When Including Friends with Chronic Illness Feels Like Ignoring Boundaries

Text reads, "Plans? Yeah, I know...I cancel, I postpone, I reschedule, I delay committing. Illness sometimes controls my schedule, but I am determined it won't control me! Please keep inviting me."
I’ve been seeing a bunch of memes lately to the effect of, “keep inviting your chronically ill friends to things, even if they always say no/flake out/don’t respond at all/etc.”

(Chronic illness here refers both to mental illness and to chronic physical conditions like fibromyalgia and fatigue.)

That’s a bit of advice that I’ve endorsed and given myself, especially having so often been that exact chronically ill person. I do think that those who are close to someone with a chronic illness and want to be supportive should, if they can, make that extra effort and try to get past their own feelings of rejection to try to include that person, because even if they always say no, the invitations may be a heartening reminder that they’re still wanted and missed. That’s easy to forget when you’re in the throes of a chronic illness flareup, especially if it’s depression.

Lately, though, this advice has been giving me cognitive dissonance and I think I’ve figured out why.

Continue reading “When Including Friends with Chronic Illness Feels Like Ignoring Boundaries”

When Including Friends with Chronic Illness Feels Like Ignoring Boundaries
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"You Need Some New Friends!"

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When I write about personal experiences with sexism, homophobia, ableism, and other forms of bigotry, a common response is: “Wow, you need some new friends! I’m a [insert marginalized identity here] and nobody treats me this way!” (Bonus points for “I don’t let anybody treat me this way!”)

Charitably, I understand where this is coming from. I am seen as a young, possibly naive and vulnerable person who just doesn’t understand that some of the crap I’ve gotten from people isn’t inevitable and not everyone’s going to treat me this way. This well-meaning older person just wants to let me know that I can find better friends who won’t treat me in these crappy ways.

But there are a few wrong assumptions inherent in these statements, such as:

  • I am too young and naive to know that I can in fact expect people to treat me better
  • I have no people in my life already who treat me better
  • I fail to set boundaries and/or kick people out of my life when they treat me poorly
  • I need to be reminded that #NotAllPeople are bigoted
  • I am writing in order to discuss my personal problems and not broader, systemic problems

Ironically, I’m actually known (among people who actually know me, that is) for being pretty quick to set boundaries and not at all squeamish about ending friendships, relationships, and acquaintanceships in which I don’t feel that I am being treated with the respect I deserve. It’s an approach I advocate pretty freely, because it has set me free: free from shitty relationships, free from friends who passive-aggressively bring me down, free from imbalanced demands for emotional labor, free (mostly) from microaggressions. Obviously not everybody always has the option to just get rid of people who treat them poorly, but when the option is available, I always err on the side of taking it.

In fact, if I didn’t believe that it’s possible for me to be treated well, I wouldn’t be writing articles about how to avoid sexism, homophobia, and other forms of bigotry. The fact that I write articles about that kind of implies that I think “better friends” (at the very least) is a reasonable goal for marginalized folks to set for themselves.

Aside from the condescending nature of these comments–I can manage my personal relationships on my own, thanks–they tend to miss the point. If I write an article about men, women, and emotional labor and you respond with “Damn, girl, you need some better dudes in your life!”, you’re missing the point that the problem is not confined to a few crappy dudes I’ve gotten myself tangled up with. Yes, there are better and worse dudes out there, and I generally have the privilege to seek out the better ones, but that doesn’t solve the overall problem of gendered expectations surrounding emotional labor. I can seek out better dudes all I want; that won’t help other women.

You could argue that these responses are inevitable given that I’m sharing personal anecdotes and of course readers would be concerned about my wellbeing. But that’s a catch-22. When people write about bigotry and oppression without including personal anecdotes, readers have difficulty connecting these abstract concepts with concrete experiences that actual human beings have. When we do include personal anecdotes, readers start debating the merits of those anecdotes and giving us unsolicited advice rather than focusing on the actual issue under discussion. You can’t really win.

So I aim for combining the two–discussion of theoretical concepts along with personal anecdotes. Some folks still get caught up on the personal anecdotes and decide that I need help running my social life. Oh well.

Note, though, that when I write about the ways in which sexism, homophobia, ableism, and ageism have impacted my life, I’m not always talking about people who were my actual friends, and I’m not always talking about people who are in my life right now. Anyone I interact with in passing can potentially express bigotry towards me, and despite my relatively young age, I’ve been old enough to have friends and partners for quite a while now. There are a lot of people I used to be close with who are no longer in my life. There are a lot of incidents that I’ve analyzed years after the fact, once I’d developed an understanding of things like sexual assault, and realized were tied to systematic oppression in some way. (For instance, I realized at one point that all of my first sexual experiences as a teenager were nonconsensual. Don’t worry, concerned older readers, I haven’t spoken to that man in years and I’m quite aware that nicer men exist.)

Finally, the “get new friends” response concerns me because it’s so reminiscent of the “not all _____” response, which is weird because it’s usually coming from fellow marginalized folks. Some women think it’s really important to let me know that the men they date aren’t nearly as crappy as the men I’ve dated (by the way, most of the men I’ve dated have been wonderful, but blog posts about how great my exes are seem neither appropriate nor interesting). There’s a self-aggrandizement inherent in that response: “Well, I have a wonderful boyfriend who always does his share of the housework and never mansplains or questions my competence and always makes sure that sex is pleasurable for me too but also totally understands when I don’t feel like having sex that night.” For all that the commenter means to highlight the wonderful man/straight ally/supportive neurotypical friend/etc in their life, they usually come across like they’re trying to brag about their superior friend-finding abilities.

Imagine how hurtful “you need better friends!” would be if that weren’t an option that’s available to me right now. Because sometimes, for some people, it isn’t. Maybe the most they can do is try to gently nudge their existing friends toward a path of lesser bigotry, or do some excellent self-care to minimize the harm of that bigotry. “You need better friends!” is flippant and dismissive in this context. Not everybody gets to design a perfect social circle.

Besides that, we can’t all just platonic-Lysistrata our way out of systematic oppression. Even if all the bigots ended up being friends with each other and the rest of us all got to have wonderful progressive friend groups with absolutely no bigotry, those bigots would still have a disproportionate influence on our society and therefore disproportionate power to oppress us. (Psst: you can’t neatly separate people into categories like “bigot” and “totally not bigot” anyway.) For instance, my friends and I are definitely absolutely not friends with the Republicans in our state legislature, and yet look.

