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Hey Captain Awkward—

My sister and I (she/her) are both students at a small college. We are both training in the same arts field, and one of our primary future career paths involves working closely together (think like a two person play, but not that). When we were younger, our mom was pretty controlling. She wanted to instill in us good habits (eating right, working hard in school and in our chosen career path, working out, etc.), but sometimes went overboard, more so with me, the elder child, than with my sister. We have a pretty fight-y family, and my mom would be the first one to admit that she does most of the yelling. She is a very insightful and organized person, so she has in the past tried to step in and run our lives in a way that is not always helpful (for instance, she used to read our emails and respond from our accounts). When she found out that we had been doing something harmful like sneak-eating snack food or staying up to read under the covers, she would be very upset: sometimes in a way that felt (at least to me back then) a bit scary.

In my early years of college, I rebelled against my mom hard. I stayed in touch with her much less and worked less hard, resulting in me falling behind a bit in my training. Over quarantine, she and I were forced into proximity and became much closer. I understood how difficult it was for her to try to raise us to be successful, and although she was not perfect (and would never claim she was), I no longer resent her. She doesn’t act like she used to anymore: she is very supportive of me and a helpful source of motivation and advice. She is teaching me to drive and cook for myself, and helping me learn the tools I need to become a responsible adult at a realistic pace.

But while I was in my rebellious phase, I tried to convince my sister (who has always worshipped our mom) that the way our mom raised us was harmful, and that we needed to become more self-reliant. Recently (like in the past 6 weeks), she has suddenly started to agree with what I thought back then, but has taken it much farther than I ever imagined.  She never tried setting boundaries or asking for changes—just suddenly woke up one day and cut my whole family off in a very cruel email, without giving my mom a chance to fix anything. Once she realized I was not going to agree with her, she started acting like she barely cared about me. I can’t remember the last time we talked about something not related to school or a book one of us read. And if I say anything positive about our family or negative about how she is treating me, she immediately walks away and refuses to hear it.

We have a VERY important event of our “two person play” that is right after our school’s break. I am a very nervous person and require a lot of practice to do my best. But she has announced that she will not come home because of my mom. As a result, I can’t practice with her at all—just get my part ready and hope for the best. She won’t even tell me where she is going.

I feel like this rift in our family is my fault. And I know my family would do anything to fix this with her. It feels petty, but I can’t help resenting that my sister is sabotaging a make-or-break career opportunity that was years in the making because of this very sudden change of heart.

Any advice would be amazing,
Sister Act

Hi there, Sister Act,

I have a few strong initial reactions to your letter and I’m just gonna go right in:

• The process you went through in re-creating a relationship with your mom (both the rebelling/distancing and the making peace) is not transitive to your sister. She observed your experience, but it doesn’t replace her own experience. She’s going to have to find her own way.
• If you treat “persuading your sister to reconcile with your mom/your family” and “repairing your relationship with her enough to get this art project done” as a package deal, with you as the Family Ambassador, I think things will get worse before they get better.
• I have a lot to say about the artistic collaboration part, you’ll find it at the bottom.

It is possible for siblings to grow up in the same family and have extremely different experiences and relationships with their parents. You feel more generosity and compassion toward your mom now, but there are reasons that you felt the way you did when you were trying to convince your sister that your mom was toxic. Your sister didn’t agree with you then, but you distanced yourself from your mom anyway because it was what you felt you needed to do. You may not like the way she’s going about things, or the timing, but your sister is not inventing the dynamic so much as following in your footsteps.

