The day started out well enough. I was at an outdoor food market with my friend. We sat in the July sun, chatting in between bites of food made for social media (fried cacio e pepe, vegan bao buns, coconut water cold brew, etc). I slowly realized that I was becoming dehydrated. Lightheaded. Nauseous.
But why kill the mood? I casually suggested we get lemonade and stand in the shade. The feeling temporarily subsided. But a half-hour later, we were sitting on the subway train and all the feelings rushed back. The doors slid open at a station en route.
“Would you be mad if we got off at this stop?”
We got off the train and stood by a trash can. Our cold cups of lemonade were ice packs. I held mine to my forehead, she held hers to the nape of my neck. My clothes were too tight, too hot. The air was stale and warm. We decided to leave the station.
We climbed the stairs and were embraced by the bright, hot, loud plaza of Barclays Center. For about an hour, we sat in a nearby Shake Shack, enjoying the air conditioning and iced water my friend bought for me. I bit my tongue to keep myself from apologizing. I’m sorry I’ve ruined our day. I’m sorry for taking up your time. I’m sorry for turning my problem into your problem.
She continued to take care of me and we made it back to our respective homes. I recovered from my heat exhaustion (though I still have a gnarly sunburn emblazoned on my shoulders). And even though she said, “Next time, you don’t have to ask if I’d be mad, you can just ask if we can get off the train”, I couldn’t shake that feeling of guilt and embarrassment. I had to tamp down the irrational thought that my friend was annoyed with me for inconveniencing her.
In 2016, I wrote the following journal entry about a friend and myself:
“I feel like we go through some of the same difficulties in life (i.e. sexuality, anxiety, depression) but we both have very different ways of handling these things. I like to tamp everything down and struggle internally, while she is fine with everything being out there. If people are uncomfortable with it, then too bad, they aren’t the kind of person that she wants to be friends with. For her, they are the problem. But I’m the exact opposite. If I’m especially struggling with something, then I feel like I’m the problem and that I need to hide those struggles so as not to make others feel uncomfortable. Which probably isn’t healthy, but I feel like it’s the only way that I’ve ever dealt with things”
When I’ve felt overwhelmed at work, I’ve refused to admit it or request assistance from less busy colleagues. I once built an IKEA sectional couch on my own because I didn’t want to wait for another person to help me. And on multiple occasions, I’ve had to be taken to the E.R. when I waited too long to tell someone that my asthma was making it impossible to breathe.
I’ve been brainwashed into believing that no matter the severity, my problems are mine alone to solve. That strength is defined by self-sufficiency.
This concept is epitomized by the phrase, “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps”. It tells us that it’s possible to do something difficult, to succeed without any outside help. But this phrase started out with a different meaning. The earliest published reference to lifting oneself up by the bootstraps, in the early 1800s, was meant to be ludicrous, impossible, to try to do something completely absurd. The phrase didn’t shift to its current meaning until the early 20th century.
Of course, this idiom is mostly employed by conservatives, and ridiculed by anyone even slightly to the left. It is used as an excuse for defunding social services. It is used as justification for the paltry conditions of the working class. The subtext is: if someone’s life is grim, it’s because they deserve it; it’s because they haven’t worked hard enough.
Regardless of our politics, we cling to rags-to-riches stories and “self-made” billionaires that mythologize this idea. But when you look a little closer, these successful individuals don’t necessarily prove the “bootstraps” theory. They only prove that, when you have nothing to lose, you bet it all. For those at the margins, there is often nowhere to go but up.
We tend to forget this. And as these stories are told and retold, the people that provided help along the way are forgotten and minimized because they don’t fit the narrative. As a result, we’ve turned the impossible into the attainable. And these individual stories are used to justify our lack of social support systems and the deterioration of unions. You alone are responsible for yourself.
This championing of self-reliance is isolating and only increases our collective sense of loneliness. In the age of the internet, we’ve drifted further and further apart from each other, our communities and interpersonal ties splintering like Pangaea. We curate our online presence for the sake of strangers and friends who have become near strangers. We’re so used to feeding (and consuming) the highlight reel that watching someone be vulnerable and ask for help feels jarring. Suffering alone is accepted as the norm.
Everyone needs aid from time to time, and it’s not shameful to admit that. It can even be brave. None of us are invincible or capable of taking on the world without at least a little assistance. It’s absurd to believe that we are.
Some things I read/watched/etc lately:
Tammie Teclemariam wrote about burrata and how it’s kind of overrated and a bit of a crutch (so controversial yet brave).
Remember zero-waste trash jars? Joseph Winters at Wired recently wrote about this relic from the 2010s.
G/O Media (which owns Gizmodo, A/V Club, Quartz, and Jalopnik) is going to continue publishing AI-written articles after a terrible July debut. Just reading the headline made me sad, so I figured I’d share the bleakness (sorry!)
This YouTube channel, Horses. They post video essays that are nice/interesting to both listen to and look at.
This piece about fashion and time from Avery Trufelman:
That is all! Enjoy the rest of your week :)
xoxo, Mia