User blogs

Hey there,

I have ADHD and use picking at my skin/scalp as a stim (despite being medicated) and work in an office, which means lots of time sitting and staring at computer screens…ideal picking conditions. I keep my nails short, I wear makeup and hats to reduce the temptation, but I’ve realized that I need a fidget tool to distract myself from the need to pick. A while back I figured out that bringing my knitting project is a perfect way to keep my hands busy!

The downside: it attracts comments, and I’m SUPER sensitive to drive-by comments from folks curious about my appearance or what I’m doing. It does attract way fewer comments than when they catch me scratching at my scalp or when I use my fidget toys (fellow pickers: NeeDoh cubes or gumdrops are perfect). I work with a fair number of Boomers and they feel the need to make judgemental comments about how old I am when they see me with a fidget toy, which actually does impact how they treat me in the workplace.

Comments like “oh, what are you making?” while I’m knitting are totally fine and can be really fun, since I do have other crafty coworkers and we can talk about our projects. It’s the requests that get to me – the “ooh, could you make me a hat / scarf / huge expensive sweater with complicated pattern I saw online” or just straight up “when are you make me something?” that bug me, and they happen SO frequently since I work for a large company and have been knitting at work for at least 2 years.

People who ask questions like this are almost always unaware that knitting is time-consuming, expensive and I only buy yarn from a local shop that hand-dyes their own Merino – and they do the “but what if-” continuation after I’ve said no, while I’m already annoyed, and the longer it goes on the more annoyed I get. I’ve worked in lots of professions over the years, and I quite like my job and I’m good at it, so I’d rather not change careers yet again after alienating all of my coworkers. I’m usually super patient and have worked with little teeny tiny kids so I’m used to a ton of annoying questions, and I’ve even offered to teach people to knit – they only just want me to make them something, struggle to hear “no”, then get annoyed with me.

Example:

“You crochet?” (Nope, knitting)
“What are you making?” (The same hat I’ve been working on for a month, I’m a slow knitter)
“Could you make me one?” (Uhhh nope, I just make things for my family / I’m super behind on holiday presents this year)
“What if I commissioned you?” (No, sorry, I don’t sell my work, if I paid myself a living wage it’d be $300.)
“What?! I buy hats at the store that are $30” (Those are made on a knitting machine & not by a person usually, or if it is handmade they’re super underpaid, and are probably not made of the expensive handmade yarn I buy)
“What if you just got some super cheap yarn from (big name craft store)?” (Nah, I just use ethical yarn)
“But what if you made just a scarf or socks or something instead?” (nope, sorry)
“My grandma used to crochet and she could whip something up super quickly” (very cool for your grandma! Knitting is a lot slower than crochet and I’m a slow knitter.)

Cue person being really annoyed and huffy and treating me stand-offishly for the rest of the day. I’ve had one coworker do this repeatedly, suggesting I sell things as a side hustle & asking me when I’m making him something, to which I finally said “sure, if you get the yarn for it and find a pattern you like, I’ll make you something” – which cued him to say word-for-word, “I didn’t want to do the work, I just wanted you to make me something”.

Am I overreacting? Maybe! Have I tried a firm “nope, sorry” to which the response is almost always that person not speaking to me for the rest of the day? Yep! Am I destined to have this same conversation over and over until eventually I snap and strangle someone with my circular knitting needles? Who’s to say.

Would you happen to have any scripts / advice / commiseration?

Thank you,
Yarnover it (they/them)

Dear Yarnover,

Your letter indicates that you frequently get monitored and singled out by coworkers due to your disability, and you do a lot of work auditing their intentions so you know how to avoid upsetting them or attracting similar attention in the future.

The examples you list show a pattern of sticking to your boundaries while engaging with their questions in good faith, but your patient explanations are not having the intended results. So you’re doing the timeless dance of the neurodivergent, visibly nonconforming, and/or serially awkward: You’re assuming that any routine social interaction that feels “off” is most likely because of some signal you failed to grasp, and categorizing your reactions to others’ behavior (such as annoyance about chronic intrusions and some people’s inability to take “no” for an answer the first seven times you say it) as probable overreactions.

Some consequences of following this logic:

• It leaves little room for and no defense against the possibility that some people act like assholes and go on little bad faith power trips simply because they enjoy it.
• If all your reactions are classified as overreactions, then anything you’d do to administer consequences or even express how you feel are probably off the table. (When people ask me for the “polite” way to tell a boundary-crosser to back off, what they’re usually asking for is the least perceptible way.)
• Ergo, “how do I fix myself so that assholes stop happening to me?” becomes the default approach to encountering bad faith in the wild.
• Wildcard slot for power dynamics around who gets to demand politeness and civility without giving it vs. who is expected to perform these things without expecting them in return.

Assuming good faith until you know otherwise is generally a good way of trying to be in this world, the same way assuming everyone is out to get you is an exhausting way to be. That said, the cultural tendency to overcompensate by ignoring historic power imbalances and assuming individual good intentions in the face of patterns of repeated bad faith behavior leaves us perpetually open to manipulation by bad actors.

Fortunately there is a fairly reliable test for whether your antagonist in a given conflict is operating in good faith: You decline to comply with whatever they want from you and see what they do. When people who genuinely did not intend to annoy or offend you or cross a boundary find out they did, they tend to apologize and back off. When people who did intend harm get called on it, they tend to explode and double down on DARVO (deny, attack, reverse victim-and-offender) protocols and other manipulation tactics until it’s all your fault, again. Once that happens, no amount of clarification, information, or work on your part will fix the situation.

What this means in practice: Some of your coworkers are genuinely curious about knitting or genuinely curious about you and knitting is a relatively safe topic to engage with since you are enthusiastic about it. However, some of these people are doing it specifically to fuck with you because you are different and they cannot abide that. They will never admit this, and your charm offensives and patient explanations will never work on them, because their goal was never to understand why. It was to exert dominance. You can tell which are which by how some of them get when you dare treat them like a peer instead of an authority.

The repeat offenders don’t think you should be allowed to knit at work unless it serves them directly (…or allowed to use fidget toys…or ignore them…or give them “too short” answers….or have a disability….or have work tasks more urgent than catering to them…or live your life without constant judgment and commentary from them). These folks will “just” ask questions in order to command your attention and suck up your time, they’ll keep going until they get a rise* out of you or satisfy whatever impulse makes them be like this. (*Any indication that you are less than overjoyed to be interacting with them for as long as they feel like interacting with you). If they succeed in pissing you off, they will have a reason to feel aggrieved and punish you all day. If called on their behavior, they will act surprised. Why on earth are you so mad? They were just asking questions!

