As I watched Tanara Burke’s recent TED Talk about the future of the #MeToo movement she founded, I felt inspired by her vision. Given that #MeToo is a movement and not a moment, it seems an appropriate time to explore how the hard times that survivors bravely shared can be transformed into something constructive.
I haven’t found so many #UsToo stories out there, but the few I ran across were quite moving for their simplicity and willing vulnerability. I liked that they very directly sent the message: “something horrible happened to me, something that disrespected my values, and I had to behave uncharacteristically to protect my sense of self or my life.”
As I reflected on the #MeToo and #UsToo stories I’ve heard, three more general points came to mind that are broader than the problems of sexual abuse and harassment. These points have to do with more general problems affecting our culture:
- Our culture(s) are not super awesome about taking care of feelings. We’re afraid to show them, perhaps afraid of being judged or hurt worse, and also quite uncomfortable witnessing feelings of other folks.
- We don’t always appreciate the value of thinking for ourselves. It’s easy and a bit of a cop-out to take someone else’s word for something we feel strongly about. And if we give into that tendency accompanied by difficult feelings that we don’t know what to do with, then we risk magnifying a problem in a way that is not constructive.
- It’s hard to know how to hold people accountable. Or perhaps it’s more that people are having trouble holding themselves accountable. Most people want to be accountable to themselves and their communities, so we need to talk about what is getting in the way.
Can we tackle these issues? I believe so. Stay tuned for my next posts, where I’ll explore each of these points separately. For now, I’ll stay broad and describe my overall formula. Later, we’ll brainstorm how this may be applicable to #MeToo, #UsToo, and related hashtags.
When life throws me a difficult time, I usually know it first by the bad feelings that arise in my body – physiologically based responses such as increased heart rate, hormones that affect my muscle tone and breathing rate, etc. Then I have to decide whether or how to act on those feelings, and whether or how to think about them. Those decisions are iterative and, depending on what I decide or think, they can either prolong my original feelings, shape them, or allow the feelings to fade away. And at some point, I have to integrate my difficult experience and reaction to it into some coherent narrative that forms a part of my history and also influences, to some extent, my view of the other people involved.
In general, I have found it most productive if the bulk of my resources (thoughts, time, action, etc) are spent shaping my environment and accomplishments, with only a few going towards informing my viewpoint of the other people involved. I don’t do this super-well, because I do consider it important to adjust my expectations of other people to ensure they are reasonable. But I do try to limit my judgment of other people’s character during hard times, because I think that’s one of the better ways to combat the fundamental attribution error and it also gives me more power to define my goals and success in terms that I can achieve, that are under my control.
And lastly, I have often had success mining difficult times for inspiration, ideas, motivation. Mostly to hold myself accountable, although I’ve also been thinking more about different types and systems of accountability in general. So, over the following three posts, I’ll talk about each of these issues separately: dealing with difficult feelings, converting incoming information into an outgoing opinion, and accounting for the situation. Stay posted!
