand out. If people find you interesting, there must be complexity to your presence, right? Well, that is where I settled on this “compliment.”
The reason I settled so easily is because I think we value obvious individuality and uniqueness more than anything else. When someone wears something that catches your eye, has a cool tattoo or hair color or says something that makes you pause to think, you remember them. And if you don’t remember them for long, they did run through your thoughts long enough to have your attention. More importantly, you saw them and didn’t immediately think of how digestible they were.
After spending some time thinking, I’ve realized that digestibility isn’t as much of an insult as I made it out to be. If anything, it’s more of a flaw to the individual who thinks it of you. To find someone digestible means you didn’t grace them with the intent to learn about their life.
Every human is made up of millions of thoughts, experiences, emotions and stories that are bound to make them as complex as anyone else. And, if every human is complex, then how could you fully digest everything they have to offer. I don’t think it’s possible to fully understand and know everything about a person. My friends and family still amaze me with new stories and thoughts everyday that change my understanding of who they are. If I am still seeking to digest the people I have known my entire life, how can anyone find an individual digestible?
The best thing to remember is if you find someone to be easy to understand or lacking interesting feats, maybe you just need to ask better questions to unlock the uniqueness they naturally have simply by existing. And if someone finds you to be a digestible individual, instead of changing anything about yourself, consider finding a new person who desires as good of an understanding around your life as they can get, even if they’ll never fully digest all you have to offer.