On being real mean, then less mean
Originally posted on Tumblr
Long post incoming……..I’ve been chipping away at writing this for like a month now and (unlike my usual self) I’ve stalled out a few times unsure of what all I want to say. But I think I’ve got it squared up the way I would like to. Unfortunately, I need a long context laying preamble. Sorry this will feel like an online recipe experience 😅
As the 5 of you who usually read my blocks of text will know well, I grew up in a very toxic, abusive, high-control environment. If you wanted to intentionally produce kids who would have anxiety, shame, self-loathing, aggression, be overly-competitive, angry, and equipped with little-to-no social skills, you should be parented like I was. In my nuclear family, we couldn’t have had worse life lessons or role modeling when it comes to building healthy relationships, strong friendships, and harmonious existence with others. Violence was often normalized. Manipulation was encouraged. Specific conditions and rules were put on receiving love and/or affection. We weren’t seen as independent humans who had their own lives and thoughts and ambitions–we were seen as extensions of my father, brought into the world to be his unquestioning cheerleaders and adoring team, to do our best to become his clones, to live out his unrealized dreams, and to combat his grievances w/ the world.
In short, it sucked.
Above all, I was taught in a very deep and real way to hate myself, not that this was explicitly acknowledged mind you, but it was the implication of everything. This self loathing was an extension of my father’s own insecurities and full inability to grow the fuck up and build a life for himself that was emotionally mature, resilience, and self-caring. This mentality, if truly internalized, creates ugliness from the inside that radiates outward. I can see that so clearly now, but back then, I didn’t understand it at all.
I was implicitly taught a thought process like, “the best way to ‘own’ someone is to shit talk them into crying” or “you can make yourself look stronger and distract from your own shortcomings by staying 1 step ahead of everyone through making THEM feel like shit about their shortcomings.”
But you weren’t just mean to someone to stay ahead of them, you were also mean as a way to ingratiate others to you. “Telling it like it is” even if what you said was unnecessarily cruel, was a virtue. Like, “what? I’m just saying what we’re all thinking!” kind of stuff. I was taught that “teasing” is a way you show someone you love them, where “teasing” means saying all kinds of awful things that are quite hurtful. I was taught that being funny was one of the most important qualities and it didn’t matter if those laughs came at the expense of others’ feelings and if, over time, your comments began to destroy those around you.
It’s “just teasing.” It’s “just joking.” It was a lot of “oh come, on grow a thicker skin” over “maybe saying cruel shit for fun is bad?” It was “God, I can dish it and I can take it, why can’t you?” over “maybe I want friends who support one another instead of digging at our insecurities.”
Some recent nostalgia I’ve been wallowing in this summer reminded me of my grossest self who lived by these rules.
Those worst moments, where I was a bully and an asshole, all occurred for me at school, when I was probably around 11/12 and older. School was a very interesting place for me. When I try to paint an efficient picture of what my childhood home was like for others, I often say, my family existed in a weird liminal someplace between mainstream, mid western white suburban society and a survivalist/separatist/cult/fringe culture (like Tara Westover describes in Educated or as seen in Captain Fantastic if you’re familiar w/ either of those.) We were a cult of 4 and there were many things We Did Not Do, all my dad’s rules. (My grandparent’s house was a safe harbor unlike my home, but that’s a tangent for another time.) That said, accessing education was something my father DID trust the local government to do (as long as he could emphasize over and over how we can’t trust everything they say, we could trust their lessons of math, music, English, etc.) He strategically chose a place to live where I could get the best “free” education possible in Central Indiana. My social life existed fully in a traditional school setting, where it took me all of 2 seconds to clock that other kids’ lives weren’t like mine, and that was compelling to me. I became a lifelong student of interpersonal relationship dynamics far before I realized I had become a lifelong student of relationships. I remember when I was in elementary school journaling about and thinking about and talking about all the friend groups and dynamics, etc. Writing stories about friend groups. Creating Barbie universes and dramas with 2 neighborhood friends. Trying to spend more and more time w/ peers instead of family.
Beyond that, I loved school because I would receive praise and love at home for A’s and praise and love from my teachers for being “so good” (aka offering 100% deference to adult authority as I been told to do, even if I could question them inside.) This all means when I was very young, I did SO WELL at figuring out school…how to make friends…how to get an A+…how to get teachers to love me…how to be The Good Kid…how to reduce my value to my grades and what I produced, which is a mentality I’ve still only begun to unweave from within me, some 30 years later.
Anyway, point is, despite the hand I was dealt, I somehow never had trouble making friends and with a lot of my closest friends, I wasn’t all that mean to in the way I describe above, at least initially. But when I did apply that behavior, god damn was it ugly. I get that now, but back then, I felt cool as fuck.
The more it (temporarily) worked for me the more I used meanness. By the time I was like 17, I literally was known as mean and wore it as a badge of honor. Lacking emotional intelligence and an overtly loving home environment, I thought it was normal? cool? idk…to “not be able to handle mushy emotional stuff.” I would (LITERALLY) run if friends were telling me they loved me. It became more and more common for me to apply, “witty mean girl” quips to even my closest friends. Stuff was said about me like, “oh, if she makes fun of you, it means she really loves you.” I was always saying shit to gain laughs from others that really hurt some people and I would act like that was a THEM thing like “god, they’re so sensitive, poor widdle baby.”
