I swear, I swear I am trying to work. I have been trying for three whole days. But you see, everyone is talking about the backlash when you are stalked, and the harassment women deal with every day, and crowdfunding rape guides, and fear. Another friend called for a racist, misogynist, threatening filth of a person to be expelled from our professional organization for flagrantly breaking its rules to promote racist, misogynist, threat-filth, and has been getting hate mail ever since about “my command of the English language, my religion, my ethnicity, and my nationality”.
More than one (more than one!) of my friends and colleagues are, this week, trying to leave an abusive spouse who runs good odds of hurting them. I am afraid for my friends. I am furious over the sheer insistence of some people on being awful to other people.
I absolutely, positively hate the fact that I have started to look at my boyfriend with a thin, desperate gratitude. Oh god thank you that you are not this, that you do not do this are not this. I told him this. And I told him how I hated it. And he winced, because he hated it too.
The story I have to write for July 1st is a happy, joyful story. And I just can’t, y’know?
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There is a reason this blog is called The Way Forward Machine. It’s a stupid pun, yeah, but it’s also a deeply held belief: That what I want to spend my efforts on is finding ways forward. That fighting entropy is our earthly duty. That you work with an eye to build, not destroy, no matter the hell what, and leave the place better than you found it.
And so, in my thoroughgoing despair, I want to talk about what it is to listen.
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On the whole, as someone who’s spoken, held silent, watched, listened to double handfuls of online discussion about the rough injustice we live in, and how we might find ways out of that mess, there is a recurring theme. People show up — people who are not in the direct blast radius of sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, hate, etc. and always — and largely do not know what to do. They speak about how it’s a problem for this other group too, or give their opinion, or generally step all over toes. And then they get their faces bitten off, and everyone leaves bitter and exhausted and unhappy and having built nothing at all.
Every time, whether it’s in anger, exhaustion, patience, or sadness, they are exhorted to just listen.
The English language is very cool because of all the things it can express, but there are things it also obscures. Listening is one. Listening, active and real listening, is a complicated act.
I do not know if anyone in my line of sight has ever talked about how.
From what I know of it, here is how to listen.
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1) Read the words, and read them again. Read them carefully.
2) You may feel defensive, or hurt, or stung. This is all right. These are emotional topics for good reasons. What people do when we talk productively about racism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia, ableism, hate, etc. is we grow ourselves up, inch by inch, together. And if it’s been too long to remember, growing up always aches.
3) Listening means not rebutting or arguing or putting a stake in the conversation while you are defensive, hurt, or stung. This is not because your opinions, your thoughts, your life is unvalued; or because a conversation is an echo chamber which doesn’t want to think about you. This is because when we are defensive, hurt, or stung, we are not kind or generous to other people, and do ourselves and each other serious disservices.
4) Yes, other people might Mad and Internet. But the only choices you can make are your own, and that thing your mother told you about the other kids and the jumping off a cliff, and we are here to talk about not how to argue, but how to listen.
5) That thing about your choices is why you don’t have to and shouldn’t really argue with people who are talking about their experiences of prejudice and discrimination. Because you have your choices. You will get to choose, in your private head and in your everyday interactions, how you treat the information this person’s giving you, and how you act. Your life is ever yours. So’s the power over it.
6) What listening does mean, in that place where you are defensive, hurt, and stung, is thinking past that reaction. This thing that person’s talking about; they didn’t make it up. (Always, always assume they didn’t make it up, because people on the whole don’t.) So it must be somewhere, lurking, where you can’t see it yet. Start watching: Do you see it on the street? Do you see it in people you know? Do you see it on TV?
7) Do you see it in yourself?
8) This will be hard.
9) It is not the hardest part.
10) Maybe you do see it. But you have reasons (and this hurts, this hurts, this is bullshit and why are those people making me do this?). What are your reasons? Can you explain them, deep down, in your own words? Ask yourself, like Elmyra from Tiny Toon Adventures: Why? Why? Why? Question your reasons. See if they stand up. See if they would satisfy you if it was someone else giving those reasons.
11) If they don’t, if they land in a puddle of mixed logic and sputtering because! and do not ask me any more questions!, you may have to do something about it.
12) This is the hard part.
13) I know this because I, who am very careful with the things I say and how they affect others, have fucked up big. More than once.
14) More than twice.
15) Remember this is not the end of the world. People will still look you in the eye. People will respect you more, in fact, if you face that instead of avoiding it, because it bespeaks integrity. We are built to adapt. We are supposed to change in the face of experience.
16) Having thought a thing that doesn’t hold up under scrutiny does not make you a Bad Person. That notion is largely bullshit: there are people, and they do good or bad things, and that is all. This makes you a person who is growing yourself up, one inch at a time, like all the other people in the world, and the best reaction to being less than you could is to be more.
17) Think about those things you do, and start to change them. Think about what you could do differently, even if it’s small, that will let you ask yourself Why do I do this? and give you a good answer. One that leaves better things behind it; ones that build. Because listen means, deep down, when someone is in a shitty and walled-in place, do something.
18) Go back, and read the words. You will be fascinated by how they look different, look deeper, even though the thing they are saying has not changed.
19) Maybe you will hate the speaker a little for the saying of them; for wrenching your life out of the predictable orbit and setting you on the course to doing a hard thing. I think that can be all right too, insofar as you don’t take that out on them. The important thing is that your legs grew. The important thing is that you listened.
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This is everything I know about how to listen. I hope it helps you. And I hope, if you have other thoughts on this, that you will share them.
The Way Forward Machine 