Some people choose to cut bigoted people out of their lives. Other people choose to keep them around and try to make them better. Most people choose on a case-by-case basis. Regardless, “just get new friends” isn’t an appropriate response to someone sharing their experiences with bigotry. As uncomfortable as it can be to acknowledge that sometimes you can’t just swoop in and fix someone’s problems for them, it’s necessary.

~~~

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"You Need Some New Friends!"

Brains Lie, But So Do People

[CN: mental illness, gaslighting, abuse]

For those of us with mood disorders to manage, learning and understanding the fact that brains often lie was a revelation. Suddenly we had an explanation–and not a BS, pseudoscientific explanation–for why we think and feel things that don’t make sense and that make life unbearable. We learned that feeling like everyone hates you isn’t actually a feeling; it’s a thought, and the thought isn’t based in reality. We learned that we have a much easier time remembering the bad than the good, which leaves us with the skewed impression that everything is awful and must always continue to be awful.

And so we adopted a new language. We talk about jerkbrains and depression!brains and all sorts of other brains, and we teach ourselves to constantly question and second-guess the negative things we tell ourselves.

For the most part, this is how mood disorder recovery happens. Once you develop the awareness that many of your depressive or anxious thoughts are not based in reality, you are able to develop coping skills to stop these thoughts or minimize their impact. This is CBT, in a nutshell. CBT is not a panacea–some people, especially those whose disorders started early in their life (or seem like they’ve been going on forever) don’t find this sufficient to actually stop the thoughts. But recovery can’t happen until you internalize the fact that brains lie.

Here’s where I worry, though. When I start hearing this:

“My friends are always making jokes at my expense and it makes me feel hurt. But that’s just my depression, I know they don’t really mean it.”

“I know I should be ok with my partner wanting us to be poly. It’s just my anxiety, it’s not a rational thing.”

“It’s not that I don’t want to have sex with him, it’s just that I don’t really have a sex drive because of my medication. So I do it anyway because I mean, I don’t mind.”

Sometimes we overcompensate. We get so used to these tropes–depression makes you feel like people hate you, anxiety makes you freak out that your partner’s going to leave you when there’s no evidence, medication makes you lose your sex drive–that we assume those causations. If you’re diagnosed with depression and your friends are making mean jokes and you feel hurt, it’s because of your depression. If you’re taking medication and you don’t want to have sex, of course it’s the medication.

Obviously these things are all true in many cases. It could very well be that all evidence suggests your friends love you and assume you’re be okay with some good-natured teasing. It could very well be that all the evidence suggests that your partner is committed to you, poly or not, and that your anxiety contradicts your other beliefs about the relationship and your preferences. (For instance, polyamory often makes me very anxious, but I’ve decided that it’s nevertheless what’s best for me and so that’s what I’m doing.)

But sometimes, your “friends” are being callous assholes and don’t care that their jokes hurt you. Sometimes, your partner is pressuring you to try polyamory even though it just doesn’t work for you, and everything about this is (rightfully) freaking you out. Sometimes, meds or no, you’re just not attracted to someone and haven’t internalized the fact that you don’t owe them sex. Sometimes the reason you don’t want to have sex with someone is because they’re giving off a ton of red flags and you should pay attention to them.

This gets even worse when close people, well-meaning or not, start pulling out these sorts of phrases in order to “help” you: “Oh, that’s just Depressed Miri talking.” “That’s your jerkbrain.” “This isn’t who you really are, it’s just your illness.” “Did you take your meds today?”

The message? “That’s not based in reality.”

Don’t get me wrong. When used by a kind, perceptive, absolutely not abusive person, these responses can be incredibly powerful and helpful. Sometimes we really do need that reality check: a partner who helps you draw the connection between skipping meds and feeling bad; a friend who patiently reminds you that sometimes depression feeds you lies.

When used by someone who wants to control you, though, they become very dangerous.

Upset that your partner keeps canceling your plans to see their other partner? That’s your depression, of course they still love you, it’s only natural that they’d want to see their new partner a lot. Scared to have sex without a condom? That’s just your anxiety, they already told you they’ve been tested, so what’s the problem? Annoyed that your friend keeps cutting you off in conversation? You know that irritation is a depression symptom.

I’ve written before that attempting to treat your depression or anxiety by invalidating your feelings can lead to a sort of self-gaslighting; even more harmful, I think, is when others do it to you. I have to admit that I start to get a queasy feeling when I see someone trying to manage their partner’s mental illness for/with them. As I said, sometimes this can be a great and healthy situation, but never forget that in a relationship between a person with a mental illness and a neurotypical person, the latter holds privilege. With privilege comes power, and with power comes responsibility.

The problem here, obviously, is not with CBT or the term “jerkbrain” or even the idea that thoughts/feelings can be irrational; the problem is abusive people learning this terminology and taking advantage of it. To a lesser extent, too, the problem is with ourselves over-applying these concepts to situations that are legitimately unhealthy, unsafe, or just straight-up unpleasant.

I don’t have a solution to this, but I do have some suggestions if you worry that you might be in this situation:

1. If you have a therapist, ask them to work with you on (re)learning how to trust your gut when appropriate. Most of us have a spidey sense when it comes to abusive people and dangerous situations; the problem is that our culture often trains us to ignore that sense. “But he’s such a nice guy, give him a chance!” “But it’s not your friends’ job to make sure none of their jokes ever offend you!” and so on. For many people, especially marginalized people, a crucial task is to remember what that sense feels like and to feel comfortable using it.

2. When an interpersonal situation is making you depressed or anxious, ask for a reality check from more than one person, and make sure that none of those people is directly involved in the situation. If you’re sad because your partner hasn’t been spending as much time with you as you’d like, that’s obviously an important conversation to have with your partner at some point, but the reality check part has to come from someone else, because your partner probably has a vested interest in keeping things as they are. (Not necessarily a bad thing! Maybe your partner has already patiently explained to you many times that they love you and wish they could see you more, but this year they need to focus on completing and defending their dissertation. Or maybe your partner is neglectful and stringing you along in this relationship that they’re only in for the sex and not being clear with you about what they actually want.)

It helps to find people that you can trust to be kind and honest. In many social circles I’ve been in in the past, there was a tendency to support your friend no matter what, and “support” meant agreeing with them about all interpersonal matters. If I’m upset at my partner, my friend agrees with me that they’re a jerk who doesn’t deserve me. If another friend is angry at me for missing their birthday party, my friend agrees with me that they’re obviously overreacting and being so immature. That’s not helpful for these purposes. You need someone who will say, “That sounds really rough for you and I’m sorry, but the fact that your partner has been busy lately doesn’t mean they hate you and don’t care if you live or die.”

3. Remember that feelings don’t have to be rational to be acted on. While it’s good to treat feelings with some amount of skepticism when you have a mental illness, that doesn’t mean you have to just ignore those feelings unless you can prove to yourself that they’re rational. There are many interpersonal situations that trigger my depression or anxiety for reasons I’ve determined aren’t rational, but I still avoid those situations because, honestly, life’s too damn short to feel like crap all the time, and I can’t will myself out of my depression and anxiety.

For example, here’s a meme I come across often:

//

Yes, rationally I know that sarcasm doesn’t mean you hate me, that that’s a perfectly valid way of expressing yourself and interacting with people, that for many people that’s part of their family culture/subculture, etc. etc.

But this interpersonal style interacts really badly with my depression. It makes me feel insecure and small. It is disempowering. It makes my brain go in circles about What Does This Person Really Think Of Me Do They Hate Me Or Not Did I Do Something Wrong.

(A part of me wonders if the reason people do this isn’t so much because they enjoy feeling relaxed enough to just be their snarky, sarcastic selves, but because they enjoy making people feel the way I just described. I’m not sure.)

So I decided at some point that I just wasn’t going to put up with it. When someone treats me this way, I remove them from my mental list of people I trust or want to get closer to. I minimize my interactions with that person. I prepare myself to set specific boundaries with them if that becomes necessary, but it usually doesn’t because distance does the trick.

At no point do I have to convince myself that, yes, all the available evidence suggests that this person hates me or is a cruel, bad person. I’m sure they don’t hate me. I’m sure they are a decent human being. For my purposes, though, it doesn’t really matter.

You are allowed to act in ways that minimize negative emotions even if those emotions are mostly being caused by mental illness.

~~~

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Brains Lie, But So Do People

Emotional Labor: What It Is and How To Do It

Ages ago, I read a fantastic article about practical things men can do to support feminism. [1] Almost every item on the list really resonated with my experience, and this was one of the most resonant:

2. Do 50% (or more) of emotional support work in your intimate relationships and friendships.

Recognize that women are disproportionately responsible for emotional labour and that being responsible for this takes away time and energy from things they find fulfilling.

Since this was just a list, that’s all it had to say about this very important topic. As I shared the article and discussed it with others, especially men, I realized that many men don’t actually know what “emotional labor” means. That, I think, is part of the problem.

I kept meaning to write a piece that explains the concept, but life happened, and I forgot. Then I read this [2]:

We are told frequently that women are more intuitive, more empathetic, more innately willing and able to offer succor and advice. How convenient that this cultural construct gives men an excuse to be emotionally lazy. How convenient that it casts feelings-based work as “an internal need, an aspiration, supposedly coming from the depths of our female character.”

This, in turn, spawned a great Metafilter thread in which people discuss their experiences with emotional labor. [3] And, that, finally, led to an Ask Metafilter thread [4], which addresses the very question I initially meant to address: what is emotional labor and how do you know if you’re doing your fair share of it?

If this topic interests you, I encourage you to read these resources, because they’re extremely useful and accessible. I wanted to highlight some of the contributions to the Ask Metafilter thread here.

