(Un)Qualified True Stories

Why do we share our stories? Why don’t we? Why should we?

How often do you see a piece of writing or a video where someone is sharing their deepest truth and qualifying it with an apology or a non apology. I guess if it’s a non apology then they are un-qualifying it. But still, they’re making an attempt to explain themselves, as if the truth were not enough alone. Or worse it is happening in conversation, and the person in front of you is making themselves vulnerable, but with qualifications. (Just kidding, I love that).

“I am not sorry I am sharing my truth”

“I am not looking for sympathy/pity/help”

“… but I can’t be silent any longer”

These qualifiers are little signposts that reveal the ways that we’ve been silenced, aren’t they? They are our attempts to get ahead of how we know we’ll be attacked. We were labeled attention seekers or liars. We were siloed in silence. But we are showing you that we know what you’re thinking. We qualify because the truth alone is not enough for most people. And we know it and we are holding a shield against the thing that held us back.

I personally have spent a lot of time thinking about my motivations when I share things about myself. I have a lot of history. A lot of it is painful. My history makes other people look bad. My history makes myself look bad. I write essays that never see the light because I can’t decide how to justify sharing them. I feel like sharing my story is an attack on someone else, or will be seen that way, and I can’t get in the words to express that I can see what the consequences will be. I’ve sat playing debates through my mind with those people, hoping I could come up with an irrefutable argument that would win the debate and allow me to speak. Just sharing this fact has me feeling that little nag in the center of my back, reminding me to qualify that.

The fact of the matter is, however it ended up in me, whoever put it there, whatever cultural or social institutions could hold the blame, at the end of the day that nag is there. Something inside of me exists and holds me back, closes my throat, and makes me hit “delete.” And my only qualification for telling you this is that who put it there, how it got there, how it grew there, is less important than how I handle it (yeah, there’s qualifications to that, too).

A lot of the stories I haven’t told just sit because I can’t get past the feeling that I am “attention seeking.” I grew up being shamed for attention seeking. What a silly thing to shame people for. Of course we want attention. We need it. Humans are social animals. Humans don’t develop without it. We physically need attention. Most people will acknowledge the research that shows that infants will not survive without emotional engagement. The consequences of physical AND emotional neglect are long term. But I am not just talking about babies. There is not a stage of human life in which we don’t require attention. Disconnection from other humans has physical consequences, it causes physical pain along with depression and anxiety and all of the other tasty issues that are eating us up these days. That phrase, “attention seeking” gets thrown around by some people when they hear something that makes them uncomfortable. The truth is that accusations of attention seeking are about the person making them. It is what we like to call an ad hominem attack. They can’t deal with what was said so they’re pointing to who said it. It is more of a manipulation of attention than anything else, so you can feast on that delicious irony while you dismiss the attack.

OOF! I’ve just talked myself into feeling deep compassion towards people who throw that accusation. So many of them have no skin in the game, suffer no personal connection to the story being told. They only have an intolerance for anyone that doesn’t toe the line. They have so internalized the culture that anything that might cause a ripple in it is a personal threat to them. That’s a miserable way to live.

So share your story for attention, if you need permission this is your note. You have to get people’s attention before they can listen to you. They can’t understand you until they’ve heard you. Once they understand you then you can understand each other. That’s how you eventually get to emotional intimacy and that, my love, is where you really experience the healing.

And as for people asking for pity. Let me tell you a story about when they put in a freeway that moved traffic out of a tiny rural town. We moved so much faster on the way to the coast without having to take the two lanes through Easton. But since that happened I have not once been to the tiny drive-in where we used to get milkshakes, or the market we would load up at for road snacks. That’s what pity is. It is the fast path where your pain is a blur on my way to the next interesting thing. So some people who hear your story are going to pity you. There’s really nothing you can do about that. But the juicy secret is that we really only have so much time in our day and energy in our hearts. We can’t make space to hold every single story that comes up. So some people are just going to pity us, because that’s all they have room for. And you are just going to pity others because that’s all you have room for. If you tried to hold space for everyone’s pain right now you would have no space for anyone. And I am going to qualify that.

