Taking it personally
Do they mean me, actually?
I’ve been working on not taking it personally when I hear things that aren’t aimed at me personally.
The other day I was listening to a podcast, and the people on it were addressing a listener question about wanting their partner to change living habits before they live together. In answering this, they mentioned that some people live in an unsafely dirty environment and that it’s reasonable to want that to change, but short of that, people also just live differently from each other and it’s something partners and households need to work out.
My homes have often been dirty, not generally dangerously so, but still much dirtier than I want them to be. I felt defensive, because the reason, for me, is mostly fatigue and pain. The reason people might have an even dirtier environment can be for the same reason. I felt disappointed and rejected.
I felt like I needed to do something about that—because I hate the feeling of suddenly being outside—like I’m on board with what I’m hearing and then suddenly I’m not.
The feeling of suddenly being outside comes from people expressing both real biases and from their simply forgetting to think of us, and I think those often get all tangled inside us, especially in gray areas where it hits on something our whole society is hurting us on but might not be. This felt like one of those—it would be ideal for someone to remember disability, but when confronted about it, who knows what they would say? The ambiguity brings up all kinds of old pains, for me.
It’s one thing to hear something so offensive you want to be on the outside; it’s another to feel just a moment of faltering inclusion. This happens when people talk about things they don’t know much about—saying something about fatness or a trait they don’t know is usually neurodivergence, or about gender in a way that throws me off. Or just something about me that has absolutely nothing to do with a way I have been oppressed or abused—just something unpopular and private—I think almost everyone has had those moments. They all feel a little the same.
The internet has been a place where I and many, many people feel more empowered to say something when they feel hurt—you’d never be able to step into a conversation overheard in person to tell someone that a thing they said made you feel bad; it can be hard enough with friends.
I think probably most people have been in a group setting where someone makes a joke that makes us feel bad, but it just doesn’t feel worth interrupting “the vibe” to point it out. Even if we did—would it just be followed by an awkward silence and a greater feeling of isolation?
I think a lot of us have found on the internet a setting where we can say something, because there isn’t much to lose.
For several years it became hard to resist for me, even when it felt bad. I was able to escape the feeling of being outside by correcting whoever was willing to be corrected when they made me feel like an outsider. I continued to be gentle and patient with people I actually knew, but online it was easy to be snippy and try and regain the control I felt was fully lost in my life, and find others who wanted to do the same. I developed a compulsion, and a sense of obligation, to point it out any time someone forgot to qualify things; I was critical in a way that implied my confidence that they were acting in bad faith.
Eventually I lost track of whether or not I cared about whether people were acting in good faith or not. I took “impact is more important than intention” very literally and I think into too many contexts.
Eventually I moved into a gentler place, and I regret how, honestly, mean I was to people in those years. I had rejected my own social interpersonal power, and became at least sometimes a bully. I was in a social group that denied that interpersonal power was possible without sociopolitical majority. That made me mean, suspicious, ungenerous, and fearful.
It’s taken me way more years to recover from that environment than the time I was in it. It’s been strange watching the years pass by as my attachment to acting that way shrinks and the amount I cringe at others doing it grows.
Ultimately, I think all of that desire to “correct” and ask “what about this you forgot?” comes from the crushing sense of being an outsider. That’s not a fresh take—but I don’t think we are aware sometimes that it’s not the greater sense of being an outsider; the huge rejections or the tangible pain of real discrimination—it’s those little moments where you were in and then you were out—those may not change our lives like discrimination, but in small moments they can hurt the most.
That’s why people created the term “microaggression” (which I haven’t heard in years now, actually? somehow?). The little things sting and add up.
Now, though, I am trying to distinguish between microaggression and failure to consider me.
When I listened to this podcast and heard this judgement of extremely dirty homes, I worried “that’s me” and suddenly felt outside in a “room” where I’d felt included.
It’s painful to feel left out.
I wanted to do something—write them off, comment, do something. I was able to let it go though. “They aren’t talking about you.” A voice that’s new—“They aren’t talking about you. And you don’t have to agree with them anyway to stay here.”
I’ve heard people talk about household habits like they’re moral, and that bad ones are inexcusable. I’ve learned those people are incompatible housemates for me, and that I don’t have to internalize that people are right just because they’re critical of me.
I asked myself a few questions about this moment where I felt left out, consuming media.
How are they framing this? Did they say this was moral or just undesirable?
Did they say “there’s no excuse”?
What’s the tone of this conversation? Is this being framed as a fact or an opinion in a chat?
What kind of podcast is this? Are they framing themselves as relational experts?
Is my intuition that when directly asked if they found disability to be an excuse for a dirty home, do I genuinely believe that they would say “no” or have they been empathetic to people in other moments?
Do I have to be included in this moment to feel included otherwise?
Can these people think of what they haven’t thought of? Does this sound like a deeply held belief or an off the cuff thought?
Do I have to agree with them to continue listening, actually? Do I have to only listen to strangers who I am confident I would want to be friends with?
The answers to those questions lead me back to “They’re not talking about you anyway. So, do you agree, or care, once you take your old pain out of the picture?”
It can be so hard to hear things adjacent to really hurtful things people have thrown at me, or society has in general thrown at me. I am so self-conscious about cleanliness and tidiness. But, I do now live with someone who understands my standards and intentions and does not make me feel bad for falling short of their expectations or desires, and who understands these feelings first-hand; we can work on them together. So, does it matter at all what anyone else thinks of me about, now? Especially people I don’t know?
Because I feel safe day-to-day, I have emotional room to ask myself why I want to ask “but what about…?” of people I don’t actually need to be invested in, and can just assume are reasonable, so I can move on.
I have room to ask myself if it matters to ask. If it changes anything, really. The deepest fear behind asking people to articulate all stipulations before they speak is that they actually do want to exclude me, and that I should internalize it. The desire to challenge people when I fear they are excluding me is this sense that if I don’t, I am accepting that I should be excluded.
I used to really need to reassure myself about my deserving to live and thrive, so much so that if I didn’t outwardly challenge people, it felt like accepting whatever they had inadvertently made me feel, it felt like accepting that the thing I either heard or read into was right and I did deserve whatever bad experiences I was having. That was so much work, and so much pressure on other people. Friends, strangers I talk to, and the media I consume.
It’s been freeing to slowly let go of that. It’s not all gone, but it’s become easier to say to myself “I’m probably not being excluded, and if I am, at worst I can find somewhere I’m included. I deserve to be with people.” That’s come from having loving people in my life. I’m sad about all the time that people were loving me, but I still refused to believe I should be included.
I believe that a lot of people are in this place; and that’s why they need to correct people aggressively about the smaller forgotten things and gray areas. There’s a sense they can’t like someone if they ever feel excluded. Otherwise, they are accepting the exclusion as acceptable or even inevitable. They’re fighting for their sense of self and place in the world.
I don’t think it’s acceptable or inevitable for people to feel like they shouldn’t be included. I think that some people are cruel or bigoted, but others just misspeak and that feeling a bit bad is a wound we can clean up on our own. Each wound gets smaller as we stop giving people so much power to define us by the ways they don’t know us. At least that’s felt true to me.
I wish us all a sense of inclusion and caring, enough to hold up against the moments we feel awkward and left out.
Thank you for reading! I am always happy to hear thoughts from those kindly reading.
You can leave a comment on Substack, or email me at michaelzzakiwrites@gmail.com. If you received this via email as a subscriber, you can also simply reply to this email.
THANK YOU <3