The original Ask Metafilter post:

# Partnered Life

* Am I checking in with my partner to see if they had a rough day?
* If so, am I stepping up to make their life easier in other ways (cooking, cleaning, etc.)?
* Am I open and clear about my wants, and not forcing my partner to guess/drag it out of me?
* Am I contributing constructively to planning of meals, events, trips, etc?
* Am I actively trying to make my presence feel safe for my partner?
* Do I try to do nice things for my partner without being asked (flowers, treats, etc.)?
* Do I take care of my own administrative life (paperwork, bills) without needing to be repeatedly reminded?
* Am I supportive of my partner’s decisions, big and small?
* Am I respectful and validating of my partner’s emotions?
* Am I vocally grateful when my partner goes out of their way to do something nice for me?
* Am I nice to my partner’s family [if that’s a thing they want]?

# Friend Groups

* Do I work to coordinate peoples’ schedules so that we can have a nice picnic/party/board game night/etc.?
* When planning an event, am I conscious of possible interpersonal conflicts?
* When planning an event, do I take into account different peoples’ preferences for food, beverages, music, etc., so that no one feels excluded?
* Do I actually have everything prepared in advance for an event I’m hosting, or at least clearly and fairly delegated?
* If there is an imbalance of emotional or physical labor occurring, am I willing to risk social awkwardness to improve the lot of those negatively affected?

# Third Party Relationships (Familial & Otherwise)

* Do I remember to make phone calls and visits to people I care about and want to have relationships with?
* Do I remember to send cards to people I care about?
* Do I send thank you notes to people to acknowledge their emotional labor for me?
* Am I actively sensitive to and supportive of people who are experiencing a difficult time (death of spouse/child/pet, etc.)?

User phunniemie adds:

I’d add “am I going to the doctor regularly” to what you have.

I hear a lot of guys (I take it you are a dude) complain (complain, or even just mention offhand) all the time about x, y, or z weird body thing that they have going on, but 9 times out of 10 (actually more, but then we’re getting into fractions) when I ask if they’ve talked to a doctor about it their response is no, or it’s not that big a deal, or they can’t because they don’t have a doctor despite living in the same place for 5+ years. So now they’ve involved me in concern for their Problem Freckle but have no ability or intention to manage it themselves.

Make sure you’re taking care of yourself and being proactive about your healthcare (physical and mental) so that the women in your life don’t have to feel like your nurse.

WidgetAlley adds:

Huge one for me, especially in reference to mental illness or trauma or disorders: are you doing your own emotional work?

This means asking for support and accommodation for your feelings and your illness if you need it, and negotiating with your partner about your needs, but also not making your problems their problems. If you have depression or past trauma, tell your partner– don’t make them guess. Ask them to make reasonable adjustments to their behavior and interactions if you can, or if you’re not sure what you need, just keep them in the loop as much as you can.

And then, do your own work and get to a doctor, a therapist, or another appropriate person who can help you in a solid professional context. It’s reasonable and sane and wonderful to ask for support and love and reassurance, but don’t make fixing your own internal workings your partner’s problem any more than you can help it.

wintersweet adds:

Do I pause to observe the context (my partner’s body language or current activity, what’s been happening today, etc.) before I involve my partner in something me-focused? (Whether that’s a request or a touch or whatever.)

Am I answering my partner’s bids?

Am I taking responsibility for my own reminders by putting things in a calendar app or whatever reminds me to do things?

Am I aware of all the unseen work involved in things like meal preparation*, and am I educating myself so that I can share the work?

HotToddy adds:

How often am I saying knee-jerk defensive things like “I forgot,” “I’m trying,” “I’m doing my best,” “It’s not a big deal,” vs “Oops, shit, I’m sorry, let me [take independent action and come up with my own fucking idea for how I can finally make this change that you’ve repeatedly told me is important to you and that I’ve said I would do but still haven’t].

RogueTech adds:

Am I difficult as hell to work with and expect everyone to work around it because I present as male?

E. Whitehall adds:

Are you interrupting your partner unnecessarily? Is their busy-ness less valuable to you than a question you could likely just Google instead of interrupting them? Consider whether you really need to ask them, specifically, right now, about this particular thing. Consider whether you’ve actually looked for answers. Have you googled? Have you checked the most likely places? Several times? Have you actually reached in and looked with your hands for whatever you’ve lost?

There are a lot more great examples in the thread, but this should give you some sense of what emotional labor is.

You might notice that some things in the thread sound like the bare minimum for being a decent friend or partner, such as respecting and validating others’ emotions. Others sound like things that aren’t necessary (or even desirable) in every relationship. The important thing is that there’s a balance. If you and your friend or partner have the kind of relationship where you share household responsibilities and expenses, for instance, it’s unreasonable for your partner to always have to remind you to do your duties when they never need a reminder from you.

Of course, it’s easy for people to look at these lists and immediately start rationalizing: “Well, but, my partner’s so much better at planning things than I am, so of course they plan all of our social events as a couple” or “Well I have a mental illness and my friend doesn’t, so I can’t always be expected to remember to ask about their day the way they ask about mine.” Sure. This isn’t a be-all end-all list, and different people’s situations have their own particular needs and restraints. I encourage you not to get too hung up on any particular item on the list, and instead focus on the concept itself.

The point is that, for the most part, women are expected to do a lot of these sorts of things in relationships and friendships, and men are not. It may well be that men are on average objectively worse at them than women are, but that’s only because they’ve never been held responsible for these things and therefore haven’t developed the skill. Most men have gone their whole lives hearing that women are “naturally” suited for these things and men are “naturally” not, so why bother working on it? Gender essentialism doesn’t exactly foster a growth mindset, and many people don’t realize that things like communication skills and empathy can actually be improved.

After reading these articles and threads, I started to understand my frustrations with my male friends, roommates, and partners much better, because these imbalances have touched every single relationship I’ve ever had with a man. Male partners have consistently ignored glaring issues in the relationship so that I had to be the one to start the difficult conversation every single time, even though they supposedly had as much of a stake in the relationship as I did. Male roommates have made me beg and plead and send reminder texts to do even the most basic household management tasks. Male friends have tried to use me as a therapist, or drawn me into worrying about their physical health with them while refusing to see a doctor even though they had insurance.

Well-meaning men of varying roles in my life have consistently ignored my nonverbal cues [5], even very visible ones, forcing me to constantly have to articulate boundaries that ought to be obvious, over and over. (For instance, “Do you see how I’m intently reading a book right now? That means that I’m very interested in the book and am not interested in having a conversation right now.” “Did you notice how I’m hunched over with my arms folded over my stomach and a grimace on my face? This means that I’m in pain and probably not in the mood for cheery small-talk!” “Pay attention to how I’ve got huge headphones on and am staring at my computer screen and typing very quickly. This is why I didn’t hear a single word you just said and now is probably not a good time to chat about your day!”)

This is why being in relationship with men, even platonically, is often so exhausting for me. As much as I love them and care for them, it feels like work.

Like all gendered dynamics, of course, this isn’t exclusive to male-female interactions and the imbalance doesn’t always go in the same direction. It can happen in any relationship, romantic or platonic, serious or less so. I’m pointing out the gendered dynamic here because it’s so extremely prevalent and so very harmful. But if, for instance, you’re a man realizing that you’re doing the bulk of the emotional labor in your relationship with someone of whichever gender, you still have a right to try to sort that out.

I strongly suspect that the emotional labor imbalance underlies part of the problem men often say they have with forming and maintaining friendships with other men [6]. When neither of them is able to rely on the other person to do the emotional labor, relationships fall apart. In friendships and relationships with women, men are able to trust that we’ll handle all that messy feelings stuff.

I also suspect that this underlies the fear and anger with which some men respond to women’s emotional unavailability. That’s not to excuse the behavior–just to explain it. I empathize with this because it must be terrifying to feel like you can’t deal with your own stuff and the person you thought was going to help you is refusing to. It must be especially terrifying when you don’t even know where the feelings are coming from, when you can’t even tell yourself, Okay, this is scary because I’ve never had to do this for myself and now it’s time to learn how.

It would be like if you’ve gone your whole life having fully prepared meals just suddenly appear in front of you whenever you’re hungry, and suddenly you’re being told that not only will the prepared meals not be provided anymore, but now you have to go out and hunt and gather for yourself. Whaaaat.

Emotional labor is often invisible to men because a lot of it happens out of their sight. Emotional labor is when my friends and I carefully coordinate to make sure that nobody who’s invited to the party has drama with anyone else at the party, and then everyone comes and has a great time and has no idea how much thought went into it.