It matters that this particular conflict is taking place at work among older, abled, cisgender people who are pretty sure that the likely consequences of pissing you off are weighted strongly in their favor. This added  difficulty level makes straightforward solutions like “just tell them to go away because you’re working” much less feasible. It’s not that the “simple” solution is unreasonable or unfair, or that it never works, it’s just that the risks are higher if your ability to eat and be housed depends on being “a good cultural fit” with people who think you’re supposed to fit them and never the reverse.

I think there is stuff you can do about this, but it requires a hard reset on your part. This isn’t a problem about figuring out what each of these people individually want and finding better ways to explain yourself next time about a thing that helps you and harms no one. Boundaries start with defining what you will do, not controlling what other people do, making this a question about wresting back control of your days, accommodating yourself to the max, and clarifying what messages you wish to send about what you need to do your job effectively. If you’re going to have to mask to get through the workday, might as well build a mask out of deliberate messaging that has a hope of serving you!

Homework time:

First, how interruptible does your job expect you to be vs. how not-interruptible do you ideally need to be in order to get your work done?

What do you need to get done this week/today, and can you map tasks for which you require the most focus with blocks of time where you’re likely to have the most focus? How do these blocks correspond with how annoying vs. enjoyable it is to talk about knitting? For example:

• Blocks of time when you need knitting as a focus tool. (No interruptions please!)
• Blocks of when you’re in the break room and happy to chat about knitting with other like-minded people. (Knitting chat = yes!)
• Blocks of time when occasional work-related interruptions and/or casual chitchat are expected and unavoidable. Shove “meetings” into this one, but remove “knitting chat” for the time being.

Second, what are some visible, perceptible ways you could distinguish focus blocks from the others and enforce greater seclusion? Can you close a door or temporarily move to an unoccupied conference room or designated quiet workspace?

See also:

• Noise-cancelling headphones, the bigger the better.
• Blocking out time on shared office spyware collaboration tools.
• Rechargeable LED lamps where you can change the color at will.
• Jo March had her garret and her “Eff off, I’m writing (This means you, Amy!)(Beth, dear, please leave the tea mugs OUTSIDE!!!!!)” cap. You already have one hat. Do you need a second hat in a different color?

The props & lighting might signal the boundary. What body language or other cues indicate “I don’t wanna talk to you right now” and could help reinforce the boundary?

• Don’t turn your body toward them or look up from your screen to talk to them.
• Continue typing or reading the entire time.
• Keep your answers very short and focused on work.
• All the other “grey rock” and “be boring” tactics they hate.

A lot of social skills advice for neurodivergent people is about how we can get better at reading  body language and social cues to avoid annoying neurotypical people by taking them at their word, (or worse, asking them to clarify their meaning), but I’ve yet to see instructions about how we get to transmit our own cues. The stuff I listed is all the stuff I was taught were “universal” signals that mean “stay away” or “keep it moving” when someone does them to me. Just how universal are they? Let’s find out!

Now, you already know that certain of your coworkers find you fascinating (non-complimentary, at least from their perspective, whereas all of my indicators point toward “a goddamn delight.”). And you know certain people (serially annoying) are gonna comment on anything and everything you change no matter what you do because that’s their brand of weirdness. You can’t prevent it, but you can expect it, plan for it, and build it into how you respond to it.

When making changes to your environment or activities inspires someone to try to get around the boundary or comment in a way that feels intrusive, try this from now on: Instead of explaining yourself at length (and thereby rewarding the unwelcome behavior), find your best “pleasant coworker who is mildly confused” mask, and pick whichever of these script patterns seems most true for you and achievable at the time.

Them: “Wait, why is your light blue all of a sudden?”

You: “New lamp. It helps me focus.” (Alternate: “I like blue.”)

Pause while everybody takes that in.

You: “Anyway, did you need something urgently, or can I dive back in?”

Option 2:

Them: :hovering around waiting for you to notice:

You: (slooooooooooooooooooowly saving your work and bringing your attention their way) “Hi there. Can I help you with something?”

Them: “Just wondering, why is your light blue?”

You: “I’m trying a little thing where I make it blue when I need to focus and pink when I am open to answer questions or chitchat. Anyway, right now is focus time. Did you need something urgently or…?”

Them: “So I should only talk to you when the light is pink?”

Pro-tip: If the questioner is someone you know to be serially annoying, unless you work with fellow ADHD, Autistic, or AuDHD-ers and know for sure that you’re talking to one of them right now, there is like a 5% chance this is a sincere question and a 95% chance that it’s a derisive challenge or excuse to lecture you.Trust your pattern recognition skills and history with the other person about which is most likely, not other people’s ideas of how this should work under laboratory conditions, ’cause there is also a more than decent chance that neurotypical bystanders who are supposedly the best at parsing subtext will be like, “But it was just an innocent question, why are you being so mean?” if you react accurately to the hostile intent where they can see you. This is why I say that the best way to get around a “neg” is to agree with it effusively, and that’s why you’re gonna slap on your most cheerful “everybody’s just joking around here!” mask  before you say your next line.

You: “Hahahaha yes! That would be great, actually, but mostly I do it for myself when I know there’s something I need to get done and I can’t afford to spend time chatting. Anyway, did you have work question that needs answering right now…or….?”

Continue looking at them with your most placid Customer Service Face and *don’t say more words* unless it’s answering their work question or thanking them for stopping by.

Then turn your head/your chair/visibly re-angle yourself to detach from the interaction like you’re using your “action” to disengage from a DnD fight, and go back to work. If they keep hovering and looking for more excuses to bother you one you’ve done that, see what happens if you physically exit the space. As in, get up from your desk and walk somewhere else on the floor (bathroom, water cooler, coffee, check mailboxes, etc.) If they wanna walk and talk so they can continue the interaction, there are multiple ways to ditch them without making a scene, like backtracking for an urgent toilet visit or phone call that you forgot you need to make, and if that fails, stop by their desk on your way back to yours to drop them off.

You’re already noticed that resisting certain labels or extended interactions makes some people you work with get weird and huffy. If someone is being rude or unprofessional here, don’t assume it’s you! People have choices about how they treat you. Cool, normal people don’t explode when a coworker says that it’s been nice chatting but they need to get back to work and won’t satisfy every drop of idle curiosity. Those who do aren’t reacting to you doing it wrong somehow, they are reacting to being thwarted about whatever they get out of picking on you. The key to dealing with people who throw tantrums when they don’t get their way about the tiniest thing is realizing that they’ll do it no matter how you treat them, because that’s their only coping skill with people they think have less power than them. If they stomp off in a huff and make a big show of avoiding you in the future, that’s a victory! Your prize is less of their company and less plausible deniability that they don’t know that they are being annoying when they interrupt you.

