Pay Attention

There is a fairly common trope that is directed towards people (primarily young, female, white people, often those who self-harm, attempt suicide, or have an eating disorder) who engage in unhealthy behaviors that they are only doing it for attention. You’ve heard it before. “She only hurts herself for attention, it’s no big deal,”. I’ve had this trope directed at me before, and absolutely seen it directed towards my friends. I don’t like it.

 

At first glance it seems fairly insightful, and provides a reason to not give the individual the attention they want: don’t want to reward bad behavior do we? Nobody likes an attention whore, and we absolutely don’t want to feed in to their need for attention. None of us particularly want to deal with negative, difficult situations, and if you can avoid them while telling yourself that your actions are positive, then all the better. But despite the first blush appearance of good advice, this kind of attitude relies on some extremely negative premises and is actually incredibly unhelpful to the individual struggling.

 

First and foremost, this trope rests on the idea that it’s not ok to want attention, or that you’re bad if you do something strictly because you want attention. It suggests that wanting attention is an inappropriate motive, and that it undermines the entirety of an act. This is straight up wrong. Pretty much every human being in the world wants attention. It’s part of what makes us social creatures. We want others to listen to us, to hear our troubles, to help us out, to be with us, to tell us stories. This is part of what confirms to us that others care. Mutual attention is how we form relationships. Wanting relationships is good right? So wanting attention is good.

 

Interestingly enough, when someone engages in what’s viewed as a positive behavior in order to gain attention, we often praise them and give them the attention they want. Imagine the star football player in high school: if someone were to become the quarterback because they liked the popularity, we wouldn’t think twice about it. Those individuals still get the support and attention of the school and their peers. We understand in many circumstances that trying to get attention is good. So why do we use it to undermine certain behaviors?

 

The second element of this trope that kicks into play even if we do accept that wanting attention is acceptable is the idea that we shouldn’t reward someone for negative behavior. We know from little kids that if you react to someone throwing a temper tantrum, they’re getting what they want and they continue to engage in that behavior. If you don’t want someone to hurt themselves, then you shouldn’t give them what they want when they hurt themselves, right?

 

There are two elements that can be important to remember here. The first is that even if someone is being ineffective or unhealthy in their behavior, that does not mean that their motivation is inappropriate or wrong. This is something we forget a lot about all sorts of emotions. Let’s take anger for example. Oftentimes when someone gets angry and yells or breaks something we tell them that they shouldn’t be angry. However there may actually be a perfectly good reason the individual is angry. What is not appropriate is the action they undertook with the anger. So while you may recognize that someone is doing something unhealthy or inappropriate with their need for attention, you can still recognize a very real need and true emotion that needs to be addressed.

 

In addition, you can address someone’s needs without promoting or validating what you view as a negative or unhealthy behavior. For example if someone is cutting and you believe it’s because they really want and need attention, the way to deal with it may not be by getting extremely upset with them or by focusing on the cutting. You can give them attention without connecting it to the negative action right away. Asking them how they’re doing, what’s going on in their life, or simply asking them to hang out are all good ways to give them the attention they might be seeking without indicating to them that you’re doing it just to get them to stop cutting. Of course at some point down the road you may want to bring up the self-harm, but only giving attention to stop the symptom is not a good way to go.

 

If someone is desperate enough to hurt themselves, to attempt suicide, to restrict food, to purge, to do drugs, to drink excessively etc. just to get someone to pay attention to them, then this is a fairly good sign that they really do need more attention than they’re getting or that something bad is happening in their life that they need help with. Many times these techniques may be the only way they can get someone to pay attention, and that indicates that they really do need something from those around them. If someone wants attention that badly, they truly do have a problem. When we blow off people’s negative actions by saying “she just wants attention”, we seem to be saying that the problems are not real if they were motivated by the desire for attention. We are telling individuals that those desires for attention invalidate all of the very real struggles that they might be going through. We tell them that their problems are fake, made up, or not worth our time and energy. It gives us an excuse not to do anything and it invalidates all of their feelings.