Emotional labor is when I have to cope, again, with the distress I feel at having to clean myself in a dirty bathroom or cook my food in a dirty kitchen because my male roommate didn’t think it was important to clean up his messes.

Emotional labor is having to start the 100th conversation with my male roommate about how I need my living space to be cleaner. Emotional labor is reminding my male roommate the next day that he agreed to clean up his mess but still hasn’t. Emotional labor is reassuring him that it’s okay, I’m not mad, I understand that he’s had a very busy stressful week. Emotional labor is not telling him that I’ve had a very busy stressful week, too, and his mess made it even worse.

Emotional labor is reassuring my partner over and over that yes, I love him, yes, I find him attractive, yes, I truly want to be with him, because he will not do the work of developing his self-esteem and relies on me to bandage those constantly-reopening wounds. Emotional labor is letting my partner know that I didn’t like what he did during sex last night, because he never asked me first if I wanted to do that. Emotional labor is reassuring him that, no, it’s okay, I’m not mad, I just wanted him to know for next time, yes, of course I love him, no, this doesn’t mean I’m not attracted to him, I’m just not interested in that sort of sex. Emotional labor is not being able to rely on him to reassure me that it’s not my fault that I didn’t like what happened, because this conversation has turned into my reassuring him, again.

Emotional labor is when my friend messages me once every few weeks with multiple paragraphs about his life, which I listen to and empathize with. Afterward, he thanks me for being “such a good listener.” He asks how my life has been, and I say, “Well, not bad, but school has been so stressful lately…” He says, “Oh, that sucks! Well, anyway, I’d better get to bed, but thanks again for listening!”

Emotional labor is when my friend messages me and, with no trigger warning and barely any greeting, launches into a story involving self-harm or suicide because “you know about this stuff.”

Emotional labor was almost all of my male friends in high school IMing me to talk about how the girls all go for the assholes.

Emotional labor is when my partners decide they don’t want to be in a relationship with me anymore, but rather than directly communicating this to me, they start ignoring me or being mean for weeks until I have to ask what’s going on, hear that “I guess I’m just not into you anymore,” and then have to be the one to suggest breaking up. For extra points, then I have to comfort them about the breakup.

Emotional labor is setting the same boundary over and over, and every time he says, “I’m sorry, I know you already told me this, I guess I’d just forgotten.”

Emotional labor is being asked to completely explain and justify my boundaries. “I mean, that’s totally valid and I will obviously respect that, I just really want to understand, you know?”

Emotional labor is hiding the symptoms of mental illness, pretending my tears are from allergies, laughing too loudly at his jokes, not because I’m just in principle unwilling to open up about it, but because I know that he can’t deal with my mental illness and that I’ll just end up having to comfort him because my pain is too much for him to bear.

Emotional labor is managing my male partners’ feelings around how often we have sex, and soothing their disappointment when they expected to have sex (even though I never said we would) and then didn’t, and explaining why I didn’t want to have sex this time, and making sure we “at least cuddle a little before bed” even though after all of this, to be quite honest, the last thing I fucking want is to touch him.

Although discussions like this one give emotional labor a negative connotation, it’s not inherently bad. All relationships run on emotional labor. In any healthy, balanced relationship, romantic or otherwise, the participants are all doing some amount of it, though the total amount varies based on the type of relationship and the needs of those involved. Emotional labor becomes toxic when certain people are expected by default to be responsible for the bulk of it. It becomes toxic when it’s invisible, when it’s treated as an assumption rather than as something that the participants of a relationship intentionally discuss and negotiate together.

What might that look like in practice? Here are a few examples:

“I’m struggling with depression right now and am also extremely busy with my dissertation, so I’m not going to be able to do X, Y, or Z in this relationship. Instead, I’m going to make an extra effort to do A and B. Is that okay for you?”

“If we’re going to be living together, I need to make sure that we both do an equal share of X. Does that work for you?”

“I know you’ve had to give me a lot of reminders lately to do basic things for myself and for our household. I’m working on getting better at remembering on my own by [setting reminders on my phone/bringing this up in therapy/starting medication/cutting back on some stressful things]. While I work on this, are you okay with continuing to remind me? If you don’t feel that things have gotten any better in [timeframe], will you let me know?”

“I’ve noticed that you manage a lot of our interactions with my family. I feel like you get along a lot better with them than I do, so maybe it makes sense that you’re the one who plans our get-togethers, but is this okay with you? Do you need me to take more of an active role in this?”

“I’ve been the one who initiates the majority of our plans together, and while I always enjoy seeing you, I need some clarity about this. If you’re not that interested in spending time with me, I need to know. If you are, I’d really appreciate it if you sometimes invited me to do things, too.”

Remember that one way in which imbalances in emotional labor manifest themselves is that it always ends up being the job of the person who does the bulk of it to start these conversations and to let you know that they’re overwhelmed by the amount of emotional labor they have to do. End that cycle. Be the person who brings it up and ask your partner if this is okay for them. Remember that a lot of people who are doing the bulk of the emotional labor, especially women, might initially try to claim that it’s okay when deep down they feel that it isn’t. Leave room for them to change their minds as they feel more comfortable with you, and don’t pull the “But you said before that it was fine” thing.

I absolutely recognize that this work is not easy. If what I’ve described sounds exhausting and overwhelming and maaaybe you’ll just let your girlfriend/friend/etc deal with it instead, I get it. It is hard. But it would be a lot easier if that labor were distributed more fairly. Emotional labor isn’t a silly fluffy girl skill. It’s a life skill.

It’s hard, too, because most men have been intentionally deprived of the language and tools to even think about these sorts of issues, let alone work on them. That’s why so many men don’t even know what emotional labor is, and why they have no idea what to do when they feel really bad except find a woman and outsource the labor to her–often without even realizing why they’re doing what they’re doing. As I said before, this sounds absolutely terrifying and I do not envy men in this regard.

But you can’t get better at what you don’t practice. Start the tough conversations. Pause before speaking and intentionally observe your partner’s body language. Ask yourself, “What could I do to make life easier for them? What things are they doing to make life easier for me, without even being asked?” Spend some time listening to your own emotions and learning to name them before rushing to either unload them on someone else or drown them out with something that feels better.

I do not exaggerate one little bit when I say that if more and more men learn to do these things, we can change the world.


Although I chose to examine gender dynamics here because that's what I feel most qualified to talk about, it's very, very important to note that imbalances in emotional labor also happen along other axes. <strong>In particular, people of color often do emotional labor for white people, especially in conversations about race.</strong> This poem [7] illustrates this dynamic well.

Update: Maecenas, who started the Ask Metafilter thread, has compiled it into this really useful google doc.


[1] http://www.xojane.com/issues/feminism-men-practical-steps [2] http://the-toast.net/2015/07/13/emotional-labor/view-all/ [3] http://www.metafilter.com/151267/Wheres-My-Cut-On-Unpaid-Emotional-Labor [4] http://ask.metafilter.com/283189/Emotional-Labor-Checklist-Self-Assessment [5] https://the-orbit.net/brutereason/2015/04/25/reading-nonverbal-cues-without-making-assumptions/ [6] https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a27259689/toxic-masculinity-male-friendships-emotional-labor-men-rely-on-women/ [7] https://resistracism.wordpress.com/2008/05/21/those-tears/

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Emotional Labor: What It Is and How To Do It

Disrupting Depression's Negative Feedback Loop

[Content note: depression]

Recently I went through a spot of depression. I’m not sure if I’d call it “An Episode Of Clinical Depression” or not; when you have a personality that already meets several of the diagnostic criteria for depression and you’ve had it since your earliest memories, it can be hard to tell what is or isn’t “An Episode Of Clinical Depression.” So, I don’t really care what I call it.

The whole thing seemed to draw on a few of the recurring themes in my life: I Cannot Date Like A Normal Person; Everything Good In My Life Is Over; I Will Never Have A Real Career Or Any Money; and, my personal favorite, There Is Nothing Redeeming About Me Except My Writing Ability. (Make a note of these; they’ll be on the exam.)