NOT GOOD. Nothing to be proud of. Signs of someone who deep down hates themselves and hopes you don’t notice because of a big, bad exterior. In this era, I was someone who attracted and accepted other toxic people and was abusive toward and accepted abuse from friends who had these same issues. How I met and fell in love w/ my partner who is not at all like this during that period of time back when sometimes confounds me. His boundaries and feelings are why I started really looking inward. His patience and willingness to understand what was going on for me was immense (as I was similarly patient for things related to his baggage.) FOR YEARS we had a dynamic where I’d “make fun of” “tease” “just joke” about him too harshly in front of others and he would ask me over and over to stop. I’d get better for a while, then I’d backslide and make him feel like shit in a group setting again–but hey! everyone laughed at my ~*~*just oh so hilarious comment*~*~ and so that makes it fine right?? Obviously, not, and the older I got the more I started to FINALLY see “mean” as mean and not “telling it like it is” or being a core part of my humor.
How I REALLY know that this toxic coping mechanism I used to my benefit was a thinly veiled defense mechanism style behavior to cloud my deep deep deep self loathing is because when I’d be talking w/ my partner about his very reasonable and normal request that I not say unnecessarily cruel things about him for fun in front of others, I would be afraid of things like, “But that’s part of who I am? It’s my humor.”
I really thought so lowly of myself that I believed that if I wasn’t witty-mean, people wouldn’t love me. That I wouldn’t still be funny. That I wouldn’t be ME unless I was being MEAN. It was so backwards and upside down because my meanness did make me harder to be around, and people were right there loving me anyway, not because of it, but despite it.
It’s so sad to realize this! Looking back and describing this girl now feels in both parts foreign to me and also like looking in a mirror. I’ve been in 20 years of some form or another of “recovery” from this kind of childhood now, and I’m about 15 years into true healing and re-parenting myself. Almost 14 years ago, I made the biggest shift toward killing this old mentality…I moved away from my home town and the people I spent my days around to that point. I had an opportunity for a hard reset in my social life and behaviors, leaving behind old reputations that didn’t serve me. And I’m still me. I’m spicy and I’m real and I’m blunt and I’m funny but I’m not cruel or mean anymore. The old me sometimes still rears her ugly head, especially when I’m tired, stress, or dysregulated. But it’s less “how I am” now than ever in my life.
As I’ve been thinking about this whole topic for quite a few weeks now, and I tried to articulate what I did that really changed me and allowed me to shed that mean girl shell of armor I was wearing that I had so thoroughly needed to outgrow. If these things resonate with you, I do have some pieces of advice.
Speak from your personal values 100% of the time. That means defining your personal values first, not just accepting what you think is valuable you’ve been told by others. Once I grew the maturity to understand I needed my own life values, it was very simple to grasp that I was not in line with them. My top 5 personal life values are: love, equity, humor, loyalty, and open communication. Mean jokes don’t check many of those boxes.
Become your own best friend first. My behaviors were driven by self-hatred I did not choose. When I choose how I want to feel about myself, I choose self-compassion, and I actively cultivate this mentality and practice all. the. time so that I don’t backslide.
Stop “telling it like it is.” This is not helpful. No one needs something obvious and cruel pointed out. This is basic “THINK” acronym stuff. It’s a classic because it works. Is what you’re about to say…. “true, helpful, inspiring, necessary, kind.” Telling it like it is is only TRUE, it’s rarely -HINK.
Never “just joke” about something someone could possibly be vulnerable about. If someone has a physical wound, you don’t jab your finger into it for fun. When someone has an emotional tenderness, you similarly don’t jab a mean comment into it. When in doubt, just don’t joke about it.
Have actual hard conversations and “call outs” in the right times/spaces. Sometimes behavior that one friend may call “mean” is actually a very necessary hard conversation to the other person. So it’s helpful to just remember that those kind of real-deal communications are rarely done effectively or productively with an audience or by using humor. Real shit deserves a real shit tone.
Push yourself to say the nicest stuff and just be fucking sincere and genuine. Tell your friends you love them. Tell your friends when you are obsessed with what they are achieving/doing/saying. Tell your friends WHAT you love about them. Make an effort for your most important relationships to have far, far more “positive bids” than negative.
Use “teasing” or “self deprecating” humor selectively and strategically. Sometimes, my partner and I DO tease each other by having open communication and actually knowing one another’s boundaries, I now understand what’s fine and what’s not. So I can proceed w/o hurting him. But I don’t know most people to that level, so I’m not going to try to tease someone else in front of others w/o that knowledge anymore. Self deprecating humor has also been a go-to for me in the past and one of the people I could be meanest to was myself. I realized I should use it sparingly with people who I don’t know well, too, because I don’t necessarily need to give them a cheat sheet to what my baggage is. And lastly, in general, I think that we should ALL be very very careful to spare strangers our sarcasm, deadpan comments, or whatever. Many folks are neurodiverse or otherwise don’t get your sarcasm and your implications can be lost in translation. You never know what topics, with strangers, might be a hornet’s nest you stumble into.
You can use your teasing super power to tease people about compliments and kind things! That sounds like, “oh wow you’re REALLY gonna just walk in here looking THAT attractive?” to your partner or your bestie when they’re all gussied up. Or “how dare you make such an excellent document” to a coworker.
Weaponize your meanness against the evil. It’s always ok to fuck up a Nazi, TERF, or fascist 😂
PFEW! Ok, I think that’s plenty for now! If you’ve got similar tips or thoughts, LMK! Of course, I still fuck up my practice of not being mean all the time, but the best thing about having done this work and shared it with those around me is that my friends are much more like to say something like, “OW! Was that your dad talking for a sec?” and help me than to just go on assuming I’m an asshole. 😆