Questions to ponder:

• Did your mom stop her attempts to control you because she realized it was wrong, or did she stop because you stopped complying?
• What if your ability to create that distance, to describe painful events accurately and feel your feelings about them, was necessary to heal and grow, and necessary before you and your mom could form a better relationship on more equal footing now?
• You say now that you understand your mom’s perspective on parenting more, but I wonder, has your mom ever apologized to either of you for reading your email and impersonating you? Has she ever said she regrets invading your privacy and  punishing you harshly for what you read and ate?
• Did she actually stop those behaviors with your sister? Do you know that for sure? “I’m not mad anymore, so you shouldn’t be, either” isn’t really a thing, especially if the person who caused the harm hasn’t asked for forgiveness or made their own amends.
• In the current conflict,  has your mom tried to build her own bridges with your sister and get to the bottom of what’s happening here, or is she tacitly agreeing that it’s your job to fix it? 
• Are you sure you know why your sister is so upset? People don’t tell their families to eff off forever out of the blue for no reason, and your sister may not have told you or anyone else in your family everything there is to tell. That’s not a prompt to play detective and get to the bottom of it, by the way. It’s a reminder that when things are bad, listening, questioning your assumptions, and withholding judgment until you have all the facts rarely make anything worse.

You worry that the rift in your family is your fault, but it might not be about you, at all — not to cause, and not to fix. Your sister is figuring out what kind of relationship she wants to have with her family of origin. The process is painful and confusing, the way it was probably painful and confusing for her when you were in a vastly different place than she was. It’s so tempting to be the peacemaker and help her skip a few steps, but it doesn’t work that way.

As for your sister’s “cruel” letter and decision to not come home for the holidays, maybe she was really out of line in how she expressed herself, but this blog will never make the argument that people must celebrate holidays with family if they don’t want to. Your hurt feelings and surprise aren’t imaginary or invalid, but you’ll lose less in the long run if you accept that she has her reasons now than you will if you force the un-winnable game of tug-of-war called “If you really loved me, you’d come home” vs. “If you really loved me, you’d trust me on this one.”

This is why, if you want a truce with your sister, I suspect your best bet is to make it clear that you won’t lobby her to come home or reconcile with the other people in your family. Stop defending your mom and her parenting decisions to your sister. Even if you are right, and your sister is being unfair, I suspect that the last thing your sister wants is for you to Be Aggressively Right at her. If your mom *was* invasive and overly critical at times (and not gonna lie, it sounds like she was), the best antidote is a combination of solidarity and faith in your sister to manage her own life. “I don’t fully understand, but I love you no matter what, and I trust you to figure this out in your own way. Come home when you’re ready. I’ll be here.”   

You write: “I can’t remember the last time we talked about something not related to school or a book one of us read. And if I say anything positive about our family or negative about how she is treating me, she immediately walks away and refuses to hear it.” 

What happens if you incorporate your sister’s incredibly clear and consistent feedback and respect her boundaries? Tell her *one time* that you’ll miss her at Christmas, but you understand if she needs to take some time, and starting now, you will stop bringing up family stuff unless she does. Then, keep your promise and drop the subject. If your sister knows that she can talk to you about school stuff and art stuff without navigating a minefield of family conflict, it may open the door to resuming work on your joint project. Picture her as a rescue kitten, feral, furious, and hiding under the laundry bin. If you want her to come out, you can’t force it. She’ll only come out when she feels safe. To help her feel safe, take her at her word about what she needs, stop chasing her, remove pressure, and give her room to breathe.

If *you* need to work through family stuff in the meantime, take it to the school counseling office or confide in a good friend. Especially if you are feeling nervous enough that it’s interfering with your ability to function, tell your regular doctor and/or make an appointment with the school counseling office.

From there, you can model good boundaries, like, not passing on your mom’s feelings, comments, or messages to your sister and vice versa, and not discussing one while the other is not present. “I love you both, but this is between y’all.”Resign from your Parental Press Secretary and Sibling Whisperer roles, effective immediately. Your mom and your sister will have to forge their own relationship, eventually. You can love them both, and root for them both, but you cannot do the work for either of them. Let go of the notion that you have to.

This is so hard, I know. It requires you to have faith and trust in someone who is not showing those things to you. If it helps, from what you’ve told me, I am extremely hopeful that things will not stay this bad forever. Unless there is some huge piece of the puzzle you’re missing, your sister is most likely going to work through whatever this is and find her way back to you. Will it be in time for your big debut? I can’t promise that, but read on. This is not the first time I have met college students who are undertaking a high-stakes collaborative art project that is at risk of collapse.

Here is where I remove my Advice Columnist hat and don my slightly dusty but still quite fetching Film Professor hat.