Of course, objectively, everything was going pretty well for me this winter. I have great friends in NYC that I see once a week or more. School stuff was going fine. I love New York. I have a no-longer-very-new partner that I like very much and whose only significant drawback is having the misfortune of not living in New York. (Alas, not everyone can be so lucky as me.) The fact that I managed, in light of all this, to be entirely convinced of my own failure in every conceivable department (while I remained confident of my writing skills, I berated myself endlessly for underutilizing them) was the first sign to me that something was once again significantly off in my brain.

Depression is really nothing but a huge negative feedback loop. The worse I felt, the more I became convinced that I have nothing of value to offer other people as a friend, partner, or anything else. I found that I could barely stand messaging with friends online (something that’s normally my lifeline) because I felt like I had nothing to say. People would ask how my life is or what’s up or how I’m doing or whatever and I had no way to answer that question. My life is bad. Nothing is up. I’m doing shitty. And you?

My various attempts to talk about the depression itself (only when people asked, of course) generally got nowhere. Either they would be like “That really sucks, I’m sorry :(” and the conversation would end there (as it should–I don’t want to force anyone to listen to this) or they would attempt to fix me and that would fail and there would be frustration all around. A few people would listen patiently and then say very little and I had the distinct sense of over-stepping, and so I tried not to ever do it again.

To make matters even worse, I couldn’t stand hearing about their lives, either. Hearing about someone going on a date or otherwise doing romance-/sex-related things became a literal depressive trigger. One time I ended up going back and forth between crying and just being miserable for the rest of the day because someone told me that someone else we know went on a date. Not because I begrudged them their happiness at all, but just because I was entirely convinced that I would never go on a date again because for whatever reason I can’t handle going on dates. (Long story. In sum: introversion.) I also hated hearing about job-related success because I was (and remain) convinced that I will never in my entire life have a job I like OR a job that gives me enough money. I’m not even talking both, mind. Either/or. But that’s also a long story.

So, since I couldn’t talk about my own life and I could only listen to other people talk about their lives as long as they weren’t happier with those lives than me, that left me with…not a lot of conversation topics. (My other mode is RAGE ABOUT SOCIAL JUSTICE!, but I’m only okay with doing that when someone specifically starts a conversation with RAGE ABOUT SOCIAL JUSTICE! Otherwise I assume nobody gives a fuck.) And thus I ended up largely avoiding conversations. And that only made me more and more convinced that I’m broken and wrong and cannot interact with other people like a normal fucking human being, which only exacerbated the depression, which only made me more and more convinced–and so on. There was even a point when I hit rock-bottom and made a list of ways in which I’m a total worthless failure compared to one of my friends and I came up with 21 reasons. That is a lot of ways to fail. And I could’ve probably kept going.

Sometimes there is no rhyme and reason to any of this. I remain hopeful that someday researchers will understand exactly how and why it happens and how to stop it, but for now, the depressive feedback loop continues ad nauseum–until it’s suddenly interrupted. What it takes to interrupt it is something that varies from person to person. For some it’s drugs or therapy (drugs worked that way for me once a long time ago), for some it’s getting out of a situation that’s become intolerable, for some it’s finding a way to make a situation tolerable, for others it’s totally random.

For me, it was reconnection. Everything suddenly flipped around on a random day when a friend saw a sad tweet of mine and offered to listen if I wanted to talk. Knowing this friend is struggling with depression too, I told them a little bit about it and they responded kindly and helpfully, neither trying to fix me nor leaving it at “sorry, that sucks.” We didn’t talk for long, but it was enough to disrupt the depressive feedback loop. (It was also enough to make me realize that one of my major mistakes this entire winter has been attempting to discuss depression with people who do not have it. Of course that’s not going to go anywhere. They can’t possibly have any idea what the fuck I’m prattling on about.)

That day I started talking to more people. People I hadn’t talked to much for a few weeks or months, or that I’d been talking to a little bit not very authentically. I let myself believe that I am the sort of person who actually talks to people long enough to become that person again. And the more I felt like a competent and sociable person who has positive traits, the less I got insecure and anxious when people talked about their own accomplishments, and the more I was able to show genuine happiness for them, and the more I felt like a competent and sociable person who has positive traits.

And that evening, I found out that two of my closest friends are moving to New York this summer. These are the kind of friends that I feel comfortable asking to hang out when I’m feeling down, the kind of friends I’d invite to my shitty little apartment, the kind of friends I don’t need a “reason” to go see. The kind of friends that my other local friends will eventually become, but not yet.

Already the huge city felt less lonely.

Later that night I took a hot shower because why not. I could hear my phone pinging with messages from my friends. The bathroom window was open because the city was finally unfurling from its long frozen sleep, and the steam from the shower was billowing out the window into the darkening sky. I’ve often felt a strange nostalgia and comfort standing at this spot, and that night I finally realized why: my grandma’s apartment in Israel is the only other one I’ve spent lots of time in that has a bathroom window, and for a moment I felt like I could almost be back in my first home again.

The second I realized that, I suddenly knew that everything would be okay again.

To be sure, I knew that there would still be awful nights after this one and that it would probably take a long time to be as happy and hopeful as I was during my senior year of college. But every time in the past that I’ve gotten that unmistakeable “it’ll be okay” feeling, it was the beginning of a long but steady trek up and out of the ditch I’d found myself in.

I recently saw the movie Frozen (yes, just recently). A lot of things resonated with me in that movie, but in particular I liked the theme of connection. In the movie, Elsa tries to hide her magical talent (and, by extension, her entire self) from everyone around her, even the little sister she loves, in order to keep them safe from the magic and to keep it a secret. That to me sounded a lot like a metaphor for depression, whether or not it was intended to be one. I also go to certain lengths to keep people from seeing how miserable I sometimes am*, and I also do this in order to “protect” them from worrying about me, from the frustration of being unable to help, and from whatever mild or severe drop in mood they may experience upon exposure to me. Like Elsa, I ultimately fail at this.

Elsa discovers in the end (spoiler alert) that the only way to prevent her gift from consuming her and everyone around her is through connection with others, through being close to people she loves and experiencing the positive emotions that brings. Likewise for me, there is no relief from depression without connection. Locking myself away in a tower makes for a good fairytale, but not so much for a recovery.

But that’s where my story diverts from the Frozen metaphor. There is no turning my depression into a wonderful force for good that makes a big happy ice skating rink for all the villagers and a cute snowman who talks and a beautiful ice palace. I have always resisted the societal imperative to turn all adversity into a “blessing in disguise.” While I certainly learned useful things from the experience of being depressed, that doesn’t mean that depression itself has positives, at least not for me. If you’d like to view yours that way, you are of course welcome to.

For all the fuss I make about how I can’t do this or that or I totally fail at this or that (I have basically decided that I am never going on a “date” again and I have also given up on trying to find a summer internship because they’re all unpaid and I’m fucking tired of paying for public transit and for lunch every day without being paid for my goddamn work), I’m actually improving in all sorts of ways. My writing’s never been better. I’ve started writing for the Daily Dot, which demands a level of confidence I did not previously have. I’ve been starting more conversations with people online, which I don’t usually do (especially not while depressed).

And, for the first time ever, I’ve written a blog post that’s purely about myself and my life and I don’t even have the slightest urge to put a big disclaimer at the top about how this is a personal post and you probably shouldn’t read it.

That’s right, I actually don’t give a fuck if you read this post and think it’s a waste of your time. Too bad, I guess. 🙂

Now that I’ve gone all meta, I’ll just say this: this is not an advice post. Please don’t leave me angry comments about how suggesting that you talk to your friends more isn’t going to help. If you’re going through something that may or may not be “An Episode Of Clinical Depression,” please do whatever makes the most sense to you or seek advice from a qualified professional. But what I do think that anyone can glean from this story is that sometimes you have to find a way to disrupt the negative feedback loop somehow. The challenge is figuring out what will disrupt it for you specifically.