If you are worried about pity, don’t be. Have pity, let others pity you. Someday when your heart is more healed you will have compassion. It’s up the road from pity. It takes practice. The good news is that letting yourself pity others and letting others pity you is actually an act of compassion. You are accepting yourself and others. You are allowing the world to be as it is. Ideally we would all have compassion for everyone all the time. That’s high level dharma shit. Don’t expect that of yourself if you are sitting here wondering if people will pity you. Granted, you could read this and become instantly enlightened and suddenly have compassion for all sentient beings. If that happens, let me know, because that would be really cool. Odds are that you are going to have to work your ass off, though.

Now, to those of us who are “not asking for help.” Some cases are clear, the story teller just needs to vent and when you want to vent and people come back at you with advice it can be rage inducing. But sometimes the person saying this clearly needs help. I personally struggle hugely with help. I have no judgement for others who need help, who ask for help, or who accept help. I say that, but what I mean is that I have control of my knee-jerk reaction to it. I cringe. I wonder why they need it. I wonder why they think they deserve it. I wonder how they got the balls to ask for it. Then I breathe and remember that I am not identical to those thoughts and reactions. And I move on, wish them well, volunteer what I can, and hopefully get a little closer every time to silencing that reaction forever. Because all of those thoughts are really pointed at myself. If I were in their shoes I would be pressuring myself to stay silent. I reactively judge them and through that myself for not being “strong” enough to just die before I ask for help. And I imagine the state I finally have to be in before I ask people for help. There are a few people who have helped me through crises who I can say have seen me at my absolutely most vulnerable. It was horrifying. I don’t think I could even be grateful I was in such a dreadful place of hopelessness and shame. And I know I have pushed people away after they helped me through crisis because I couldn’t face them after they saw me that vulnerable (if that’s you, say HEY! I probably really miss you). 

When I see someone bravely sharing and qualifying along the way it inspires me. There are times when those qualifiers sit delicately balanced on top of the bravest moment of a person’s life. They have decided to face what comes with their revelation. Fears for what may come have finally been overwhelmed with the possibilities and potential of what sits on the other side of them. Most of us only see a glimmer of the life change that is being born in that moment.

I have stories that I feel a deeply compelling need to share. Not for attention or help, but because I want others who’ve had similar experiences to know they’re not alone. That simple motivation would be enough, but there is an even bigger reason that gets missed sometimes. When we share, and we discover we aren’t alone, we sometimes stumble upon stories that are bigger than ourselves.

We need to talk about what has happened to us and what we’ve seen, because we need to share notes. One of the most liberating moments of my life happened while studying feminist philosophy. I know, shocking. I seem very interesting but it’s just because the cliches that string my life together are interesting. And also poetic. Miranda Fricker coined the term epistemic injustice and furher describes two forms of it, hermeneutical injustice and testimonial injustice. Check it out here, Wikipedia (the TL;DR version) or here’s an expanded explanation. I was going to share a link to Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, but couldn’t find an article on it, which will be funny to you once you learn more about the concept. Basically, hermeneutical injustice is the injustice of not being able to fully understand your own experience because the language doesn’t exist to explore the concept that impacts you. A great illustrative example is how before groups of women got together in the 1960s and 1970s to talk about the experiences they had in the workplace, the term “sexual harassment” did not exist. Shame and silence kept women before that from understanding what was truly happening to them. Testimonial injustice relates to the way we discredit people and their story because of who they are. Think of all the reasons our stories get dismissed. I myself think I won’t be believed (and often I am not) because I am a woman, because I have a history of mental illness, because of my political beliefs, because of my sexual orientation, my religion, etc. How many of the things that we don’t share are kept quiet because we think we won’t be believed? How many of the reasons we think we won’t be believed are related to issues of testimonial injustice?

And after all this, I am still personally stuck on the qualifiers. I keep re-reading this piece wondering if I need more qualifications, or fewer, if I’ve use the right ones, if people who read it who know me will think I am talking about them, it’s a carnival of anxiety in my head at the moment. I went back to count how many times I qualified statements and gave up. As much as I would love to be myself unapologetically, without qualifiers I am not there. I am where I am. Just a person, staring at a screen, trying to be brave enough to share, trying to have compassion for those who are brave enough to share, working on having compassion for myself, and hoping that you will, too.

#anxiety #philosophy