 

The motivation of attention does not make something trite or unimportant. It doesn’t turn a problem into a joke. In fact it’s a good indication that the problem is real and severe and requires attention. Let’s stop blowing off the very serious problems of people we just don’t want to deal with by casting aspersions on their motivations and step up to the plate to find a healthy way to give them the attention they clearly need.

Achievement, Self-Hatred, and Goals

Yesterday I saw a lot of people linking over to this comic at the The Oatmeal. It encompasses something that I think is extremely common and also somewhat worrisome, so I’d suggest that you read it UNLESS you feel you might be triggered by fatphobia. Cause there’s a major trigger warning on this baby. If you can’t get through the whole thing, I understand, but just give yourself a little taste of what it’s like.

So after I read this comic yesterday (and I forced myself through the whole thing, thinking there must be some redeeming feature to it, as people I respected had linked to it), I found myself somewhat flabbergasted that people were holding this up as funny and true and something they identified with. This comic signifies to me about 99% of the reason that everyone I know is miserable and hates themselves. The author openly admits that his behaviors are atrociously damaging, but people were happily linking to it and saying “oh yeah that’s me!” I find myself somewhat perplexed, and so without further ado I’m going to break down exactly what I find wrong with this fat-shaming, self-hating, disturbingly-reminiscent-of-bulimia comic.

 

So let’s start with The Blerch. The Blerch signifies to me everything that is wrong with American approaches to mental and physical health. The author describes the Blerch as the thing that asks him to slow down or to stop. He calls it blerching when he is sedentary with “no good reason to be sedentary”. He is constantly trying to escape The Blerch, and makes it out to be something terrible or horrible that will ruin his life if he allows it to catch him.

There are a lot of problems with this. First, it seems to pain laziness as the greatest evil in the world. This is weird to me, as laziness really is not that harmful of an action. No, it’s not great, but all of us need a little bit of relaxation in our lives and that’s ok. It’s part of recharging our batteries, staying sane, taking care of ourselves. Giving yourself rest is not a sin. It is in fact necessary, good, and worth it.

Second, The Blerch is predicated on the idea that you need an excuse to be sedentary. Let that sink in: if you want to sit down or lie down, you need to earn it. The only time you get to stop accomplishing things, or eat, or have fun, or relax is if you’ve earned it somehow. That’s bullshit. These are all basic human rights and no one should feel as if they can’t do them unless they’ve run 20 miles. I often hear friends and family members speaking disparagingly about themselves for taking the afternoon off or for sleeping in, because for some reason this equates to be lazy and worthless and pointless. This comic just reinforces that over and over again. You need to have earned the right to sit on the couch, otherwise you are The Blerch. The examples the author gives of the “bad things” The Blerch asks him to do are such horrendous activities as sleeping in or reading bad book reviews. Sleeping in is actually a wholly human impulse and a part of self-care, as is doing something silly like reading bad book reviews. We really shouldn’t be demonizing activities that allow us to take care of ourselves. We should be allowed to things we want to do simply because we want to do them sometimes.

The third thing that’s really scary about The Blerch is all the fat-shaming that it seems to represent. Apparently it’s the author’s previous fat self (who was really horrible?? I don’t know, but I guess he doesn’t want to be that person anymore), and somehow The Blerch manages to equate self-caring actions with being fat and then equate fat with lazy. Not good.

So then we come to the second page, wherein the author describes his eating habits. He says he eats to reward himself for things. Ok, this is not the healthiest thing in the world, but it’s fairly common and there’s a lot of therapy programs out there that can help you find a healthier relationship to food. However apparently in his mind, this makes him a horrible glutton. The most telling piece of this comic is to me the following: “I run to eat. I punish my body outdoors to atone for my atrocities indoors”. There’s a lot to break down here.

A.Food is not something to atone for. It is not a sin.

B. Do you notice how he equates eating with atrocities? That is fucked up beyond belief. And our society does that ALL THE TIME. Eating a lot is somehow on par with criminal behavior. Notice how he portrays himself in these panels: disgusting, grotesque, disturbing. As if there is something horribly, horrifically wrong with eating, or with eating unhealthily. Being unhealthy is not the same as committing atrocities, and equating the two is a huge part of how fucked up our relationship with food is right now.