It’s not that your honorary Film Professor doesn’t care about your feelings or your relationship with your sister, but right now she is much more interested in hearing about your plan. 

• What needs to happen in order to pull off your planned project, on time, under budget, and in a way that does what you hope it will do, both creatively and professionally?
• Details please: Dates, times, equipment, locations, materials, who is doing what.
• Working backward from the deadline, what needs to happen each week between now and then? Are there any particularly time-sensitive pieces or firm deadlines?
• How will everybody share drafts and updates,  keep track of all the moving parts, and communicate? [In-person meetings, a dedicated email thread or webspace, texts, phone calls, etc.] In my classes, students jointly proposed ground rules and made agreements about how and how often they’d communicate. “I will check email and reply to messages at least once a day between now and filming.” “If I can’t do something I promised to do, I’ll let everyone know right away so they can make another plan.” 
• What resources do you have? What resources do you need? What are the gaps that still need to be filled? Who can you ask for help?
• If something falls through or doesn’t work out as planned, what’s Plan B?
• Great, what’s Plan C?
• What are the artifacts that are being created and how will they be stored and accessed? [Digital material like scripts, raw video footage, edited video, graphics, concept art, sketches and schematics should all be backed up in at least three places and be accessible to everyone on the project.]
• Who is the project’s spokesperson for publicity and social media purposes? How will the finished product get to its audience?
• Just between us, what’s Plan D, marked Top Secret, the contingency plan for if your sister bails on the project completely, or you find it impossible to keep working with her if things remain so tense? You may think of you and your sister as a package deal, but pedagogically speaking, these are YOUR office hours and I’m interested in YOUR creative future right now. Don’t worry, if your sister stops by later, I’ll ask her the exact same thing.

To me, it sounds like the most pressing issue is rehearsals. You originally planned around being in the same place over the break, making it less urgent to nail down times or reserve space and equipment. But now you won’t be in the same place during those weeks, so those rehearsals need to go on the calendar now. Let’s say, at minimum, one rehearsal before everybody leaves for break, one rehearsal first thing when you come back, one tech rehearsal, one dress rehearsal. That’s four more rehearsals than you currently have planned , right? If you need more practice than your sister’s schedule or emotional bandwidth will presently allow, find a friend who will run lines with you. Maybe they can film you so you can see yourself.

You’re a trained artist, so I’m sure this is not the first time you’ve heard about good practices for collaboration. But I”m getting into the dirty details for a reason, namely, that in collaborating so closely with your sibling, you may not have had to spell any of this out before now. She’s your best friend, your creative partner, your other half. You can practically finish each other’s sentences! You always know what she’s thinking!

Until one day you didn’t. And it was terrifying to discover that you can’t just let go and trust the old shorthand, the automatic, dependable, seamless joy of having someone there who absolutely gets you. So if you’re going to make this work, you have to find something else to go on. That something else is process, it’s the sum of all your training, the difficult-but-repeatable act of turning what you imagined into something that somebody else can work with. Making art is making decisions, and logistical decisions are creative decisions. “They’re out of banana costumes, can we make T-Rexes work?” “They had the silver fabric that you wanted, but what do you think of this shimmery purple? It is 1/10th as expensive, meaning we can also rent the smoke machine.”  “We can’t use the big theater that day, there’s a concert. Will the black box work?” “Mary has class that night, can Toby run the lights?” 

You don’t have to particularly like each other or work out all your family shit to put on a show, but you do have to to solve one problem after another until you “finish the hat.”

I hope you finish the hat.

The post Who’s Struggling With The Emotional Labor Of The Holidays? appeared first on A Practical Wedding: Wedding Planning, Inspiration, and Ideas.

The sun is setting on November, so here’s that thing where I treat the search strings people typed in to find this place as actual questions. No context, snap judgments, go! I didn’t pick a song this month. 

1 “Is walking too fast creepy?” 

No? Walking way too close behind a stranger can be creepy. Walking very fast while aiming directly at somebody could certainly alarm them. Walking much faster than a companion, so that they continually fall behind or have to race to keep up, is annoying. Glad to put that one to rest for you. 