What I went through this winter was pretty mild compared to other depressive things I’ve gone through, so it makes sense that the solution to it was also pretty easy and simple. Letting my friends back in felt like opening the curtains and letting the sunlight back into my room after a long, dark winter.

~~~

*By the way, the fact that I write publicly about depression is not at all incompatible with the fact that I hide the worst of it. I do pretty much everything described in this perfect article about how to be a “good depressive citizen.” In fact, I’ve probably done it in this post. But I tried to circumvent that a little by letting you see a little bit if how I actually felt.

Edit: So I got curious and read the Wikipedia entry about “The Snow Queen,” the fairytale that Frozen is loosely based on. It sounds like an even better metaphor for depression than the movie:

An evil troll (“called the devil“)[2] makes a magic mirror that distorts the appearance of everything it reflects. It fails to reflect the good and beautiful aspects of people and things, while magnifying their bad and ugly aspects. The devil teaches a “devil school.” He and his pupils take the mirror throughout the world and delight in distorting everyone and everything; the mirror makes the loveliest landscapes look like “boiled spinach.” They try to carry the mirror into Heaven with the idea of making fools of the angels and God, but the higher they lift it, the more the mirror grins and shakes with delight, and it slips from their grasp and falls back to earth, shattering into millions of pieces. These splinters — some no larger than a grain of sand — are blown around and get into people’s hearts and eyes, freezing their hearts like blocks of ice and making their eyes like the troll-mirror itself, seeing only the bad and ugly in people and things.

Disrupting Depression's Negative Feedback Loop

It's Okay Not To Disagree With Your Friends About Politics

I’ve seen a lot of articles and discussions lately on the theme of “why you should have friends who disagree with you [about politics].” Given how uncritically this view is often presented, I want to complicate it a little. My point isn’t that you shouldn’t have friends who disagree with you about politics, or that having friends who disagree with you about politics is bador that there no benefits to be had from having friends who disagree with you about politics, or that you should never expose yourself to views with which you disagree.

My point is just this:

  • Having politically divergent friends is not necessarily superior to not having politically divergent friends;
  • Having politically divergent friends does not necessarily make you superior to those who do not have politically divergent friends;
  • There are legitimate reasons why someone might choose not to have politically divergent friends;
  • There are other ways to reap the benefits of having politically divergent friends.

The reason I’m trying to make these points so carefully is because anytime I attempt to discuss this without several metric fucktons of nuance, folks immediately take my points to their most extreme possible conclusion and start being all like “OH SO YOU THINK THERE’S NO REASON TO EVEN ENGAGE WITH VIEWS WITH WHICH YOU DISAGREE AND IT’S BETTER TO JUST STAY IN YOUR OWN LITTLE BUBBLE HUH blah blah groupthink blah circle jerk blah blah echo chamber.”

*sigh* No.

When a position gets strawmanned so vigorously every time it’s brought up, I know it’s time to give it a proper defense.

In the interest of being fair, I understand where this is coming from. It is true that people tend to avoid evidence that goes against their beliefs and seek out evidence that confirms their beliefs. It is true that people sometimes stereotype and pigeonhole those that disagree with them rather than actually listening to them to see how they justify their own views. It is true that some people think you’d have to be “crazy” or “evil” or “stupid” (meaningless words, by the way, all of them) to hold some belief they disagree with. It is true that it is “easier” not to engage with views you disagree with than to engage with them.

I just don’t think that ameliorating this requires being “friends” with people you strongly disagree with (in my case, conservatives, libertarians, and so on).

First of all, perhaps we are disagreeing on the definition of “friend.” To me, a friend is a person with whom I share parts of myself that I would not share with a coworker, a classmate, a person I just met at a party, a stranger on the subway, a professor, or even a family member. My relationships with my friends aren’t purely dispassionate exchanges of ideas; they involve emotional intimacy and disclosure.

Someone with whom I’m friends on Facebook may also be my friend, but they may only be a “Facebook friend” if they are not someone with whom I’m interested or comfortable sharing very personal things. (I get pretty personal on my Facebook, but my definition of “personal” differs from most people’s.)

There is no need to be “friends” with someone (by my definition) to discuss politics with them and learn from their differing perspective. I can get that from a class discussion or from reading a blog post or newspaper editorial or from having them in my family or from getting into a conversation at a party or any number of ways that do not involve me making myself emotionally vulnerable to people who are probably going to hurt me. I engage with diverging views all the time. I just don’t need to do it while hanging out with friends or checking my Facebook.

Second, people have different goals for their friendships. If one of the main things you get out of friendship is exposure to ideas you disagree with, then it’s easy to strawman people who don’t want to do that as “not wanting to be exposed to ideas they disagree with.” If one of the main things you get out of friendship is emotional support (like me), then it’s easy to feel like we’re being demanded to open ourselves up to rejection and ridicule from conservative “friends” who think we’re going to hell or deserved to get sexually assaulted or should not have full human rights.

Furthermore, to those of us who don’t view friendship primarily as a way to be exposed to ideas we disagree with, it can feel very odd to be told that we “ought” to make friends with people we disagree with in order to “learn from them.” My friend Wes says, “I feel like articles like this view people as plot devices or vehicles for self-reflection. I have friends because I enjoy interacting with them, not because I think that interacting with them is good for me.” While some would argue that friendship is a transaction in any case, I personally feel gross conceptualizing it that way, and even if I didn’t, you still have to agree on what exactly is being transacted. If someone thinks they’re providing me with emotional support and hoping to get the same in return, it would probably be a little hurtful to realize I’m actually treating them as an anthropological experiment so that I can learn How Conservatives Live.

Just as people can have different goals for friendship, they can have different goals for social media. Progressives in particular often get criticized for “shutting down” disagreement on our Facebooks, because we’ve decided that we don’t care to see certain things on our pages. This, again, is taken as evidence that we don’t want to “engage” with dissenting viewpoints.

But I do want to engage with dissenting viewpoints. I’ve simply decided that my Facebook will not be the place where I do that. My Facebook will be a safe space where I go to get support, bounce ideas around with people who can help me develop them, share updates about my day-to-day life, and keep up to date with what my friends are doing. It is not Miri’s Free-For-All Political Argument Arena. That I do not want a barrage of notifications from people yelling at me every time I open Facebook (and nor do I want the panic that inevitably ensues) should not be taken as an indicator of my supposed unwillingness to “consider alternate views.”

Third, not all disagreement is made equal. For instance, I am not interested in engaging with people who ignore empirical reality, whether they do that in the form of denying climate change, insisting that racism is over, or claiming that you can “snap out of” mental illness. There is nothing to be gained from listening to someone call the sky green and the grass blue over and over.

I am also not interested in engaging with people whose sole justifications for their views are religion. You believe abortion is a sin against god. I believe there is no god and no sin. Neither of us is going to convince the other, and I’ve heard this argument a hundred times and will not gain anything from hearing it again.

The above views are things I can just as easily read about online or in books or newspapers. There is no need to waste my own or another person’s time hashing them out in real time.

Other disagreements are productive and interesting to hash out with people. I have argued about human rights organizations, how do donate to charity, affirmative action, whether or not Dan Savage sucks, whether or not polyamory can work, the Israel-Palestine situation, Occupy Wall Street, unpaid internships, why there aren’t more women and minorities in the tech sector, and plenty of other things, either in person or online. Some of the people in some of these debates were conservatives and libertarians, others were liberals or progressive. In any case, diverging views were exchanged and considered.

Fourth, even disagreements about the same issues can read very differently to the same people. For instance, I’m sure progressive dudes can have nice, dispassionate discussions about abortion rights with conservative dudes, because hey, no skin off their backs (and then they can turn around and demand that women do the same, you know, to avoid “groupthink”). Likewise, there’s probably a reason I included affirmative action in that list of things I can debate productively. It doesn’t affect me personally. When someone says they oppose affirmative action, that does not feel like an attack on me personally.

(It’s important to note, here, that just because you don’t mean for your Unbiased Objective Opinion to feel like an attack to someone else doesn’t mean that it doesn’t. Recognizing the disparity between intentions and outcomes is integral to debating sensitively and successfully)

Most people will not be interested in entertaining debates that feel like attacks on who they are, especially on aspects of their identity that they cannot (and, generally, don’t want to) change.

However, I suspect that the challenge isn’t convincing people that it’s okay not to do things that make you feel bad, but convincing them that some things that do not make them feel bad make others feel bad. If any of the people preaching the virtues of having politically divergent friends ever experienced the way I feel when yet another dude sneers at me about false rape accusations or asks me how I can tolerate living in “that neighborhood” with all of “those people,” they would probably stop preaching it.

But some people never experience that feeling either because they don’t experience much marginalization or because their brains just work differently (I have many extremely patient female, LGBTQ, PoC, and/or disabled friends who don’t mind engaging with those who are prejudiced against them). It is sometimes difficult for them to understand that others do experience that feeling (or even what that feeling is) and that that doesn’t make others “worse” than them somehow.

For what it’s worth, I’d be absolutely willing and interested in having conservative friends who want to just hang out and play games and explore New York together and leave my politics alone. I’ve had friends like that at college. But it rarely works because most conservatives who encounter my politics want to debate them, and I’m not interested in doing that with people I consider friends. My close relationships with people whose politics were very different from mine have relied on embracing our similarities and appreciating what we admire in each other, not on endlessly hashing out the same tired political arguments.

It’s easy to make statements like “everyone ought to have friends on the other side of the aisle” when you don’t consider that others might view friendships and political disagreements differently than you do. I want my friendships to be a refuge from the loneliness and cruelty of the rest of the world. That doesn’t make me “weaker” or “less open-minded” than you; it just means that I have different priorities. My priorities are shaped not only by the personality I was born with, but by the experiences I’ve had and the goals I’ve set for myself in my life.

If you enjoy political debates with friends, cool. If you don’t, cool. I want people to be open-minded and consider views they disagree with, but not at the cost of feeling accepted and supported by their friends. I want to challenge the idea that a person’s worth, intellectual capability, open-mindedness, or commitment to skeptical thinking can and should be judged by their willingness to have Dispassionate Debates with their friends about issues near and dear to their hearts.

It's Okay Not To Disagree With Your Friends About Politics

[blogathon] Top Ten Reasons I Can't Wait for Women in Secularism 2

The WiS2 conference logo.

This is the second post in my SSA blogathon! Don’t forget to donate! This post comes from a reader’s request.

In less than two weeks, I’ll be off to Washington, DC for the second Women in Secularism conference, to which I get to go primarily thanks to the generosity of an FtB reader who gave out a bunch of grants. Yay!

Check out WiS2’s awesome schedule here.

Here’s why I’m really excited:

10. Cards Against Humanity. It’s not a secular con without it. It’s always the first thing to go into my duffel bag.

9. Washington, DC. I rarely have occasion to travel there, but it’s a beautiful city. Last time I was there it was December, which was slightly unpleasant, but this time it won’t be. Maybe I’ll have a bit of time to just walk around and explore, too.

8. Using my new business cards! I didn’t really give them out at Skeptech because I basically knew everyone there. But I’ll probably find a use for them at WiS2. Check them out, I designed them myself!

7. Seeing Susan Jacoby speak. I laughed out loud numerous times while reading her book The Age of American Unreason recently, and that rarely happens while reading nonfiction. I disagreed with her on some things, primarily relating to technology, but for the most part reading the book made me want to shout “fuck yes” periodically. She’ll be speaking about the history of women in secularism and I’m sure it’ll be similarly awesome.

6. Getting out of Evanston for three days. Every time I do this, I feel refreshed and destressed. There are great things about living at a university campus, and there are not great things about it. I look forward to sleeping in a comfortable bed and without drunk students yelling beneath my window (and now that I’ve said that won’t happen, just watch it happen anyway :P).

5. Friends!  I’ll get to meet a bunch of lovely people with whom I correspond online but have never actually seen in person–Tetyana of Science of Eating Disorders, Ania and Alexander of Scribbles and Rants, and Melody of CFI-DC (who just might be involved in this conference somehow…). I’ll also get to see people I’ve already met: Kate and Andrew, obviously, Sarah Moglia, and tons of other people I’m probably forgetting.

4. Getting to see Stephanie, Greta, Rebecca, and Amanda speak–again. While seeing and meeting new speakers is always exciting, seeing the ones that I already know will be awesome is arguably even better.

3. Blogging! Lots of blogging! I’ll be doing it. I might even liveblog if I can get good enough wifi access. Taking notes/writing about talks is not only helpful for those who end up reading it; it also helps me better remember what I’ve learned, which is often a problem for me since I’m not an auditory learner at all. So sharpening my liveblogging skills will be great.

2. I know I already mentioned Amanda Marcotte, but her talk seems so cool that it warrants its own list item. It’s called “How Feminism Makes Better Skeptics: The Role Rationality Plays in Ending Sexism.” I think this is extremely important because there are so many people who still believe that feminism and skepticism are incompatible. There are also many feminists who take a very anti-skeptical stance to both feminism and other issues, which is why you sometimes see extreme science denialism and adherence to pseudo-religious dogma in the feminist movement. So I’m very curious to see what Amanda has to say about feminism and rationality.

1. Spending a weekend with a bunch of fantastic secular activists. Although I always enjoy the actual talks and panels at conferences, the best part by far is the feeling of being around so many people with whom I can fit in. There’s no other feeling quite like that.

If you’re going to WiS2, let me know and come say hi! 😀

