dismissing my problems with “well, it could be worse”
self-dismissal, fairness, comparing your troubles with others, "bootstraps elitism"
back in a timely manner! wahoo! a couple thoughts before we begin. the first one being that living in these “interesting” and “unprecedented” times is so many layers of dissonance. i don’t know why i keep coming back to this as a comforting thought but like some people just are born at rather unfortunate times (i don’t imagine people living through the great depression or before they knew what germs were lamented so much about their place in history) and in the end we’re just little speckles of dust who must do what we can with what we have and try to be positively impactful to the people around us. i think it’s particularly hard to cope as a child who grew up with a strong “the arc of history bends towards justice”/“end of history”/“post-racial america” framing in our social science educations. we gotta shake that off and fully recognize that it takes fight to bend the arc of history, and that fight looks different for everyone. easier said that done. so much easier said than done.
secondly - I don’t think I can run an advice column (let me know if I’m wrong lol) for many reasons but I love feeling like I exist which is amplified when people TELL ME THEIR THOUGHTS so if for whatever reason you do not wish to comment on the post or reply to the email, put whatever you want (WITHIN REASON) in this form. Would love to hear your thoughts, feedback, tweets you cannot post, etc. I’m trying to let myself do things without the profound fear of flopping. If a post falls in the forest and nobody acknowledges it, then nobody knows I flopped? Probably not how it works but whatever!
also: I reviewed Sable Yong’s DIE HOT WITH A VENGEANCE for The Brooklyn Rail. It’s a fun collection of essays about vanity, beauty, and wellness from the perspective of a former beauty editor. There were definitely a bunch of parts where I wanted to shout “SAY MORE!” but maybe that’s where I should be doing the thinking/engaging, which I tried to do in the review. i’ve been getting nonstop ads for “preventative” botox recently so beauty as an industry is definitely on the mind.
“well, it could be worse”
I wield the blunt instrument of the phrase “well, it could be worse” against myself constantly. It’s my mallet against personal sadnesses and feelings of having been wronged. As they pop up, I whack them back down, a weird little game. It’s not fair that I grew up with an alcoholic father. Well, it could have been worse—at least he had a job most of the time and he never hit or physically threatened me. I’m lonely and feel hurt by the actions (or lack of actions) of some of my friends. Well, it could be worse. At least you have friends and they are mostly good. I feel panicked by the precarity and sense of general decline in modern American society. Well, it could be worse. At least I’m not housing insecure, and not constantly urgently at risk of losing everything.
The hardest mental fallacies to fend off are the ones that don’t feel entirely wrong, that I never feel like I can unravel all the way. Nothing above is wholly inaccurate. But there are always worse versions of the circumstances you’re in, and also better ones. There’s no real way to compare against anyone else’s life because the set of variables is simply too wide. That doesn’t stop me from trying though! I look at how my friends handle what I perceive as similar experiences, smooth over the many differences. I huffily think I could have “done better” than them if I had their starting points, or I dismiss my own problems because they seem nowhere near as consuming as someone else’s. I gobble up memoirs, noting where the author’s life takes turns mine doesn’t or hasn’t yet—I missed the obtain a supportive long-term romantic partner exit on the highway, unfortunately. I haven’t found the hypothetical well of compassion for self and others that is supposed to heal me. I read a memoir where an author’s parents are worse than mine and think, well it could have been worse, what’s my excuse? I read a memoir where an author’s life seems far more straightforward and manageable than mine and wonder where my book deal is.
I am, in many ways, extremely lucky. And in others ways, comically unlucky! And I know I need to stop invalidating my own experiences and feelings by fixating on the first part. I also can’t overindex on being unlucky though. These two extreme points I’ve been swinging between particularly vigorously in the last year leave me either scrambling to re-delude myself, chastising until I can push forward with whatever is immediately in need of my attention, or wallowing in a muddle of self-pity and vengeful anger. It encourages a really negative form of bitterness; I find myself angry at and disconnected from people who I perceive as having “gone through less” and unsympathetic to people who do actually acknowledge their own negative experiences fully. Not a recipe for human connection.
This is sort of an Anson brainworms version of privilege discourse; who has the right to be upset and angry at the state of the world? Are you “checking your privilege” and “listening and learning”? The way that well-meaning phrases become words that make me gag as they curdle in corporate and online settings is a discussion for another day. Whose problems are “deserving” of our attention? Am I doing this (life???) “right” (by whose measure??)?