The nice thing about this strategy is that you can substitute “knitting” or “white noise machine” or anything for “blue light” and follow the same pattern. “It helps me focus.” “I like it.” When you’re on break time, or out of hyperfocus, you can be your gregarious and pleasant self who loves knitting*! (*With one caveat, coming below.)  If you feel you were “accidentally” short with someone with benign intent, remember that it’s okay to be too busy to talk to nice people, too, and you can always follow up later. “Sorry, I was in the middle of something before. How is your day going?”

Finding a way to be consistent about switching modes and giving yourself ways to reset after an awkward interaction is way more useful than trying to find One Script To Finally Rule Them All. You can’t ever get people to stop trying to hijack your day, but I think you can probably exert more control about how long the interruptions last and how you snap your attention back to where you want it to be afterwards.

Bonus: Specifically About Knitting

Here is experiment you could try with how you talk about knitting. I want you to think in terms of switching between three distinct modes. The modes are called:

“Knitting is fun and interesting!” (Mode 1, hereafter)

“Knitting is boring routine background noise I use to get myself through tasks that require sustained attention.” (Mode 2)

“Sorry, I don’t take commissions.” (Mode 3)

Mode 1 is for break time or during office chit-chat lulls involving fellow knitting enthusiasts and people you trust to not be annoying about knitting. In Mode 1, “What are you working on?” is a straightforward question with a straightforward answer. “I’m making a _____ for _______.” And as long as you are enjoying yourself and everyone else is participating in the conversation, be effusive about the kind of yarn you like and the patterns and the other details that make it fun for you. You don’t have to be a robot about it all the time just ’cause other people are weird and demanding sometimes.

Mode 2 is for when you are actively using knitting as a focus tool and someone interrupts you to ask questions about what you’re knitting & why. Tell them it’s a focus tool you use to occupy your hands when you need your brain to stay on task. Then, stop saying any words about knitting. Everybody already knows you like it. Did they need something work related? No? Thank them for stopping by and go back to work. If they are truly interested, they can join in on general Yarn Chat next time everybody’s in the break room.

Mode 3 is for people who badger you about knitting stuff for them. “Sorry, I don’t take commissions.” Then, once again, stop saying any words about knitting. Reasons are for reasonable people. The more you explain your process, or justify what kind of fancy yarn you use, or break down your labor and material costs for unreasonable people, the more they interpret it as the starting point in a negotiation where they will eventually wear you down instead of the “no” that it is. This is the exact dynamic you are describing, is it not?

Change the subject back to work, or ask them if they have any neat holiday plans coming up or if they’ve read any good books lately. You’re not being mean, rude, or unprofessional here. Badgering someone who has given you five reasons already for why they can’t or won’t do what you want is actually rude and unprofessional.

If this works like I hope it will, the act of knitting at work can remain a hobby you enjoy and an important accommodation, while providing zero further beeswax for people who harass you about it To pull it off, I recommend you save discussions about knitting at work for down time and people who make that enjoyable for you.

Hi CA,

In the last year two people have gone no contact with me (she/her).

One is a former colleague (she/her) who has burned many bridges in our professional community. She’s been basically blackballed in our specialty area and had to take a position doing similar but much less exciting work after she was fired from her last job. Around the same time she stopped talking to me because she felt I wasn’t supportive enough about her recent move. This is, at least, my guess based on talking to mutual friends. She never told me she was going no contact, she just dropped out of a group chat and de-friended me.

The other is my husband’s sister (she/her). This is 10,000 times more complicated. She seems to be reacting to a lifetime’s worth of frustration with her parents. This escalated three years ago when her first child was born and the relationship between her and the rest of us deteriorated rapidly. From my perspective there’s a communication mismatch, a generational divide, and 40 years of unresolved issues that I can’t begin to understand. It’s been about a year since she’s talked to her parents. She’s texted twice with my husband over that time with the most recent one very politely but firmly saying she doesn’t want contact with us either.

I know of two instances where SIL has felt hurt by something I directly or indirectly did, so I want to talk it through and fix it. But obviously her relationship with her parents and brother (my husband) is bigger and more important, and I can’t repair my relationship with her until that happens first. In retrospect, I should have responded a lot more intentionally when I became aware of her feelings.

I also feel the need to say that my MIL went no contact with her parents in her 40s, so in many ways my SIL is repeating learned behavior. But maybe I’m being blamey/judgemental/defensive when I bring that up.

Two questions:

(1) I think about my SIL and the hurt I’ve caused her every day. How can I live with her feelings towards me until the day she decides she’s ready to reach out? We have a very small family and her absence is felt.

(2) Does everyone my age (early 40s) have two people who don’t want to talk to them anymore? It feels like a high number.

Thanks,

SIL of the SIL

Dear SIL of the SIL:

In answer to your second question, I mass-blocked literally thousands of rancid TERFs, Nazis, trolls, and other badly behaved strangers flowing into Bluesky from Twitter before breakfast this morning, so I might be the wrong person to ask about whether “two” is a high number. It’s a high number for you, so it counts. Does it represent a troubling pattern where you are the common denominator, or is it just a coincidence of timing? Unclear. More on this later.

In answer to your first question, I don’t know precisely what you did to your SIL and how much of it was intentional, but I can tell you that widely accepted practice for addressing harm done to other people looks something like this:

1. Name the harm in clear, specific terms and be honest with yourself for your role in causing it to the best of your ability.
2. Make a sincere apology where you take accountability.
3. Hear the other person’s side of things out without interrupting to equivocate or explain.
4. Offer restitution to repair or offset any damage you may have caused, and follow through on your promises if the offer is accepted.
5. Leave the ball in their court for how to move forward, without placing further demands on the wronged person to forgive, soothe your feelings, or grant you access to them. [=>YOU ARE APPROXIMATELY HERE<=]
6. Adjust your behavior so you don’t repeat the same problem in the future.

Steps two, three, and four are things you do in concert with other person, but the rest are things you can do for and by yourself. In cases where apologizing or making amends would do more harm by say, overriding the consent of the person you wronged, then ethically you *must* leave your SIL and former friend alone unless they contact you. So my best advice for you is to detach from ever getting a satisfying reason or answer from the people who cut you off and focus on the parts you can do alone.

Sometimes people who have been cut off after a breakup find comfort and peace in rituals, such as:

• Writing a letter with everything you wish you could say to the absent person and what you wish they would say back, and then destroying it.
• Quietly donating money or effort to a cause the person cares about in their honor (but emphatically not in their name if it would subvert a no-contact request).
• Making a conscious choice to redirect whatever grief, unrequited love, or other unresolved feelings and the energy you would spend chasing after the absent person into nurturing your community and people who want to show up in your life.