~~~

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[blogathon] Top Ten Reasons I Can't Wait for Women in Secularism 2

On Ending Friendships Over Politics

After the election last week, I saw exactly three reactions to Obama’s victory in my Facebook newsfeed.

The majority were shouts of glee and sighs of relief, whether because Obama was elected or because Romney was not. Count me among those.

A tiny minority were pictures of crying Statues of Liberty, Bible verses, and promises to move to another country. (Which one? I’m guessing not any of the ones with socialized healthcare.)

A slightly larger minority were the ones ruing the “divisiveness” of politics and the “hurtful discourse” and the fact that “friendships end” over the “bitter comment wars” on Facebook. Laments like these are usually uttered by the sort of holier-than-thou moderates whose numbers, for better or worse, seem to be shrinking with each election cycle.

Here’s the thing. True friendships can withstand lots of things, including things more severe and “divisive” than a few debates over Facebook. If your friendship ends because you argued about who has better ideas for fixing our economy or whatever, the problem was probably not the argument. It was probably the friendship.

I’ve gotten into some pretty heated arguments with friends before, about politics and about other stuff. In the end, if I really care about that friend–and usually I do–I try to smooth things over by telling them that I still respect them as a person, and, usually, that I still respect their opinions even though I disagree. I make sure they’re not personally hurt by anything I said. And the friendship goes on.

If instead I find myself reaching for the “unfriend” button, it’s probably because I just didn’t care about that friendship enough. But that said, this happens very rarely.

Furthermore, you might be surprised to know that some of us don’t want friends who think we should be forced to carry a rapist’s baby to term, or that we shouldn’t have the right to marry who we want because “marriage is sacred.” These things aren’t just political anymore. They’re personal.

A person who not only believes these things but actually tells them to me despite how hurtful and alienating they are probably isn’t someone I want to keep as a friend. I’m not interested in being friends with people who consider me a second-class citizen.

On that note, it’s surprising sometimes how personal our political issues have become. I would never end a friendship over a disagreement about, say, economics or foreign policy, but I would absolutely end it over racism, sexism, or homophobia. Now that “-isms” play such a big part in political affiliation, an argument that starts out about the Affordable Care Act can turn into an argument about whether or not women should “just keep their legs closed.” By the way, if you think women should “just keep their legs closed,” you’re no friend of mine.

Finally, I don’t see how ending a friendship over significant political differences is any worse or less legitimate than ending it because you hate each other’s sense of humor or lifestyle, or whatever other reasons people have for ending friendships. If you don’t feel close to someone anymore and don’t want to be their friend, you shouldn’t have to be. You don’t owe friendship to anyone. I get that it sucks if someone you considered a good friend suddenly wants nothing to do with you just because you disagreed with them, but it’s even worse to have to pretend to be someone’s friend for the sake of not being “divisive.”

Stephanie Zvan wrote something very wise about this:

If you’re talking about reconciling relationships, however, ask yourself what you’re doing. Are you gearing up to apologize to someone who you feel was arguing from a good place when you got a bit testy with them? Are you mending family bonds that are important to the kids in the connection? Are you letting back into your life someone who’s spent the last several months telling the world that your rights matter less than theirs? Are you accepting one more apology from someone who gets abusive every time you discuss something you disagree on?

The differences matter. Not everyone is someone who should be in your life if you want a decent life. Sometimes strife is freedom.

 

Truth is, there are a lot of potential friends out there. While it’s important to expose yourself to different perspectives and opinions, there is absolutely no reason you should have to remain friends with someone whose politics you find deplorable.