C.It appears that in this world there are two ways to be: perfect, calorie counting robot, or self-destructive binger. This is sad. It’s also a really unhealthy way to approach food, and it’s a dichotomy that gets reinforced a lot. It also seems like it’s destroying something he actually enjoys: he says that running makes him feel alive, but he also acts as though he compulsively has to do it to work off his food. Recognizing that there are other options could make both food and running more joyful (this could apply to all sorts of behaviors that people use to cope with overeating or guilt about food).

But what disturbs me most is the end. He recognizes that it’s unhealthy and then he says he’s not going to stop. The problem is that he doesn’t seem to recognize just what is unhealthy about his behaviors. He appears to think that it’s just physically unhealthy to eat that much. Unfortunately, what he’s describing sounds an awful lot like bulimia. Obviously I can’t diagnose him over the internet, but what he’s describing is unhealthy not just for what it might do to his body, but moreso for the self-hatred, shame, guilt, and disgust he has. Even more worrisome is that many people felt that they could relate to this picture.

And now we are on page 3. Here is where we start to get into what the author views as positive things or positive feelings, and they mostly seem to center around accomplishing things. He says that cleaning the house, paying your bills, and catching up on email feels like nirvana. This seems a little weird to me. Shouldn’t bliss be more like spending time with someone you love or doing something you really enjoy? Why the obsession with accomplishing?

For some reason, getting stuff done is once again treated as the end all be all of being a good person. This is screwy, but again, part of the fabric of our society: we’re trained to believe that the best thing we can do is get stuff done, and that if we’re not getting stuff done then we’re fuck ups. We’re trained to think that we shouldn’t feel good about ourselves unless we’ve accomplished things. This is a highway to depression, and this comic is reinforcing it over and over again. The fact that sometimes you can’t clean the house or check your email doesn’t mean you’re a fuck up or you should be able to do those things: it means that hard things are hard, or that you’re tired, or that you just don’t like doing those things.

So now we move on to page 4. This is where he begins to talk about vanity, and makes it VERY clear to us that he’s not running out of vanity because he’s not like those shitty people at the gym over there who are stupid and use tanning beds. We get another heaping pile of shame for other people’s choices all over this page. Why the hell does he care if these people choose to go to a tanning bed? I don’t know, but apparently it’s a really big deal to him.

And then he goes on to say that he runs to feel good, not to look good. It’s interesting because this seems to contradict all the self-hatred that he had in the previous 3 pages. He seems to have been saying that he runs so as not to feel like a miserable waste of space, and then he says he does it because it makes him happy. Perhaps it’s both, but accomplishing for accomplishment’s sake is just as empty as looks, so maybe those of us who are highly motivated need to be careful before we look down on the gym rats.

And now we arrive at page 5, which sounds like something out of Dante, and disturbs me all to hell because it is yet another example of how in our society feeling miserable and in pain is equated with earning something, finding serenity, and being a really great person. So the first sentence describes this as the most wonderful and terrible run the author has ever had. Now I hope I don’t have to be the first to point out that suggesting wonderful and terrible should be descriptors of the same thing is a little off, and that maybe we should rethink our concept of wonderful if it includes things like giant hornets and crazy heat and dehydration.

Also the whole scenario he describes is horrifically unhealthy and kind of unintelligent: why would you go running in that kind of heat? That’s asking for something bad to happen, because it’s nearly impossible to keep yourself hydrated enough. But it’s considered something awesome because he was pushing himself through pain, he was showing what he could do. I can only ask, to what end? Why is it amazing? What is it about feeling like shit that we think inevitably leads to a great gain of some kind?

