One-uppers. Man, they drive me crazy.
And the internet especially is lousy with them. You probably have these fuckmuppets in your personal life and family too.
You might recognize them from classic hits like
You think THAT’s bad, try…
That’s nothing, you should see…
Be grateful that…
You’re lucky it’s not this thing that happened to ME…
And it’s fucking exhausting.
When people share their challenges with you, or share their hard experiences, or share their traumas, or even just talk about their shitty day at work, the response is not to fucking draw a diagram of how yours is somehow worse.
When I talk about this shit with people the defense is always that doing that is somehow about connection or commiseration or people trying to “relate” to another person by communicating that they’ve had similar experience. I mean after all, how can we fucking bond if we can’t wallow in the same fetid trenches together and make sure we arm wrestle for the trauma prizes, am I right?
What it actually is emotional interruption and effectively being the fucking Kanye West of broader society, grabbing the microphone and believing that the only fucking thing that could possibly matter on the planet is for everyone to hear your perspectives right at this fucking moment, regardless of whether anyone asked you.
It’s such a dick move. It’s terribly invalidating to other people because you’re stepping all over their fucking experiences to insert and center your own.
It’s also stupid and yet another illustration of how incapable most humans are to grasp the concept of relativity in all things. We do not have equal experiences. We do not have homogenous stories and lives. We each have fucking different things that happen to us and contexts in which they happen and just because you think your fucking bad day in NYC traffic was objectively worse than someone’s day in traffic in Columbus, Ohio does not make you fucking special or even correct. It just makes you an asshole.
There are people who make a sport of this shit, too.
Suffer losses in a fucking pandemic? Don’t worry, some intellectual rustbucket had it worse or harder than you did, and they’ll be sure to tell you how grateful you should fucking be. Have a chronic illness? Well it can’t be as bad as the fucking guy with cancer. Get laid off from your job? Well at least you didn’t have to cut off your own fucking limb while you were trapped under a boulder.
Instead, can we do a group project here and learn how to fucking validate other people like adults?
Try one of these handy phrases on for size:
Ugh, that sucks. I’m so sorry you went through that.
That must have been terrible. Are you okay?
I can totally understand why you’d be angry about that.
Wow, what a shit experience. Here’s some bourbon and a puppy.
Who do I have to kill?
Okay, maybe the last one is a bit much. But honestly. Is it so fucking hard to just listen and be there for someone when they’ve had a rough time without automatically using their expressed experience as a runway to launch your fucking jetliner of personal misery? I’m sorry you didn’t get the fucking attention you needed from your parents, Chad, but neither did I and we all have to fucking take turns on this squeaky merry-go-round of dysfunction and it’s not your turn right now.
We all have shit. It costs you exactly nothing to either offer unconditional support and validation to another human or decide you don’t fucking have the spoons for that today and choose to say nothing at all. You don’t always have to give what you don’t have.
But you can certainly exercise some self-restraint and at least refrain from emotionally cock-blocking anyone who dares to ask to be the main character in the story for five fucking minutes.
Do better, dickwagons.
Fuck Yes Friday
This campaign apparently launched a while ago, but I only saw it this week, and it’s a lovely thing to come across especially during Pride month.
MasterCard has a feature called True Name, where anyone can have their card issued under the name they identify with rather than the one they were necessarily assigned at birth. This is particularly meaningful for transgender and nonbinary humans who often have to navigate the friction between using a deadname that’s listed on legal documentation and records and the name they’ve chosen.
It’s a problem that those of us cisgendered humans in the world would never have to deal with. And aside from it being humiliating it can be downright dangerous for these people to have to navigate.
Every once in a while, the big companies back up talk with action. As a marketer by trade, it can be exhausting to see lots of performative talk during months like Pride, but we love to see when a brand actually invests in changing the world, not just splashing rainbows on things.
Bright spots are so needed and during a week when the worst of humanity managed to show themselves to me many times, it was a really welcome glimmer of hope that maybe—just maybe—there’s goodness in our species yet.
With love and angst,
Amber
PS - if you missed it, I shared guidelines on Monday if you’d like to be a future contributor to Dear Fuckers. All the cool kids are doing it. And I know you’re mad about something.
Like Dear Fuckers? Share it with your friends on the internet so we can ruffle some feathers. You know you want to.