You're not too sensitive, sweety!

You just have to stop opening the doors to the bakery.

In my first class at paralegal school the instructor told us we needed to have thick skin to be a paralegal. “Pfffft. No problem,” I thought. “If I can survive my mother, I can survive anything.” I knew everything and had little self-awareness at 19 years old, and besides that I was mean in the way people who were raised by mean people often end up. Helpful advice like “buckle up buttercup” went in one ear and out the other because I was a tough cookie.

A few months into my first job, one of my supervising attorneys silently dropped a cassette full of dictation on my desk late in the day. It was all letters and deeds and such and then oddly, a memo to me. Apparently I’d made a rookie error: when mailing draft wills to a client, I glued the envelope closed but I didn’t also tape it closed. The client was livid. “Maybe you don’t understand this job,” I typed to myself. “I shouldn’t have to explain this to you. This is inexcusable and I shouldn’t have to look at the mail before it goes out the door to make sure you’re keeping our client’s personal information secure.” I cried the entire 45-minute drive home from work, sure that my career was over. Thirty years later, I still mummify every piece of mail in layers upon layers of tape.

While I never made that particular “mistake” again, there were many others, like using sick time for a doctor’s appointment during which I’d gotten some upsetting health news. I called my attorney and told him I needed to take the rest of the day. “I have x, y, and z going on and I need you here, working. This is a real problem, and I need to know that this isn’t going to be an ongoing issue with you being out sick all the time.” I now have to do breathing exercises every time I submit a request for time off, because I’m sure someone will yell at me for using the benefits I negotiated for and am entitled to.

In the days before email, I worked for an attorney who gave me the silent treatment for nearly six months, communicating exclusively in dictation. I’d transcribe his memos to me and print them out on Pepto pink memo paper for his review. A few days later he’d leave them in my pigeonhole initialed with a note scrawled across the bottom. He only resumed talking to me after I organized his office while he was on vacation and he had room to work again. I learned that some attorneys just need mothers, so I started shopping for gifts for their wives and picking up their dry cleaning.

And then there was the attorney who kept a punching bag on his desk and had dents in his filing cabinets. “Surely this is the attorney I can tame with my skill and efficiency,” I thought after the interview. He just needed a good paralegal and this was my time to shine. He turned out to be door-slamming silent pouter, though, at least until the time he picked up a four-inch binder and threw it across the room at me. I got fired. He’s a judge now.

Back then, it never occurred to me that our client had an outsized negative reaction to standard office procedure (Glue is a generally accepted envelope closing medium! Nothing bad happened!) and not only did my attorney not have my back, he threw me under the bus and drove back and forth over me in an abusive, demeaning, passive-aggressive tirade.

Every time I need to prioritize my health or my family’s needs over work, there’s a voice in the back of my head that sounds an awful lot like that attorney: I should be working. I can’t be sick. I am going to lose my job if I take care of my dad while he’s dying. I have to figure out how to deal with this issue without missing any work.

My mother was a door-slamming silent pouter, so I understood the language even though I also hated it and understood it wasn’t appropriate in a professional setting.

When you make yourself indispensable and then are unexpectedly unavailable, it causes problems. I didn’t realize, though, until I was in a position to solve those kind of problems myself, that there are an infinite number of ways to solve them, none of which involve making someone feel bad about needing to take time away from work.

Before I learned better, I considered my supervising attorneys superior. I was the supporting cast in their legal drama, subservient to their needs and whims. Over time, my experiences molded me (or rather, I allowed myself to be molded) into a dutiful little worker bee who works to exhaustion, needlessly owns other people’s baggage, makes excuses for poor behavior, plans vacations around work, and gaslights herself into perfection. My self-worth is, or was, intertwined with my performative abilities.

This is a hard pattern to break; when I pull the thread it leads all the way back to my childhood conditioning. It’s also a hard pattern to break because the entire system depends on legal staff not understanding that they are key players and that they, too, have agency and autonomy.

For the first half of my career, after having a shitty day with a shitty boss, I was able to go home and retreat into the comfort of family and friends, who understood the context and contours of my life. They *got me* so when I talked about the latest ridiculous thing my attorney did they just let me go on until I realized I was upset about a silly little thing, relative to the Big Things I’d had to deal with over the years. Bad days were soon forgotten and ultimately laughed about because wow, this job really is just silly sometimes.

Then came the internet.

Suddenly, the doors were open to the entire world and all of its opinions! In the beginning, before social media, we had blogs and websites. People found us, and we found them, because we connected through small communities of shared interests and values. For the most part, people behaved online the same as they did in real life – polite, respectful, interested, curious, helpful. If someone behaved poorly, at least in the crafty fiber spaces I spent my time in, they soon found themselves unwelcome and ignored.

That didn’t last long; the platform that brought us Farmville realized drama and trolls were more profitable than people sharing seeds for fake avocado trees so it switched up its business model.

I’ve been terminally offline for nine months, but unfortunately it's impossible to avoid using social media while writing a local newsletter, which is now my second full time job. So many organizations post information about their events exclusively on Facebook, so lately I've been spending a few hours a week scrolling and searching for events...which turned into mindless scrolling...which started to (once again) break my brain. This is no accident — Facebook's algorithm prioritizes negativity and drama because it keeps our eyes glued to the screen. It's free because we are the product. We pay with our attention and data and ultimately, our communities, because good things happening in our towns isn't dramatic enough to keep the lights on at Meta.

So last week, after sharing my newsletter on Reddit as I do every week, a user there dismissed it as an advertisement and told me I should just post the information on Reddit like everyone else does. I explained that this newsletter is for people who have a hard time finding information about events using social media and Google searches because of the way algorithms have changed (most of us, right?). He took a "liking" to me though, and I ultimately got dogpiled and downvoted into nonexistence.