For some reason pain and good have become linked in our minds. If we did something through pain then we are good. Unfortunately that doesn’t make any sense. Because it doesn’t.  Sacrifice, particularly self-sacrifice, requires an end: you can’t just put yourself through a lot of pain and think that something great will magically appear because you sacrificed. It has to be for a reason and a purpose. You have to jump on a grenade that’s actually going to explode in front of someone else, not just jump on top of a grenade. And it seems to me that this particular page is promoting jumping on random grenades: make yourself feel miserable! You’ll get so much out of it! You’ll be a better person! Huzzah! It openly admits that there was no pleasure in this run, but it’s still holding it up as the best and most meaningful run.

Ok. Final page. In this page, we are treated to the part where the run gets better: it doesn’t matter what the purpose of life is because he is KING OF THE MOUNTAIN because it started raining and he feels better. Um…ok? I mean, it’s nice that you can just say that the purpose of life doesn’t matter because you feel very full of life. But why does that have to come at the cost of extreme bodily deprivation and pain? I have a hint for you: it doesn’t. And when you say that the reason you don’t care about thinking about the why is because the world is full of beauty and agony…well that sounds a little fucked up to me. Your agony did not earn you anything in this case. It would be really nice if we could start separating beauty from agony and realizing that sometimes great insights come from completely not painful and not shitty situations.

The final conclusion tries to be positive, because it wants to spin the whole thing into meaning that everything will be ok if you experience life. Unfortunately this doesn’t cover up all the self-hatred that was the reason for running in the first place, and it doesn’t cover up how much shame is bleeding out of this comic, and it doesn’t cover up the fact that the obsession with doing more and going further for no particular reason even if it makes you miserable gets pushed over and over. Somehow I get the message from this comic that when we’re feeling bad and shitty about ourselves, the answer isn’t to ask why, or try to do something nice for us, but rather the solution is to beat ourselves into a bloody pulp to live up to some masochistic ideal that society has painted for us. It’s screwed up, it shames people who might have any kind of illness or disorder and thus CAN’T do these things, and it glorifies pain, and suffering for no reason. It ignores what might actually create a fulfilled or positive life and eschews those things in favor of getting stuff done, regardless of what the end purpose of that stuff is. And in the end, it says that the part of us that is afraid and hungry and needs something should be stuffed away and run from so that we can get more done.

Now here is the point where I’m going to insert a caveat: I’m not really all that mad at the writer of this comic. It appears to me that the comic was written out of a really unhappy place, and that he’s in some way trying to come clean about how miserable he is. There are places that he acknowledges that he is doing things really badly and trying to trick himself into thinking he’s happy. I think that he’s a product of a society that tells people these same shitty messages over and over again. And I wish I could say something to him that would snap him out of this mindset.

But I do think it’s important to dismantle what’s wrong with this comic because he is contributing to the general milieu that suggests we always need to be moving and accomplishing. I also feel that this comic crystallizes very well many of the negative impulses in our society that people view as positive, and I see this in the positive reaction the comic is getting. So. I don’t blame him, he recognizes he’s being unhealthy, but I do want to call out how he’s playing into unhealthy stereotypes. He says that his need to run comes out of his wish to do really amazing, good things like cure cancer. This makes me incredibly sad, because it seems to me that as the writer of The Oatmeal, he’s already shown that he has some pretty amazing talents and is doing something with them, but it’s not enough for him.

I don’t like this mindset. It’s made me miserable and it’s made people I love miserable. Accomplishment is not everything, nor does it determine your worth as a human being. And this shaming comic implies over and over again that it does. I wish people would stop sharing it.

An Apology is a Phoenix

In the skeptical community, people have been talking about apologies. We’ve been working on being open about when we’re wrong, valuing the apology, and discussing what constitutes a good or a bad apology. What is more fascinating to me than these practical discussions is the question of how apologies actually work. What is it about saying two words that can change the nature of a harmful act? What are we doing when we apologize?

 

The place to start might be when you should apologize. In general, an apology is expected when you harmed someone and you could have acted differently, particularly if you harmed them intentionally. An apology usually implies that you will change your behavior in the future and that you can see you should have acted differently. Oftentimes we might say “I’m sorry” just to express sadness or sympathy. That is not the same as an apology. This is the type of thing you might do with an accident, although if the accident is bad enough you may apologize with the intent of improving your behavior in the future, especially if you were reckless or careless.