Ultimately, this is a dead-end train of thought that I could almost believe was planted on the left to derail discourse and prevent solidarity. Weighing out anyone’s hardships, your own or others, and trying to hold them against each other is petty and a waste of time. I also feel like this is a common fuel for what I’ve come to think of as bootstraps elitism—a sort of harshness and unsupportiveness that people who have “made it through” the same crucible of shit sometimes hold for those coming up after them. It’s similar to a hazing mindset: I struggled to get here, so why shouldn’t you? I find it everywhere: people who have paid off their student loan debt opposing student loan forgiveness, immigrants who have been in the country longer denigrating those who are newer, women ascending to positions of power and kicking the door shut behind them. Where you’d expect the intimate familiarity with someone’s struggles to create empathy and solidarity, instead there is judgment and competition.
Some of this is attributable to a scarcity mindset, feeling like there’s a limited few spots so you have to gatekeep and stay vicious. There’s also the fear that you will be lumped in with everyone else in your marginalized group; I think a lot about Cathy Park Hong in Minor Feelings admitting that she easily perceives a room as “overrun when there are too many Asians, and “too many” can be as few as three.” A disgusting, relatable feeling. These feelings are understandable but they’re built on the broken assumption that we’re planning on maintaining current hierarchies, stereotypes, and power structures.
The accumulation of more struggle does not alleviate the pains of the past. Welcoming more harm into the world makings things “fair” in the stupid sense of the word. Our lives are easier because of the sacrifices of people who came before use who we didn’t know, will never know, thank god. If we all operated from a sense of spite and regression, what would it all be for?
I am allowed to mourn my losses, lick my wounds, feel my sorrows, as is everybody, without some bizarre need for justification or measurement. My experiences are not made flimsier or less impactful by the existence of someone else’s, and vice versa. I think especially in this era of aggressive and constant self-narrativization and hearing the blaring chatter of other peoples’ narratives via social media, this is challenging to internalize.
A more fragile outgrowth of this is the recognition that “well, it could be worse” was a coping mechanism, a way my child brain identified to prevent myself from crumbling under the weight of what was going on around me. Divorce, domestic violence, alcoholism, generational trauma, and mental illness are all still too big for me to wrap my arms around now, and my arms were once much shorter. I find it extremely challenging to slough off the instinct of self-criticism and be appreciative of my past self, especially as I wrangle with the now bitter psychological fruits of childhood survival tactics. But ultimately, the truth I’m still working on swallowing is that what helped me to survive is not necessarily what will allow me to thrive, and that I can move past the whack-a-mole of “well, it could be worse” now that I don’t need it as desperately.
It’s taken me a long time to recognize that I don’t even need to argue my way point by point out of bad logic. If anything, this can add fuel to the fire because I’m expending so much energy dissecting and shaming. I can release myself. It could be worse, it could be better, it can just be.
content (not derogatory)
in light of, ahem, recent political vibes… i’m thinking about sarah thankam mathews on cathedral thinking (broad positive appealing welcoming political vision instead of constant firefighting and doom) and living in the interregnum/figuring out how to enact my beliefs day to day in a meaningful way
the nytimes 100 best books list came out… but who are all these big book lists for?
AI is extremely reliant on faith in its hypothetical potential… also even if Sam Altman and Ariana Huffington did build the best AI health coach in the world… that is NOT INFRASTRUCTURE!!!!! PUT THE MONEY INTO OUR LITERAL HEALTH SYSTEMS PLEASE!!!!!!
really appreciated how this essay delved into the way various experiences can really complicate how we understand/end up with diagnoses, and the messy, underrepresented ways autism can manifest
platonic partnership and life-building and love <3
god, one of my favorite genres of media is just a behind-the-scenes look at how a big complicated thing gets done! logistical success makes me optimistic about the human race. how do you feed the entire olympic village?
why are there NDAs everywhere now and what does it mean
famous author alice munro was recently exposed as having known about her husband’s sexual abuse of her daughter and stayed with him… i can’t summarize this well i just recommend you read andrea skinner’s essay about her experience in her own words, the toronto star’s reporting on the matter, and then you read brandon taylor on art monster discourse and child sexual abuse
the weird needle that republican women are threading these days
loved reading this
Amazing piece🩷