If this issue with your sister-in-law is preoccupying to a painful degree that distracts you from enjoying life, consider taking the problem to a counselor who can help you work on ways to disengage, forgive yourself, and find closure. If you want to read more about apologies (including ones where the amends must be made in absentia), I recommend Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg’s excellent On Repentance And Repair: Making Amends In An Unapologetic World.

Now let’s talk about what these two situations have in common, what they don’t, and where that leaves you. Are these people leaving you, specifically, because of something you did wrong, or are they exiting a whole system that you just happen to be part of? And are you missing them, specifically, or are you reacting to the pain of rejection? My read on both situations is that it’s mostly the second thing, but you tell me.

Your former colleague was in the process of leaving one job/career field for another, not entirely of her own volition, and you say that she has a habit of burning bridges. In a time of professional upheaval and crisis, she left the group chat and blocked you at the same time. You have through-the-grapevine information that she found you insufficiently supportive of her choices, though you don’t indicate that she asked you for specific support that you then refused.

Were you close friends who happened to meet through work, or were you part of a loose association of friendly current and former colleagues who mix networking and social chatting? Looking at the last year or two, how big a part of each other’s daily lives were you? When was the last time you spent one on one time together that wasn’t based on shared professional interests or the whole group getting together? What makes you think that this is a deeply personal and specific “fuck off” and not just burning one last bridge between anyone and anything that reminds her of an arena of failure and strife?

If I gave you four buckets and 10 tokens, and told you that nobody else on earth would ever see or judge what you did with them, how many tokens would you put in each bucket?

• Bucket 1: I Miss Her So Much & Find Myself Texting Her Almost Every Day
• Bucket 2: I Feel Both Sad And Relieved At Possibly No Longer Having To Deal With Her Constant Ups & Downs
• Bucket 3: I Feel Guilt About The Aforementioned Relief
• Bucket 4: I Feel Hurt & Angry About Being Rejected Without Explanation

Your sister-in-law broke up with her entire family over “a lifetime’s worth of frustration with her parents” and “a communication mismatch, a generational divide, and 40 years of unresolved issues that I can’t begin to understand.” You say that your MIL had to take a similar road with her own parents, and you also say “We have a very small family and her absence is felt.” Interesting.

Were you and your sister-in-law friends? Did you spend one-on-one time together hanging out and have interests & hobbies in common that were not centered on the rest of the family, or did you encounter her mostly on holidays and events where the others were present? Would you be friends if you met under different circumstances? Have you ever shared something she told you in confidence with her folks, even if your intentions were good? (If so, I have exactly one guess about why she stopped talking to you). Before the current rift, were she and your husband friends as adults? Did they hang out together just for fun sometimes without their parents? Is your husband someone she trusted to confide in and ask for help? Did they have keys to each other’s places? Does he think of her as a reliable narrator*? (*I have no indication that she isn’t one, but if either of you don’t think she is, it also neatly solves the mystery of why she lumped you in with the parents).

Six new buckets, fifteen new tokens, and same deal as before where you are completely honest with yourself and nobody will ever tell:

• Bucket 5: I Miss Her All The Time & Feel Like Husband/I Lost His/My/Our Best Friend/Only Ally In The Family
• Bucket 6: Lumping Me In With The Rest Of These Dysfunctional Assholes Just Because I Made A Few Mistakes Really Hurts My Feelings
• Bucket 7: I Resent How Much Her Absence Has Increased Pressure On Me To Play Dutiful Daughter (& Pick Up Holiday Slack)
• Bucket 8: Surely There Is Some Solution If Only Everyone Would Just Talk To Each Other Like Adults (The Middle Child’s Lament)
• Bucket 9: Come On, SIL, You’ve Made Your Point, But Doesn’t Your Kid Deserve Grandparents? They Won’t Be Around Forever!
• Bucket 10: What If There Is Something Deeply Awful Buried Under Euphemisms About “Generational Divides” and “A Lifetime Of Frustration”? Something So Bad That I Might Have To Run Away, Too?

I’m guessing wildly here, so it would make total sense if not all the buckets get tokens. But an inbox full of concerned wives who are trying to single-handedly fix the dysfunction in their husband’s families in time for Festivus makes me a relatively *educated* guesser, so I’ll wager that it will be highly revealing for you to contemplate which buckets got the most tokens and why.

As for what you do with the information, may I humbly suggest: Nothing?

Do literally nothing about it, except take the steps outlined earlier in the post to create your own closure without looking for ways around their consent. You can’t fix your husband’s family of origin, not that anyone asked you to. You couldn’t have fixed your former friend’s cascade of career corrections, even if she asked you to. There is no work you can do about these relationships that will make them different than they are. All you can do is take care of yourself, and that most likely means detaching. Wish your former friend well in your mind and then do something nice for yourself or somebody who welcomes your company. Let your husband and his family be upset about his sister this holiday season without climbing into her shoes or undermining her choices. If you get opportunities for a do-over about the mistakes you so regret, you can make a different choice next time. In the meantime, stop doing work about people who are not working at you.

If we value consent, then we have to accept the possibility that people will decide to leave and not come back. We must be allowed to leave relationships and situations that harm us or no longer serve us, and therefore we must allow others the same freedom to weigh whatever they’ll gain in peace against what they might lose in connection and then do what they think is best for themselves. If they are being unfair or making an error in leaving, that’s still their mistake to make, and it’s up to them to come back and correct it. We get to decide if we’re willing to leave a door open and hear them out someday, because everybody gets to set conditions around who is allowed in their lives. But once someone goes, there is nothing we can do to hasten their return. So do nothing.

People left behind often interpret being cut off as a punishment, and I’ve read enough letters from the people who leave that I can’t say 100% that it isn’t intended that way, at least at first. A good sign that leaving was meant to teach a lesson is if they keep popping back up to see if you’ve learned yours yet. But if somebody goes away and stays gone? The simplest and best explanation is that they wanted freedom more than they wanted anything else. Freedom from you, from the institutions you might represent, from the situation that brought them to that point, from painful reminders, from a flurry of minor annoyances, from a lack of enjoyment or pleasure, from pressure or obligation to make the situation be any different. Freedom goes both ways, so when somebody hits that block button or tells you outright not to contact them anymore, they are telling you that there is nothing whatsoever you can do to fix whatever this is, and now you get to be free of it. Breaking up means that you don’t have to work on the relationship anymore. It’s done. Your work here is done.

Grieve for what you lost. Then? Be free.

Hi Captain,

I (any pronouns) have experienced the same deeply uncomfortable restaurant scenario twice, and I’d love advice on handling it or avoiding it in the future. 