 

In college, I had a professor who likened apologies to the lifecycle of a phoenix: you kill off a small part of yourself and are reborn better and stronger. I think that this conception of an apology is important: an apology is more than simply saying words. It is a speech act: you are doing something with words. You can threaten someone with words, you can question someone with words, and similarly you can apologize. So what are you doing when you apologize?

 

The image of a phoenix is particularly pertinent to an apology, because a good apology is one in which you identify a piece of yourself that you want to kill off or change into something new. An apology that truly understands what you have done wrong and seeks to right the wrong will want to distance the new self from the self who did the harm. Each of us spends our whole lives choosing which parts of ourselves to cultivate and which parts to cull off. When we apologize, we clearly identify a type of behavior or attitude that we want to kill off. When we do that, we open the way for a new behavior that is more positive and more in line with our values.

 

What I find the most interesting about this is that it helps to explain why apologies are so painful and often difficult. We have to clearly identify something about ourselves that we don’t like and that we want to change, openly get rid of it, and then somehow try to come out with new life and growth from the experience. It hurts to change, it hurts to realize that you dislike a part of yourself, and it’s painful to try to remove something. The very image of the phoenix is one of violence towards the self, but it also explains why apologies can be a great thing; only by burning away the mess can you turn into something better.

 

And when we use this image to understand what someone is doing in an apology, we begin to understand why it holds the power that it does. When we’re talking about our identities and how we form our identities, the most we have are metaphors, symbols, and words. No one can see our identities or our personalities, and so the things we do with words are often the most important. When we apologize, we are doing something to ourselves even more than we are doing something for another person: in front of witnesses, we are killing off one piece of ourselves and committing to the growth of another piece. We are allowing others to see a process of change in ourselves, which is something personal and difficult. The intimacy of an apology is something that is rarely discussed, but I believe it plays an important role. We could go through the same process of recognizing that we are wrong and committing to change our behavior without telling anyone, however the fact that we do it in front of others and as reparation for the harms that we’ve done makes it a kind of justice.

 

In the atheist community we don’t like to talk much about the power of metaphors and symbolic acts but let’s be real for a minute: symbols mean something. People wouldn’t hold on to them so hard if they didn’t mean things to us and if symbolic acts didn’t mean things. And so the symbolic act of an apology does more than simply let someone know you’re sorry and sad for what’s happened. It illustrates to them that you’re willing to distance yourself from someone you used to be, perhaps even to the point of destroying that part of yourself. Apologies are powerful symbols.

The Power of Pets

This is a post about how much I fucking love my cats. I was in no way planning on writing this post today, or possibly ever. But last night my baby boy, my perfect, favorite, sweet, psycho, needy, crazy, lunatic cat Sid Vicious (Darth Siddius the Kittius) died unexpectedly. And it’s honestly the only thing I can think about, and I need to talk about it somehow, and as this is my blog I get to do what I want.

I had a friend ask me recently what the point of pets was. I thought everyone got how awesome fuzzy sweet creatures were, but that question reminded me that it’s likely not everyone understands how integral my cats are to my mental well-being.

People are scary. They require understanding. They expect things of you. They can be passive aggressive, or angry, they don’t always tell you what they want, they can be hard to read. Oftentimes they challenge you and ask you to do incredibly difficult things, especially if you have a mental illness (people ask me to eat and not to cut, which are two of the hardest things in the world for me). While people can also support and share and talk and comfort, they ask for these things in return, and they have biases, and they can be confusing. They require energy. They rarely allow you to be wholly yourself, as each person in the world has different needs and triggers and concerns which you have to be aware of when you’re around them. People have a limited supply of how much they’re willing to listen to you bitch and moan or cry or hate the world. So people are both limited in what they can offer you, and they limit you in that they have expectations and needs and frustrations. For me especially, communicating with others can be particularly difficult, and because of the sensitive nature of a lot of my problems, I don’t feel comfortable being very open around other people. Especially because people often get really uncomfortable and try to make me do things I don’t want to do when I open up to them, I’ve learned that it’s often better to not rely on others.