2 “How to casually drop to your long-distance crush that you are coming.”

“Hello, [CrushName], I’m going to be in [CrushTown] for a few days next month. Can I buy you dinner one night?” 

I don’t really know how to do the “casually” part of this. Do you want to see them or not? If so, invite them to hang out, preferably with plenty of lead-time so they can give you a real answer. 

Do not show up at their door to surprise them. Don’t do it. 

3 “Captain Awkward how not to be someone your adult child writes to advice columnists about.” 

This could become a very long list/book chapter unto itself, but these are a few common elements I notice in recurring parent-child conflicts in my inbox:

• Your children are not your property nor are they extensions of you. Grocery bills and tuition payments were not a down payment on a lifetime of obedience.
• Your children are experts on their own experiences and needs, which may be inconsistent with what they needed when they were small, and quite different from what you imagined, assumed, or hoped. Insisting upon imaginary consistency at the expense of what the actual person in front of you is telling you that they need is both extremely stressful and extremely doomed. 
• Respect boundaries. If your child asks you not to do something (call them when they’re at work, touch them a certain way, comment on their body or appearance, serve food that they hate or are allergic to, drop by unannounced, call them the wrong name), they are giving you information about how to treat them well. “But I’m your parent, so I should get to [do the thing you just said you hate!]”  isn’t a good argument, and your relationship with them will deteriorate if you continue.
• Your children have their own memories of growing up, and it’s normal if they remember events that you both experienced differently than you do. That’s not an attack or a lie, and they aren’t automatically unreliable narrators just because they were little. 
• You do not have to like or agree with all of your child’s choices, but if you respond to everything they reveal about themselves with judgment and criticism, do not be surprised if they stop telling you stuff. 
• “Are you asking for advice or just telling me what’s going on?” is a useful question in any relationship. Not everything needs to be a teachable moment. 
• Your adult children are not responsible for your emotional well-being, nor is it on them to fill the gaps in your social calendar or make up for disappointments in your other relationships. Make some friends. Join something. Find a therapist. Everyone will be happier for it. 

That’s not the whole list, but you get the idea. 

4 “Mother expects me to be her friend.”

And not in a fun way, I’m guessing. See above?

My tried-and-true suggestions for dealing with a parent who wants more than you can give are:

• Take a little time to think about what kind of relationship you actually want with this parent. What would it look like if the relationship were going well? What would make spending time with them more enjoyable for you? In a perfect world, how much interaction (time, energy, effort) is right for you? 
• Try to set up a regular phone call (Zoom, visit) etc. so that there is a predictable structure for interacting with the person. Choose a frequency, format, and duration that is sustainable for you. If the person learns that you won’t reply immediately to every text and call but that you can be depended on to show up for the (for example) weekly Sunday phone call, they may chill out over time. 
• If a parent claims that you’re the only person in the world they can talk to, interrogate that. They seriously have zero peers or other family members or social connections from their entire lives? Is it that you’re the only person they know, or you’re the only person they can guilt and bully into doing what they want when they want it? Consider that someone refusing to hire a therapist doesn’t make you their therapist. 
• Set boundaries about things you won’t discuss. “I don’t want to be your marriage counselor, this is way too many details about my dad!” “Whoa, too much information!” 
• When someone wants something from you and won’t take no for an answer, there is no way to push back that won’t upset them. Setting a healthy boundary where none existed before means accepting a certain amount of upset feelings in order to change the situation.“She won’t like hearing ‘no’, but I still need what I need.” 
• Making a boundary stick is less about finding the right words to convince the other person and more about being consistent in your actions, e.g. ending the conversation if the person won’t stop bringing up a touchy subject. 
• Give it time and multiple chances. The relationship didn’t get this way overnight, it won’t change overnight. 

5 “I don’t want to go holidays.” 

This topic is covered exhaustively in the site archives, but since it’s that time of year again, I will repeat: 

The world will not end if you skip a holiday celebration. There are other ways to connect with people you love. Given that there is still a pandemic, 2021 is an excellent year to NOT subject yourself to group activities in close quarters. 