I jokingly referred to myself in the subject line as the Dinner Puritan because when I order at a restaurant I order based on dietary restrictions and finances, not exactly pleasure. I’m a single mixed drink or a single entrée with tap water kind of person. I never want to spend money on a main + dessert or multiple drinks unless it is a VERY special occasion. I’m also vegan with multiple food allergies/intolerances, so most menu options are out of the question regardless of price.

I’ve now been in two uncomfortable situations where I went out to eat with a group and ordered one small thing under $20, whereas everyone else ordered apps, drinks, and an entrée, totalling $50+ per person. In both instances a person put a single card down without discussing how they’d divide the check, and I woke up to requests that I pay for my entree plus tip/tax split evenly among the group, as opposed to split proportionally.

With tip/tax split equally I was, respectively, requested over $40 for a single drink, and a single plain order of fries. Aka, they were asking that I pay 140% gratuity! In both cases, I refused to pay this and offered to pay 40% gratuity, which I believe was fair, but deeply awkward as some people had already paid their “share” which was less than what they actually owed. These experiences also leave me feeling deeply wronged by the person who paid. How could they be so careless and cheap? I would never put a person on the spot like that and always do the math proportionally, unless I had consent to do otherwise. 

I told my roommate that going forward I’ll ask the waiter for a separate check, but he said that was also uncomfortable. I also wonder if I’m violating some sort of neurotypical rule that when you go out you are supposed to have “fun” how the entire group is having fun. Am I acting off-putting somehow by just ordering a single drink? I mean, I won’t stop, but I want to know how it’s perceived and how to mitigate the awkwardness of tricky situations like this in the future. 

Thanks!

The Dinner Puritan

Dear Dinner Puritan,

Your plan to tell the server “Hi, I’d like to be on my own check please” at the start of any group dining experience is the least awkward or complicated way to go in my opinion. Everybody at the table who wants to split a group check into equal shares is still free to do that, and any fellow reluctant shared-check people in the group will now have an opening to say, “Me too, please.” In the rare instance that the restaurant has a firm one check per table rule that isn’t already written in bold type on the menu, by asking about separate checks up front you’ll find out right away and can tell your companions now instead of letting it be a surprise later. “It’s fine if the restaurant won’t split the bill, but FYI I’m going to throw in cash to cover what I consume and not do the thing where we all split it evenly.”

With the caveat that reasons are for reasonable people and preferences around optional fun social things with people you like should not require defending, if anyone in the party expresses surprise or dismay and you feel compelled to clarify, try:

• “I have very specific dietary needs and budget constraints. Doing it this way lets me have the pleasure of your company without paying for it later.”
• “I don’t like mixing fun with complicated group math, so this is what works best for me..”
• “Oh, I just prefer it this way.”

I don’t dine out like I used to since COVID and my seven years of experience as waitstaff are a relic of the last century, but here’s what to keep in mind if a fellow diner invokes creating potential hassle for the server as a reason to not split checks:

• Restaurants already know how to split checks and do it all day, every day for other people. It is a routine part of doing business, not some eccentric oddity you invented to be weird at people.
• In my experience working in restaurants, it takes less time and effort to keep stuff separate from the start than have to reconstruct what every single member of a large party ate and drank at at the end.
• If it did make slightly more work to do it your way, so what? Acro$$ tipping culture$ and indu$trie$, there will alway$ be one incredibly $traightforward and univer$ally acceptable way to reward $omeone for going the extra mile for you.

If this makes your roommate or other dining companions uncomfortable, they have several choices open to them:

• If the illusion of group harmony is truly that important to them, they can volunteer to take over paying your portion of the bill for things you didn’t eat or drink from now on.
• They are equally free to avoid group dining situations where you will also be. (If someone would actually do that over something like this, consider that the added expense and effort of appeasing them is even less worth it than it was when you sent your letter.)
• They can feel slightly weird about it inside their private thoughts forever without ever making it your problem again. Which, when you think about it, is kind of what your roommate is asking you to do about his allegiance to splitting things “evenly” except you’re also supposed to pay $40 extra dollars for the privilege.
• They can embrace it as the harmless personal quirk that it is, like so:

Server: “Hi, welcome to The Piehole. Can I get you started with anything to drink, and would you prefer to be on the same check or separate?”

New person at the table who doesn’t know you well: “Oh, I think we’re good with one check!”

Friends who do know you: “The five of us are good on a single check, but Puritan likes their own.” 

You: “I sure do, thanks!”

Server: “Great. What can I get you?”

:no restaurant walls are destroyed by apocalyptic horsepeople as a result and an acceptable time is had by all:

Your job is not to fix everyone’s feelings or reset their expectations about how this should work. Your job is to keep doing what you know works for you. They will adjust, and if they don’t, there are bigger problems in the relationship than how you split the check.

As for whether you are acting “off” or violating some kind of neurotypical social pact: I’m not neurotypical and neurotypicals are not a monolith, but I’ve got some bonus content at Patreon about developing habits of non-compliance in low-stakes social situations.

Dear Captain Awkward,

In 2018, my (she/her, already away from home at the time) father married his current wife. I knew she had a religious conservative upbringing, but my father told me she wasn’t really aware of or interested in most politics. She always acted accepting and compassionate around me.

A few months ago, he casually dropped in a conversation over the phone that she had voted for Trump both times. Specifically, he told me, because she wanted Trump to ban abortion.

This would be horrible enough, but I have disabilities that mean I will probably be severely disabled or even die if I get pregnant and am denied a prompt abortion. My father should know this (I’ve told him). His wife has no excuse of ignorance on the medical reality of the situation – she is a nurse.

I was horrified. At her, but mostly at him for apparently being ok with this, and expecting me to be ok with it too. I had a meltdown (I’m autistic) over the phone. My dad also has a pattern of a) picking his s.o.’s over his kids; b) not accommodating or trying to understand my needs (I once had a panic attack because he invited strangers to a private dinner without telling me where I was able to be polite only by disassociating and running to the bathroom every 5 minutes to desperately try to suck in oxygen. He noticed but didn’t do anything or even check in on me, during or after.); and c) generally being superficially accepting but not demonstrating understanding that his queer, disabled daughter is actually queer and disabled. This felt like part of that pattern. I had no contact with my dad for a couple weeks.

At the time, I was also going through a really rough patch in my professional life, and finally emailed him about how much I wanted to call, wanted my dad, but that I felt like I couldn’t because I can’t trust him. He sent me back a response admitting that he doesn’t understand why I am upset, but he loves me.

Over the next couple weeks, we emailed, and then started texting, with general life updates and light conversation.