This negative interaction with a handful of critics taking shots from the cheap seats took up an outsized space in my brain for a few days. I take all feedback to heart, so I had to wonder what I was putting out there for someone to view a free newsletter full of positive information and fun events as just an advertisement. That's not what I'm trying to accomplish. I’m building a community resource on a platform that exists outside the confines of social media and ultimately, the internet.

After getting out of town for a long weekend and spending the entirety of it offline, I finally had the space to remember that this is just how the internet works now: negativity attracts negativity in ways that drown out people who are positive and creating good things for their communities. This – in addition to the death of local newspapers -- is why nobody has any idea what’s going on in town anymore.

I think, if I hadn’t been having such a challenging week month year IRL, it would have been easy to dismiss an internet troll as a bottom-feeding basement dweller who had too much time on their hands. But, as things are, the world is a dumpster fire, there’s too much to pay attention too, and my body and brain are off-kilter, so someone being mean to me on the internet upsets me. I just need to be less sensitive.

And that’s when it hit me.

Why, exactly, do I need to be less sensitive? How did *minding my business doing my thing* become the problem? Why do I need to change my behavior and make myself smaller so a loud bully has more space to be toxic? Why do I need to tolerate bosses who throw things at me? Why do I need to carry the weight of responsibilities that don’t belong to me, or the consequences of someone else’s poor choices? Why do I need to make allowances for poor behavior?

I’m not the problem, and neither are you.

Toxic people and institutions need to keep us small so they feel bigger. This is binary, scarcity thinking. This is a culture of people who have not learned responsibility for their behavior nor how to apologize when they miss the mark. This is a culture of people who believe that in order for them to have more, someone else needs to have less. This is a culture of people who exist amidst abundant resources but fail to see them because we’ve been sold on the idea moving fast to collect limited editions.

Negative interactions with other humans as we move throughout our day are challenging enough on their own. The internet makes all of them harder to navigate, because it fractures our attention and algorithmically nudges us to view the world as a dangerous, scary place. It turns us into avatars who only see other avatars. We’ve become so habituated to shitty behavior that it’s just…normal. People who are kind and thoughtful and quietly existing/creating have become the outliers, the rare unicorns who make our days better but we don’t see nearly as often as we should (or could, but for technology guiding us away from them).

This isn’t just an internet problem, and it’s also not just a me problem. It’s all of us, everywhere, all of the time. Most of us have had work experiences like mine. All of us have been through trauma (helloooo global pandemic). Meanness and selfishness has woven its tendrils through everything that constitutes our culture – the media, entertainment, politics, families, work, communities – in ways that are so pervasive it’s impossible to escape.

Except we can escape.

We have forgotten that we have autonomy and agency because we are trapped in a cycle of doing what everyone else is doing without slowing down long enough to question why. We call ourselves creatives and then follow prescriptive art and writing advice dispensed by “experts” while yelling about AI stealing our opportunities. We chase market trends and wonder why everything feels reductive. We follow the same optimized newsletter publishing schedules as everyone else and then get mad because our work gets lost in the Sunday Morning Sea of Words. Our websites are stylistic copypasta. Our social media posts are interchangeable cringe marketing fests.

If you want different results, you have to do something different. That doesn’t mean it will be easy. It doesn’t mean it’s going to work. And it almost certainly guarantees you’re gonna attract someone who insists you stay small and do things the way everyone else does them, even if they’re not signing your paycheck, because freedom of speech now only matters when you’re talking down to someone.

But if you refuse to open the doors to the bakery, people will go elsewhere for their Dubai Chocolate Cookies with Matcha Sea Salt Dust, and then you can offer some Clove Cupcakes with Star Anise Infused Whipped Cream Cheese Frosting and Espresso Dust. The people who like what you’re selling will find you; the rest are unimportant.

When I was trying to untangle all of this for myself, the first thing I realized was that staying off the internet was only an initial step. I’ve long understood that the firehose of toxic information streaming into my eyeholes skewed the way I see the world in a negative way. I could only notice that difference, though, because I’ve spent so much time offline this year. I didn’t feel like my brain had fully repaired from the damage the internet has done until I was mostly offline for about six months.

That’s when I was able to start seeing people as humans again. I remembered that everyone has a backstory, and that when people are unkind they’re often hurting or unconsciously running through the script that gets them through the day – a script which contains all of their challenges and traumas and relationship patterns. For all I know, maybe they regret what they did later but don’t know how to make amends, so in turn it will become another part of their story that they use to beat themselves up.

We’re all out here trying to have our needs met, whether it’s housing, food, health, career advancement, a sense of self-worth and belonging, or a relationship.

When I slow down, I can look at an event like a boss not speaking to me for six months and understand that he didn’t have the tools he needed to address something he wasn’t happy with in a more respectful, professional way. Maybe he remained silent because he didn’t want to be mean. Maybe he remained silent because he realized he fucked up, too, and couldn’t find a way to navigate that. Or maybe he remained silent because that’s how he was treated in the past and he was subconsciously perpetuating a relationship pattern.

This isn’t making an allowance or an excuse for poor behavior. This is seeing a human, accepting them in all their messy humanity, and doing it without judgment.

It doesn’t take Mother Teresa levels of empathy to do this. It just requires us to slow down enough to get curious. We don’t have the time or space to do this when we’re carrying on ten million unimportant micro-conversations in our heads. The only way to accomplish this is to get off the internet and go do something meaningful and positive with our extra time and attention.

If we were all able to do this, it just might change the world.

Thumbnail image: "Milk and Cookies Cover" by Thoth, God of Knowledge is licensed under CC BY 2.0.