Pets are completely different. Some people might suggest that animals only like you cause you feed them, or that they don’t really distinguish between people, or they don’t actually care about you. Well even after I moved out, I was Sid’s special favorite. From the moment I walked in the door at my parents’ to the moment I left, he would follow me around, yelling at me to pet him or love him or pay attention to him. He liked me and my dad better than anyone else, and he had his habits with us: he’d wake my dad up first thing in the morning and have a cup of coffee with him. He was needy. He wasn’t afraid to tell you what he wanted, but he never needed that much. He screamed to tell you he wanted to be petted or to stop petting him. He purred to tell you yes please. He hated being ignored, and god forbid if you let a different cat under the blankets first. He had Personality. SERIOUS personality, and he knew who he liked and he knew who he didn’t like, and he liked his older brother and he hated the dog and he loved being cuddled and he hated being held and he loved the sun and he hated loud noises. Sure he needed things, but nothing draining. Just some love. Some cuddles. Some pets.

He was distinct. He knew who he was and he made no secret of it so you never had to guess what he wanted or needed. And best of all he didn’t give a shit what you did unless it affected him. He would love you and rub up against you and only get unhappy if you ignored him. If you were struggling or not eating or depressed, he treated you exactly the same (although his magic cat sense told him when you were sick and he’d give you extra special cuddles). He didn’t judge. He didn’t ask you to do things that were outside of your comfort zone. But he did calm me and comfort me. He was warm and soft and purred, and made me feel close to another being, a being that didn’t require me to censor my thoughts or my feelings at all. Full and complete acceptance.

And what is absolutely wonderful about this kind of acceptance, this unthinking support, is that it made me a better person. I am not usually a very nurturing person. I’m not good at patience. I’m not good at spending time trying to puzzle out what someone is saying or wants or needs. I’m generally not very mothering or very caring. But sweet baby Jesus, when I was around that cat I had the patience of a saint. I would pet him for hours. I would sit without moving until my legs were numb rather than wake him up if he was sitting on me. If he was complaining about something, I would pet him and play with him and feed him and do whatever I could to try to figure out what he wanted because he was my baby, he was my responsibility. He had no better way of telling me what he wanted than meowing, so I had to figure it out. And he brought me back to reality. All of my cats do. When I’m drifting in my mind, somewhere unpleasant and self-hating, and a cat comes by and sticks his butt in my face, there’s only so much more metaphysical musing I can engage in. The physical sensation of touching a soft cat and having them arch up into my hand and purr can do more to center me than anything else.

And so my cats make me feel stronger. They make me feel as if I can take care of something, as if something needs me, as if something loves me no matter what and doesn’t need me to change. They remind me of the good bits of the world, and they remind me that in this exact moment there is a silly, goofy, sweetheart in front of me, tickling me with his tail and begging for a good scratch. They don’t demand that I change myself or make myself better or become healthier. That’s what scares me about other people. Other people put food in front of me or take away my razors or put me in therapy. My cats just show up and tell me that they need me. And then I have to remember for myself that I need to take care of me to take care of them. They make me strong enough to do things outside of my comfort zone on my own terms. They butt into my life when I least expect it and don’t ask me to feel better…they just ask me to cuddle with them for a bit. And somehow this utter rejection of everything that’s going on in my mind makes me feel better anyway.

I love my cats for the freedom they give me. And so I will miss my Sid more than I can say. I’ll miss how if you pet him just the right way you could make him do somersaults. I’ll miss how loud and obnoxious he was. I’ll miss how you could make him go flying across the room in terror if you sneezed too loudly. I’ll miss how he always had to be at the center of everything. I’ll miss how when I left my parents house my clothes would be nearly gray from all the cat fur I had gotten on them while cuddling him. I will miss how statuesque he looked when sitting still and upright, and how he and his brother made perfect little Siamese bookends whose heads moved in synch at any noise. I’ll miss the stupid fighting under the covers when two cats tried to get in at once. I’ll miss it all. Mostly I’ll miss that my baby who loved me for nothing more than the fact that I would give him my time is gone.