Early this morning, while I was deep in despair, I sent him a text asking how he could live with someone who helped all this to happen. (I understand, now that I’ve calmed down, that this was a bad idea.)

My dad responded with a very long text telling me that I should “leave politics out of [his] personal life.” That I was “taking it out on [him]” and “this has been going on for months and [he is] sick of it.” It is stressing both him and his wife out and “by any standard it is unacceptable” and I “need to grow up.”

I responded “Ok. You can contact me by email if you need to” and blocked his number.

And now I don’t know what to do next. I love my dad but if he didn’t feel safe before, he really doesn’t feel safe now.

I need help with how to move forward with a relationship with him. I would still like to email him like I was before, but apparently from his perspective that is “taking it out on him.” I would like to see him for Christmas (in a third location where I can leave if it gets upsetting), but I don’t even know how to raise the suggestion.

Or if I am overreacting, I would really appreciate a reality check. I really really want my dad back.

Thank you,

It’s Not About Her, It’s About How You Are Responding

Dear It’s Not About Her:

I was wondering when the first “How do I do I Faaaaaaamily and Holidays with Trump supporters right now?” email would roll in and it didn’t take long. You were the first over the line (4:28 pm Nov 6, for anyone keeping count) but not the last. I had 13 similar when I started writing this at 11:44 am Nov. 7 and will probably have at least as many more by the time this actually posts. So if it helps to know this, you are far from alone.

Interestingly, I got an editorial note back in the spring about how maybe the “politics” chapter in the book draft was an unnecessary side quest if I wanted the book to be “timeless.” Given that I have been writing about this exact problem from different angles for at least 9 years and counting, and the Nazis didn’t have the good grace to simply evaporate into thin air or stop being related to us, I’m not sure how the problem of “how do you constructively interact with people who say they love you and then vote like they hate you” is an irrelevant artifact of a departed age. FYI, I also saw the questions from this week about “how do we get through another 4 years of this bullshit in one piece” piling up after Tuesday night but today I’m gonna focus on the beat I know well: Family estrangement, boundaries, and how the annual winter holidays and their expectations of forced togetherness, capitalism, patriarchy, and cheer amplify every existing fault line.

Not About Her, you can’t control what your stepmom does or how your dad enables it, you can only control what you do in response. It’s understandably easier to displace your anger at your dad onto his wife than to face the fact that your dad at best doesn’t have a problem with her views and most likely voted the exact same way, if he voted at all. There’s obviously no way to know for sure unless he tells you, but telling you to “grow up” and blaming you for being scared and upset doesn’t fill me with optimism.

Your dad has choices about how he treats you and what kind of relationship he wants with you, and he’s choosing this. Your dad knows how you feel, he has your email to get in touch with you if and when he wants to, and it’s within his power to mend this rift any time he wants to. Not only is he not mending it, he’s telling you outright that he does not share your distress or your priorities, and he’s showing you that he is not a safe (or willing) harbor. This is nothing new. You say he has a pattern of choosing his romantic partners over his kids, and you know that he’s not going to suddenly get a divorce or chew his wife out. Nor is he gonna suddenly be open to celebrating a major holiday in a way that maximally accommodates you.

The fact that you’d rather not take him at his word, that you still hold out hope that a loving dad who can show up for you is still in there somewhere, is a testament to *your* loving and generous spirit, and I truly hope that someday your dad earns even a tenth of the grace you’re extending him now. But a scenario where your dad morphs a safe, comforting person for you to spend time with is probably not happening by Christmas, if ever, so your best course of action is to believe him about his priorities and then do whatever you need to take very good care of yourself.  

That’s why, in your shoes, I’d skip the whole idea of Christmas with your dad this year and make other plans altogether. If you do manage to meet up, my guess is that you are gonna be miserable, dysregulated, and rapid-cycling between fight, flight, fawn, and freeze the entire time, and everyone’s gonna walk away with their worst preconceptions about how it would go pretty much intact. If you stay away this year, think of it as:

1. Giving yourself the gift of time and space to feel your feelings and grieve.
2. Giving yourself permission to do zero work about fostering or maintaining a relationship with your dad for the time being.
3. Taking things one step at a time. Skipping Christmas this year might be the first of many, or it might be a necessary breather. You don’t have to decide all of it right now.

In your shoes, I would probably not think about skipping Christmas as “teaching your dad a lesson,” or anything about influencing his behavior, changing his mind, or fixing his heart. He might miss you and get a glimpse of what his life would be without you, but he might not, and even if he does miss you and feel sad, he might not change a single thing. Please keep your expectations about all of that incredibly low. Time to loop in your actual support system of people who consistently treat you with kindness, plan the most safe, warm, comforting holiday you can for yourself and leave the whole question of your dad alone for now.

Here endeth the individual response and beginneth the general:

The recommendations to choose yourself right now and keep your expectations low go for everyone who wrote me a similar letter and everyone who is contemplating one or has a draft in their Notes app. You can send me a million versions of this question and my advice will not fundamentally change from what it has been all along: Of the available “holiday” and “family” Venn diagrams before you, what’s the configuration that best protects you, your safety, your peace, your integrity, and your precious, irreplaceable, beautiful heart? You know your family, you know your own distress tolerance, so choose your own adventure.

If you don’t feel like celebrating right now, especially if it means doing a ton of labor around planning, hosting, cooking, traveling at great expense to yourself, not to mention gift-giving, and tiptoeing around the delicate sensibilities of people who demonstrated that they clearly don’t care about you, then this seems like a great year to sit the entire thing out. If certain people would be disappointed, how does that compare to how disappointed you are in them? You might be seeing the words “don’t comply in advance” a lot right now. This whole blog is an exercise in practicing non-compliance with harmful expectations and people in personal and social spheres. What does compliance about this specific thing get you? What does it cost you? In the short-term, where is your line? In the long-term, how bad would it have to get before you made a different decision?

Conversely, if there is a version of celebration that feels good to you, like planning a solo holiday or spending time with affirming friends and family, or because the religious elements hold meaning for you, then do that. If going home for holidays or hosting gives you a sense of joy and normalcy during tough times, then please eke out what joy and comfort you can and deck the fucking halls while you still can. Righteously denying yourself the things you love isn’t going to save a single person that needs saving.

If you want to show up to the usual gathering to be in solidarity with kids and non-terrible relatives or as an act of defiance because you don’t want to cede your whole family and special occasions to the worst people you’re related to for the rest of time, then do that and use the suggestions at the link for how to take good care of yourself. Consider banding together with non-bigots to make bingo cards or put a dollar in a jar every time the bigots say something terrible and donate the proceeds to a cause that they’d hate. “No, keep talking Uncle Paulcifer, every racist or homophobic thing you say is one more dollar for queer sex ed, and I win the Cousins Cup trophy if you get to 100 gross things in a single day!”

