Healing is Making Us Mean

yes, it's the damn phones

“Too much of nothing, 
so why don’t we give it a try?
Too much of something, 
you’re gonna be living a lie.”
(lyrics from ”Too Much” by The Spice Girls)

my king!!!

Millennials are, definitively, the therapy generation. We made therapy so goddamn cool, that it was weird if you weren’t going to therapy. “Seek therapy” became an oft-used sign off for snarky tweets or breakup texts (guilty as charged - sorry).

We have diligently studied our neuroses into oblivion. We know when we’re distracting ourselves or self-destructing. We’re hyperaware of our people-pleasing tendencies, we know our Meyers-Briggs personality type (INFJ-T here, reporting for duty *salute*), our love languages (ranked, of course), and our apology language (because we’re not brutes, duh). We know when we’re being avoidant or combative. And we know that we need to avoid listening to Sade when we’re in our luteal phase because it’s “just too much.”

But then.. things got kind of weird. “Therapy speak” started to bleed into everyday interactions, as evidenced by many a viral screenshot on Twitter. Suddenly, people were churning out clinical HR responses for the unforgivable sins of *checks notes* friends asking them to help them move, pick them up from the airport or, worse yet, simply wanting to vent.

“Hi! I’m so glad that you felt safe enough to come to me with this. I can see that you’re in need of support, however I don’t have the capacity for this right now and need to honour that boundary. I appreciate your understanding. Let’s get coffee soon when you’re better though! xx“

Respectfully… is everyone okay?

The language of healing has been bastardized and rendered into performances and diatribes about boundaries and toxicity. Suddenly it became the consensus that you shouldn’t ever ever ever, not even for one millisecond, be asked to go out of your way to do something for someone else, because you already do SO much for everyone else all the time and nobody ever does anything for you, right? Inconvenience somehow became a cardinal sin, punishable by ghosting, or at the very least, a post on r/AITA.

Very quickly, “healing” became less about connection and more about control. Less about understanding ourselves, and more about explaining ourselves; justifying every boundary, every reaction, every ~vibe shift~ with a diagnosis. We’ve developed this not-so-subtle kind of smugness — often cruel and alienating — where if someone doesn’t speak our therapeutic dialect, or if they’re not fluent in the frameworks we’ve adopted, they’re labeled unsafe. Unregulated. Toxic. Somewhere right now, someone’s ChatGPT “therapist” is telling them “You are absolutely right—your friend asking you to come to their birthday party on the three year anniversary of your situationship ending is totally selfish. You deserve to feel heard, too.”

Really spooky shit!

And being the chronically online peons that we are has only made it easier and easier for us to ignore and reject the very idea of other people’s interior lives. The almighty algorithm trains us to scan for sameness. We scroll until we find people who mirror ourselves back to us, who react in the ways we would, who say the things we were just thinking. And in that constant self-reinforcement loop, we start to believe that our way of seeing the world is not just valid — it’s correct.

Nobody else has gone through the things that I’ve gone through.

No one else is as benevolent, kind, generous as I am.

No one else loves as hard as I do.

And the result inevitably becomes that everyone that isn’t us is enemy of the state #1. Unenlightened. Emotionally unavailable. Spiritually misaligned. Healing and Being Healed™ gives us a nicely packaged wall to safely put up between ourselves and the avatars we deem everyone else to be. And “therapy speak” has become the script we use to avoid the terrifying unpredictability of actual human messiness. If someone doesn’t immediately respect your nervous system or your inner child, they’re cast out like some unreformed medieval peasant who hasn’t read The Body Keeps the Score.

Now, every post screams “I’m more than healed than you.” We are constantly reminding each other that we’re hashtag unbothered; too beautiful, too successful, too wife, too mother, too award-winning, too Black, too rich, too matcha, too “my biggest flaw is I love too hard,” too fucking enlightened to care.

Here’s the thing, babes:

you do care, and I’m going to hold your hands for this next part…

pretending you don’t is making you really, really mean.

tea

There is no amount of internal work that will exempt you from hurt or misunderstanding or the occasional chaotic group chat spiral. You can’t boundary yourself into a perfectly curated life. And to be honest, you shouldn’t want to! People will still disappoint you. You’ll still say the wrong thing sometimes. Your parents might never apologize the way you want them to (shoutout to the immigrant parents who bring their children plates of cut up fruit in lieu of apologies, though lol I see you and I love you). Your partner will trigger you. You’ll trigger them back. It’s called being alive. It sucks sometimes. Welcome!

Human beings aren’t meant to be optimized. We are meant to be in relationship. In conflict. In care. In community. And community, here, doesn’t mean constant harmony. Because, ew, that’s not real life, nor should it be. Community comes with burden, it comes with inconvenience, it comes with conflict. But somehow, we’ve deluded ourselves into thinking that our lives should be totally devoid of those things. We lie to ourselves (and each other) by saying that “true friends” would never inconvenience you. My siblings in Christ, the people you love will absoLUTELY inconvenience you. And what a miracle that is! I promise I don’t mean to be that person (but I’m a Pisces, so I literally am that person), but how fucking lucky are we to have people we love and are burdened by? I don’t ever want to be so cut off from this world and the people in it that nobody turns to me for respite, help, or care. How sad would it be if nobody called me to scream with joy with them that they got the job they wanted? What an utter failing it would be if no one thought of my name when they thought of care.

more tea!!!

Here’s what I know: the tug and pull of life is what makes it worth living. We give and we receive. We recede and someone leans in. We push and people make space for us. We forget and the universe lays reminders at your feet. We can retreat but life is always going to advance on us. We don’t get to opt out of the banalities and challenges of it. Keeping the door open and letting people in is the only way rooms expand. Life actually gets easier when you let it be difficult. I know! It’s weird like that! Therapy culture, mixed in with a little global pandemic, mixed in with all the damn screens!!! has had us running away from each other - and ourselves - for so long and we have no idea how to be decent people to each other anymore. Everyone wants a village but doesn’t know how, nor wants to be good villagers. We traded in kindness, compassion, grace, for suspicion, combativeness, and isolation.

We need more confrontation; meaning, we need to rebuild our capacity to be with and around each other again. We need to remember how to face ourselves and the people that make up our communities and look at each other. BE with each other. It’s in the confrontations that we learn how to make room for one another. Here’s author, Kurt Vonnegut, explaining why he would buy envelopes one at a time:

I love to be the bearer of fantastic news: your healing can’t and won’t happen in a silo, my friends. We need people. We need each other! We need to learn how to sit and deal with things, ideas, and people. it’s not always fun, but true healing rarely is.

And besides, the only way to become better dancers is by dancing.