6 “Auditioning for supporting part tips”

How fun! I don’t know how this ended up here, but after spending hundreds of hours on the “casting” side of the table, I do have a little bit of audition advice for actors for all kinds of roles. Everyone has a different process and different priorities for choosing actors, so this is not meant to be comprehensive, nor is it a professional standards guide. It’s  more “unforced audition errors I have personally witnessed & how to prevent them:” 

• Name your headshot and resume files something descriptive that contains your full name before you submit it or upload it anywhere so busy people do not have to figure out which “headshot4.jpg” you are on the day. 
• Do not be an imperious ass to people on the production doing admin work like emailing you to schedule auditions or signing you into the room. Everybody talks to everybody, and you can burn a lot of bridges with a single dick move.
• Especially when auditioning for film, do not mime actions (scattering invisible flowers, pouring invisible tea, etc.) even if they are described in the script unless the director or casting director specifically asks you to do it. It’s  distracting in the room and looks incredibly weird when the video is played back later. The camera mostly wants to know what your face is doing, so ignore most stage directions and focus on the emotion. 
• Make choices about the material you end up reading or presenting in the audition. If it’s a “cold” read (meaning: the actor hasn’t seen a script until they arrive at the audition space), and they don’t give you anything to go on, chances are that they want to see you interpret a text. Can you find the beats, or make some? If the scene is funny, can you hone in on why it’s funny, and can you mine the funny in your performance? As the audition progresses, the director might give you a different objective,  layer in a different subtext, or shift the tone or timing, etc. to see how you “take direction.” Ideally you will make different choices once you receive different input, and some of those choices will work while some will fail, and that’s okay. The stronger and clearer your choices, the more the director has to react to, and the more it will feel like a collaboration. The best auditions I have seen are the ones where the director and the actor discover that they keep making each other better the more they mess about. 
• If you’re asked to choose your own audition piece, strongly reconsider using something from a role you’ve actually performed in the past. You may feel more confident about presenting something polished, but what made sense for that one show can fall incredibly flat in the audition room. When a director wants to see how well you respond to their ideas, now you’ve suddenly got to push through a bunch of long-calcified creative decisions that you drilled into your muscle memory in order to try something new.  [See Slings & Arrows, Season 2, everything to do with MacBeth for an excellent cautionary tale about this]. 
• I know the whole casting process is nerve-wracking and full of rejection, but please know: The people in the audition room are most likely rooting for you to be great. They want you to solve their creative problems and to make the project come to life. They hate rejecting people, and love getting to make the “You’re cast!” call as much as you love receiving it. In the end, you might not get cast for all kinds of reasons that have nothing to do with your talent, but trust: These people invited you to audition for a reason, and they would not waste their time if they didn’t think you had something to offer.

I love actors. I miss actors. You are all the best. Break a leg out there. 

The post Small Business Gifts We Want To Keep For Ourselves appeared first on A Practical Wedding: Wedding Planning, Inspiration, and Ideas.

Dear Captain Awkward,

A few months ago I moved to another country to attend graduate school. To make the moving process easier, I chose to apply for university accommodation instead of looking for private accommodation. The building is basically a fancy dorm, but it’s clean, in a good location, and I like most of the people that are on my floor.

Here’s my problem. When I first moved here I got to know three of my immediate neighbors, “Anna,” “Beth,” and “John.” These three are in their early twenties while I am in my late twenties, because I waited several years after undergrad to attend graduate school. We had a group chat and while we weren’t each other only friends, we hung out together quite a bit. As I got to know everyone better I learned that John is a big partier, and also likes doing hard drugs. I didn’t have a problem with this, even though I don’t party (or even drink) cause I’ve been working in enough places for long enough to meet a lot of people who do that sort of thing.

During all this time, Beth has been going on lots of dates. A few weeks ago, John got very drunk, and started complaining that he couldn’t understand why Beth was getting so much action and he wasn’t, and straight up said that he didn’t think Beth was pretty enough to warrant all this attention. At this point he had definitely been drinking a lot, but wasn’t blacked out. I called him out and said that he just sounded jealous, and he blew me off. He left immediately after this to go party some more. Right after this I ran into Anna and told her what John had said, and she was rightly pissed at him.