If you have the bandwidth and ability to have a bunch of awkward arguments, or to make them endlessly repeat stuff for your own amusement, let fly your inner Buttigieg and loose the dogs of “Well, actually…. ” Or give them the “just asking questions” treatment they love sooooooooo much. “Really? Is that what you think? Interesting. Please explain!” “Can you explain it again, I don’t understand.” “You were just joking? Okay, cool. But why is that funny, though?” “I still don’t understand. Can you explain it to me one more time!” “Hold up, let me get my phone. Could you run through it one more time for the TikTok? I was trying to tell my followers how racist you are, and they didn’t believe me, but I think what you just said will totally seal the deal!” If they leave in exasperation, you get to eat their share of pie! If you get yelled at or dis-invited next year and they don’t, then you’ll have ample time to contemplate how nothing they said or did was objectionable enough to get them sidelined, but your reaction was. (Don’t worry, I’ll set an extra place for you at the Scapegoats Table just in case.)

Look, it’s fun to picture their faces getting soooooooooo red and the way the forehead veins do a little dance when they pop out, but we know that not every theater kid is the “debate kid” brand of theater kid or has the necessary relentlessness or backup squad in place for this kind of shenanigans. If you don’t — especially if you are a vulnerable person whose access to safe housing, food, disability care, childcare, and/or the resources to complete your education requires attendance and a show of nominal compliance while you figure out a long-term plan– I will not judge you for faking it. There are a lot of kinds of courage in the world, and your safety and survival is more important than anyone’s fantasies about how “this” is the thing that will finally “show them.” Especially since nothing anyone does over the course of a single meal or day is gonna change any hearts or minds. (*Please hold that thought, we’ll come back to it in a few paragraphs). 

“But Captain Awkward, I already said I would go/host and everyone’s planning around me.”  Makes sense, I think a lot of us made plans in hopes that this was all going to go a whole different way. Some of you are asking for ‘polite’ ways to cancel, and honestly bless your hearts for giving a shit about maintaining decorum at this moment in time in a way that I frankly cannot match. I can tell you that general hosting etiquette indicates that the sooner you notify people to un-plan around you, the sooner they can make a different plan, and the exact wording you use is less important than delivering clear and actionable information. Meaning, if you text “Sorry, just letting you know that plans have changed and I’m no longer hosting or attending _______ this year. Have a wonderful holiday and hopefully see you in 2025!” today, then you have given everyone enough information to make other plans, and they can draw whatever conclusions they like.

If you cancel, will people demand to know why and badger you to change your mind? Let’s be real: If your family is the kind of family that has you writing to me every year around this time, then you already know the answer to that is “yes, obviously.” There’s no way to prevent them from asking, but you do get to decide how you respond. Remember that reasons are for reasonable people, and the people who are most likely to bug you at length about this are also the ones who most likely know *precisely* why you canceled. Whether you tell them “Still too mad about the election to look at anyone’s face right now!” or repeat “Sorry, plans changed. Maybe next year!” until you give up and mute notifications is up to you.

As long as you follow through on your decision and keep faith with yourself, you are the only person who can make an informed decision about the likely consequences of opting out and whether you’re willing to live with them. For example, if you know that cancelling now–or telling people why–means buying yourself weeks upon weeks of arguments and bullying, I will not judge you if you feign compliance and then suddenly miss your plane, have last-minute car trouble or mysterious plumbing issues, or manifest a fake and highly incapacitating illness that requires 24-7 access to the home bowl. (I figure if we have to deal with a constant threat of illness from unchecked COVID spread or listeria from deregulated food processing facilities, then, oops, I guess we’re also accepting a world where the people who usually do all the labor of making the holidays magical for everyone else might have to call in sick at the last minute.)

*Okay, it’s time for that thought we’ve been holding onto: Do you want to win the argument or do you want to be free?

People who write to me about family estrangement tend to want multiple things at once:

1. They want to finally put a stop to ongoing harm, abuse, and pain.
2. They want freedom to heal from past trauma and de-center the abusive person in their lives.
3. They often want help composing a final kiss-off manifesto that will ensure that the people who harmed them fully understand the harm they caused and why this painful decision was necessary once and for all.
4. They want to both have the last word and lay the groundwork for accountability, a change of heart, or an apology that is never, ever coming. And like, today’s Letter Writer, they hope against hope that it’s possible that there’s a universe where they still get to have a dad.

There is not one thing on that list that is silly or that I don’t deeply empathize with. The “post-election” letters that have rolled in so far this week all have similar sets of conflicting impulses, and and I recognize and salute anything and everything you have personally done to try to fix the hearts, change the minds, or cancel out the votes of the people you’re related to. There is no social script or interpersonal jujitsu you can do in this moment that will make any of this less awkward or painful. Not a one.

Just, political estrangement works like all the other estrangement, and you can’t count on ever getting everything on the list. So do you want to win the argument, or do you want to be free?

You can have space and peace and healing, with time..

You can have the last word, sort of, in that you can say your piece and then stop responding to whatever they say back.

But no matter how hard you try, you can’t fix other people’s hearts for them. These bogus calls for “unity” and “not letting politics distract us from what’s really important” are the same trap they’ve always been: “I get to treat you like shit, and you have to love and forgive me forever no matter how I treat you, and if you ever decide to stop playing this terrible game, I get to play the victim and blame everything on your supposed lack of empathy and commitment. Who wants a hug?”

Le sigh. Patriarchy is nothing if not boringly consistent, and you’ll notice that these articles about “how to coexist peacefully at holidays despite contrasting politics” are always about the concessions and compassion we owe them, and never about the basic human fucking decency they owe us.

Which is why I recommend that whatever you decide to do this year about the problem of “holidays,” “family,” and the precise dread:fury ratio you’re rocking, make it about taking care of yourself and the people who are closest to your heart, not about proving a point or teaching a supposed lesson to people who let you down. If what you need most right now is to tell certain people in your life to eff off into the sun forever and donate whatever you would have spent on their holiday gifts to abortion funds, I hope it feels as freeing as it sounds and brings you the relief and peace you need in this moment. But please, for yourself, let go of the idea that anybody is gonna “learn” anything from it and console yourself with this old quote from the Shakesville days that I think about a lot:

“There are times when you must speak, not because you are going to change the other person, but because if you don’t speak, they have changed you.”—Mary Quinn, aka Maud.

If quiet quitting The Holidays Industrial Complex feels like self-care or best way to honor your own integrity and peace, you’ll get no arguments from me, this year or any other year. If you want to show up to be in solidarity with others who can’t opt out, or because you want to leave the door open for things to be different someday, or because you’re one of the many people who needs to camouflage for your own safety, I have only love to offer you.