I’d much rather be “divisive” than have to see bigoted crap all over my Facebook, which I consider my online “home.” Just as I don’t have to have bigots over for dinner, I don’t have to have them in my newsfeed.

On Ending Friendships Over Politics

[storytime] How I Quit the Senior Thesis

Ever since I was little, I held a belief shared by many gifted kids–gifted kids who grow into overachieving teenagers and then sleepless college students and then budding doctors, lawyers, engineers, researchers, businesspeople, or just those legions of people who wear tailored suits and work in tall office buildings in lower Manhattan and do stuff with money on computers or something.

That belief was this: you must do everything you are capable of. Anything less than that, and you’re “selling yourself short.”

You must participate in every science fair. You must take every honors class. You must play every sport your body can reasonably perform. You must accept every social invitation you are offered. You must matriculate at the most elite college to which you are accepted. You must have as many majors and minors as you can fit into your schedule, and you must have as many leadership positions you can get yourself accepted for.

So last spring I applied and got into the honors program in psychology. This meant that I would spend my senior year designing, carrying out, and writing up my own research study. At the time I was still under the impression that I wanted to pursue a PhD in clinical psychology, so this was obviously something I felt I should do.

I was at least mildly excited about it, at first, or at least made a good imitation of being excited. I don’t remember which it was anymore.

But in any case, things soon deteriorated. I discovered that I would not be able to do the study I originally designed about the stigma of mental illness–a topic I care deeply about–because none of the faculty members who study it were able to advise my project for various reasons. I tried to find a different lab to work in, but literally every single professor whose work I found interesting–and there are quite a few–was either already advising too many other honors students or had a requirement that you needed to have worked in their lab first or whatever.

So I ended up in a lab that deals with something I knew little about and that had very little relevance to my future career–cultural neuroscience. Fascinating stuff, but difficult and unrewarding. I couldn’t understand half the words that came out of my adviser’s mouth. What little willingness I had to go through with the program faded away. But still, I did not quit it.

The reasons I gave myself and others for not quitting are interesting mainly due to their blatant inaccuracy:

  • I felt that the department would be annoyed with me, but that’s silly since I was told I could withdraw at any time, and besides, if I quit that would free up resources for others.
  • I worried that this would somehow hurt my chances for admission into graduate school, which is even sillier because I’m applying to do a masters in social work, where nobody will care about my lack of research experience (particularly not in cultural neuroscience).
  • My parents told me not to, but so they did with journalism, and I quit that anyway and never looked back.
  • And, perhaps most importantly, I thought that quitting would make me a failure, even though that’s just obviously false.

As it turns out, what it came down to wasn’t any logical reason, but rather a sense of obligation, an invisible hand shoving me forward into doing things that I have no interest in and that bring me little or no benefit.

It is incredible to me how powerful that force was. I have always stubbornly persevered when it comes to getting the things I want, but apparently not getting things I don’t want is a different story.

Several agonizing weeks went by and then The Weekend happened. The Weekend was this past weekend. I saw an amazing speaker talk about microaggressions. I spent hours with friends. I laid around in bed in the mornings. I had a friend visit–someone I care about deeply and am now proud to call more than just a friend.

And at one point, I was sitting in the living room looking at my two bookshelves, which are full of unread books that are calling my name. (A small sample: When Everything Changed, Microaggressions, Outdated, Delusions of Gender, Sex at Dawn, and Thinking Fast and Slow.) I often wonder when I’ll be able to read them. But this time, for some reason, the question took on a new urgency: Seriously, though, when the fuck am I going to read these amazing books?

And it hit me that for the first time, academics doesn’t have to define me anymore. It doesn’t have to be My Thing. I don’t have to throw myself into the work to forget the fact that I have no real friends and no actual meaning to my life, because suddenly, I do.

I have new friends all over the country who are quickly starting to feel like old friends. I have my writing and this blog, which is growing in popularity and bringing me even more good friends and interesting people to talk to. I have the work that I do with sexual and mental health–I could write a whole post about the projects I’m working on and how much they mean to me. I have a new partner I adore, who supported me through this decision rather than pushing me to do and be everything.

This city, this city I used to hate so much, is growing more beautiful and homey to me every day. We spend our weekends out in its streets and thrift stores and cafes and apartments. As the weather grows colder, my heart grows warmer.

The thing is, I can do and be a whole lot of things. If I really wanted to, I could do this thesis. (I could also get a PhD, which I recently decided not to–a decision that parallels this one in many ways.) In the grand scheme of things, a year is not that long of a time to do something I don’t like and don’t need (assuming, of course, that my mental health would survive the year-long onslaught, which I doubt).

I could toil away at it and add another line to my resume, not because this will help me get into a social work program or accomplish any of my actual goals, but just so I could feel a little bit smarter and more accomplished.

But why?

Life is just too fucking short.

It’s too short for this kind of crap.

And so I quit.

[storytime] How I Quit the Senior Thesis

The Friend Zone is a Myth

This week’s Daily Northwestern column.

As Valentine’s Day approaches, many of us are probably thinking the same thing : Dating is hard.

And it is, especially in college. People who look for serious relationships (as opposed to casual dating or hookups) face plenty of challenges, such as jam-packed schedules, breaks away from campus, study abroad semesters, plenty of temptation, and, of course, the constant specter of graduation.

Some might say that friendship is another one of those challenges. The concept of the “friend zone” isn’t a new one. On UrbanDictionary.com, where it was the “Word of the Day” back in October 2011, “friend zone” is defined as “What you attain after you fail to impress a woman you’re attracted to. Usually initiated by the woman saying, ‘You’re such a good friend.'”

Despite the gendered definition that UD provides, I’ve heard both girls and guys claim that their crush rejected their advances because they were “just such a good friend” or because they “didn’t want to ruin the friendship.”

I think the friend zone concept is mostly bunk. First of all, the fact that many relationships do start off with the couple being good friends shows that friendship itself isn’t exactly a cold shower.

Second, the friend zone seems like a convenient (if well-intended) excuse that people use when a friend whom they see as nothing more expresses romantic interest. After all, it’s never pleasant to have to tell a good friend that, for whatever reason, you just don’t see them as boyfriend/girlfriend material. And often people might not know the reason for that lack of connection: Maybe they just didn’t click with the person, or there wasn’t chemistry, or whatever you want to call it.

In such a situation, it makes sense that someone would say something like, “I just don’t see you as more than a friend.” And it makes sense that the person they’re rejecting would conclude that the friendship is the problem.

But it’s not. The problem is the person just doesn’t like them that way.

Of course, some people do choose not to date a friend they have feelings for because they don’t want to jeopardize the friendship. However, such people are probably simply valuing friendship over romance for the moment, and that’s their choice — it doesn’t mean becoming their friend was a bad idea.

Sometimes the friend zone explanation arises when a person puts a lot of energy into being a good friend to someone they’re interested in and gets frustrated when their emotions aren’t reciprocated. Since humans are wired to find patterns, the natural assumption is that the friendship caused their crush not to like them back.

However, as important as it is, being a good friend doesn’t entitle you to someone’s romantic attention. In fact, nothing entitles you to that.

It makes me sad when I see advice columns in women’s magazines exhorting them not to act like good friends to the men they like for fear of getting “friend zoned.” These columns generally advise women not to do anything overly friendly, such as worrying about a guy’s health or listening to him talk about his problems. Caring actions like these might prompt the dreaded “You’re such a good friend” comment.

However, unless you’re looking for the most casual of flings, friendship first makes a lot of sense — it allows you to get to know the person well before getting too invested, it helps them understand your boundaries, and it allows you to make sure that both of you are looking for the same thing from each other.

Especially at our age, people vary a lot in terms of the sorts of sexual and/or romantic relationships they’re looking for. Some just want to hook up, some want to date several people, some want an exclusive partner until distance forces them to separate, and others are looking for something serious and long-term. Getting to know a potential partner as a friend first is a great way to prevent hurting each other when you discover that your goals diverge.

Besides, if it never develops into anything more, having a new friend never hurts anyone.

This Valentine’s Day, ignore the cliched advice and go with your gut. People are either going to like you, or they’re not. But they’re more likely to like you if you treat them well.

The Friend Zone is a Myth