In the middle of the night, after I went to sleep, I was woken up by John yelling in the hallway. Beth had brought her date home, and John was at this point blackout drunk. He was yelling, referencing sex acts that she and the guy should do, and flicked her in the face. I told him to shut up, she told him to go to bed, and I wish I had done more in the moment but my brain wasn’t working properly cause I was still half asleep.

The next morning, I told him what had happened (he allegedly has no memory), told him he needed to apologise to Beth, and he immediately apologised. The thing is I have no desire to hang out with him anymore, and neither do Beth or Anna. He has continued to drink and party like before, and since I’ve seen how that can affect his behavior, I don’t think I would want to even if he stopped drinking. His room is right next to mine, so I can’t really avoid him. I am polite when he talks to me, but I don’t make plans. At 27 I feel no desire to hang out with people who act like that. Part of me is wondering if I am making too much out of this since it wasn’t me he acted this way to. I can tell John misses us, and that does make me feel guilty. Should I be working more to forgive him, since Beth says she has?

Conflicted

Dear Conflicted,

Let us pause for a few words from Nandor The Relentless: 

I so appreciate the solidarity you, Anna, and Beth have demonstrated, and I love how you phrased the last sentence of the letter: “Should you be working more” to forgive John? 

Even if I agreed that you should do “more work” (to be clear, I don’t), I’m curious: What would “more work” even mean? Ignoring John’s sexual harassment of Beth? Ignoring the part where he “flicked her in the face” because he was angry at her for dating someone else? [Is anyone else extremely glad that Beth wasn’t by herself in the hallway that night?]  Are you all supposed to invite him to hang out and pretend that nothing like this will happen again, even knowing that he’s changed nothing about his drinking habits? Or, perhaps, something else that rhymes with “If John has to face predictable social consequences for his bad behavior, does that technically make me The Rude One?”  

This holiday season, may I offer you the gift of Forgiving Without Forgetting? You can accept an apology in a way that forgoes the need for further apologies, explanations, or redress.You can resolve to be civil and polite as long as the other person remains civil and polite, and negotiate a “I won’t bring it up if you don’t,” truce.You can forgive someone for the sake of your own peace of mind, because you just want it to be done and over with, as it sounds like Beth has. Most importantly, you can forgive someone without taking on their redemption as your project and without granting them infinite opportunities to disappoint, harm, and upset you. Also incredibly important: You can forgive someone a different amount than somebody else does. Beth was the chief target of John’s behavior, and it should probably be her call whether to escalate stuff like reporting him to the dorm management, but you don’t ever have to accept him back into the group even if she eventually does. 

You’ve only known John for a few months. Friendships form fast in close quarters, but they inevitably change as everybody learns who they are most compatible with, i.e. even if John hadn’t done something objectively awful, it would be completely fair for you to reevaluate how much you want to hang out now that you know him better. It’s always a little sad when a budding friendship doesn’t really take off like you expected, it’s also sad when someone acts like a complete shitbeast and makes it really hard for you to be friends with them. It’s possible for something to feel sad and still be the right decision. “We used to be friends but it didn’t work out.” 

Thing is, John knows exactly why he’s unwelcome now, and he has many choices about How Not To Ruin Future Friendships With Alcohol And Misogyny. I hope he makes good ones, starting with leaving all of you the hell alone, but that is not my concern. 

My project is making sure that you, Anna, and Beth know that your instinct to avoid someone who followed up his mean, sexist comments by cornering your friend after a date and putting his hands on her in a drunken rage is valid, reasonable, and good. The “He doesn’t really meeeeeeeeean it, he’s just insulting and assaulting you because he liiiiiiiiiikes you” message was trash when you were five, don’t let the grown-up versions (“How can it be his fault if he doesn’t even remember it?” “How will he learn if you don’t personally help him through…a bad thing…he did to you?” ) lure all of you into the flaming dumpster now. 

In conclusion, it is perfectly fine to wish John well, maintain perfunctory politeness for the sake of hallway harmony, lock your doors, and keep right on keeping your distance from #ThisFuckingGuy.