Between the lines of all these questions (current count as of Friday, 11/8/ 1:19 CST = 29) people are asking me for permission to take one course or another, or asking me how to do the most right thing, and I have no moral tests for you because I don’t have to live your life and because there are extremely good reasons that political organizing and mutual aid are *group* activities, reasons that include effectiveness, long-term sustainability, and safety in numbers. In answer to the inevitable “Really? THIS is what you’re worried about? People are dying“ doom chorus, please know that I would never do any of you the injustice of assuming that the precise makeup of your holiday table is even close to your only priority, ethical focus, or vector of possible resistance. All I ask in return is that you take care of you during this holiday season, and don’t make me a liar about the rest of it in the years to come.

Love, solidarity, and non-compliance forever.

Hello Captain Awkward,

A few years ago, I (she/her) randomly struck up a conversation with a neighbor on a bus we rode together. We had seen each other on the bus before, but had never talked. In the space of the 15-minute ride our conversation veered from the innocuous (birds are cool pets) to her trauma dumping on me about her abusive mother. Over the next week or so, these conversations continued with increasing trauma dumping and increasing invitations to hang out, which I consistently and politely declined. I ‘solved’ the problem by taking a later bus, and occasionally pretending to be asleep if we were on the same bus together. Classy, right?

My wife (she/her), recently experienced something similar at her place of worship. How can she gracefully shut down the trauma-dumping without having to find new services to attend? We are both people pleasers and would deeply appreciate a script for redirecting conversations from near strangers when they get traumatic.

Thank you!

Hello:

You cannot prevent people from approaching you in the first place or control what they talk about when they do. All you can do is control how you respond. Which is what you did with your bus nemesis. I know you don’t feel good about how you handled that, but if you’d continued riding the same bus while being visibly awake you would have had to build yourself a “don’t talk to me” fort out of headphones and sunglasses and deep hoods that hide your face, and when that didn’t work, you would have had to be direct: “You’re very kind, but I don’t want to be friends or spend my commute in conversation, especially about deeply personal topics” and it would have felt as bad or worse. She stopped bothering you, right? Then the message was received.

Whatever social skills you and your wife struggle with as recovering people-pleasers, some people lack the social skill of checking in with others to make sure they have consent before they divulge their innermost feelings and dark secrets. And unfortunately, some people use oversharing as a social tractor beam because somewhere they learned that the more in pain they are the more compelling they are. Once an ‘ALL ATTENTION IS GOOD ATTENTION’ person locks on, you can’t fix that shit with social scripts.

Stuff you can try: You can end the conversation altogether and make the reason all about you. “I’m so sorry, you’ll have to excuse me.” You can sometimes interrupt the flow before it gets intense. “Sorry to interrupt. I’m so sorry you are dealing with that, but this is a more [involved][sensitive][heavy][detailed] conversation than I’m prepared to have [right now][today][at this event].” Both of these strategies work best as an immediate prelude to moving away and creating physical distance.

At church, your wife can try redirecting. “That sounds serious! Let’s find someone who can maybe help.” Then she can walk them over to the pastor or someone whose explicit job description is to listen to church members and try to help them, foist with all her might, and hope they stay foisted. She may have to repeat the foist protocol several times before it sticks. “But I’d much rather talk to you!” “Oh, I’m so sorry, but I don’t have the right training or skills for this kind of issue, so let’s find someone who does and you can tell them what you were just telling me.” The trick is, once she offers to walk them to somewhere else, she must never stop walking. They’ll either follow (and be foisted) or they won’t. Either way, she’ll be free.

Depending on the denomination and the culture, Church Social Fallacies can operate a lot like Geek Social Fallacies, except much, much stronger. (See also: Addiction Recovery Space Social Fallacies). “I want you to feel welcome here, but that doesn’t mean I agreed to be your new best friend or make all my time here about you” is a tough boundary-needle to thread at the best of times, it’s even harder when there’s an extra layer of  GOD WOULD NEVER REJECT ME, DO U HATE GOD? running through the culture. Is your wife’s church a good-with-boundaries church or a God-hates-boundaries church?  If it’s a God-hates-boundaries church, y’all will need to find a new church soon anyway. One way to test is to ask the pastor (or similar) for advice about how to handle people who overshare upon first meeting. “Oh yeah, that’s a thing we’re trained to deal with when we become clergy, you did the right thing to refer them to me” = green flag. “WE ENCOURAGE EVERYONE TO BE OPEN ABOUT EVERYTHING ALL THE TIME” = RUN.

When I say that these strategies “work,” what I mean is that they are the most likely paths to get you out of conversation you don’t want to be having as quickly and efficiently as possible. Implementing them won’t feel good for you or the person you’re getting away from, and I don’t have any way to mitigate that. No matter how polite and reasonable you are, interrupting someone who is talking about heavy stuff with you mid-share so that you can extract yourself from the conversation is gonna make them feel bad. Being stuck in a conversation you know you’d rather not participate in is gonna make you and your wife feel bad. It’s awkward to realize you’ve misjudged your audience and level of closeness, as these people have clearly misjudged you and your wife. It sucks to be a survivor of abuse and trauma and not know who is safe to tell. It’s also awkward to have to be like, “cool story, CHANGED ANY SUBJECTS LATELY?” to someone who is obviously in pain when you don’t consent to be drawn into the graphic details of their story.

These mismatches in wants and assumptions won’t ever get less awkward, but you do get better at handling them with practice. Here are some places you can shore up your own skills:

1. Practice interrupting and extracting yourselves with each other until you have the language and the moves down.
2. Practice saying no and hearing no with each other without adding a ton of extra explanations or apologies.
3. Practice sitting with the awkwardness and temporary discomfort of situations where it’s not possible for everyone to get what they want.
4. Consistency is better than perfection. There are no perfect words that will make any of this feel good for all involved. However, consistently withdrawing from conversations you don’t want to be in sends the consistent, *accurate* message that these are conversations you don’t want to be in. Mixed messages, where you fake interest because you think you’re supposed to while inside the resentment grows and grows, help no one.
5. Remind yourselves that consent is ongoing and can be revoked at anytime. Just because you listened once, whether it was out of kindness or being too nervous to interrupt or leave, doesn’t mean you’re obligated to listen forever or do it next time.
6. Remind yourselves that compassion is not wasted. Sometimes people serially take advantage of the kindness of strangers, but sometimes you meet someone in the middle of their worst day ever, in a vulnerable moment when they truly do not have the ability to modulate or discern, you do the best you can under the circumstances, and life goes on. Each encounter is a new chance to do things differently, on both sides.