The "Right Headspace" Fallacy

It speaks to the petty, mean-spirited nature of the internet that two pieces of advice from Twitter recently went viral and attracted an enormous amount of attention not because they contain wise counsel people could learn from but rather because they’re so singularly smarmy and fake that they demand to be passed around and cruelly mocked. 

Both of these tweets offer advice on a very real dilemma: how do you stand up for yourself and establish clear, real boundaries with messy, emotionally needy friends who demand too much of your time and energy without hurting their feelings? 

First a woman named Melissa A. Fabello offered the following template as an example of how you can respond to someone if you don’t have the space to support them:

“Hey! I’m so glad you reached out. I’m actually at capacity / helping someone else who’s in crisis / dealing with some personal stuff right now, and I don’t think I can hold appropriate space for you. Could we connect [later date or time] instead / Do you have someone else you could reach out to?”

As you might imagine, the internet had a fucking field day with this suggestion. There’s something inherently creepy and wrong about literally reading a canned response from a script when someone you ostensibly consider a friend reaches out to you on a nakedly emotional level in a time of crisis. 

The well-intentioned but phenomenally shitty advice was roasted and spoofed and made into memes.

The antiseptic language of the template only adds to the sense that it was created not for empathetic human beings who find themselves overwhelmed by the neediness and demands of friends but rather for robots who want to avoid emotional entanglements altogether, and don’t mind coming off as cold to the point of sociopathic in the process. 

Then, as is invariably the case, someone came along with even worse advice. Because the world wide web cannot run ENTIRELY on angry woman yelling at cat memes, the twitter account @YanaBirt entered the fray to say, “I just wanna say y’all dump information on your friends at the wrong time without their consent. If you know something that could hurt them, ask permission before you decide to be messy, please” before proposing the following response:

“Are you in the right headspace to receive information that could possibly hurt you?”

This bit of advice received about the same reception as the one about being at being unable to respond in a human way due to being at “capacity” emotionally. 

People pointed out that being told that information exists that could hurt you is generally a million times more terrifying than just being told the potentially hurtful information. 

I should know. For the last three or four years whenever I found myself in a position to receive information that could possibly hurt me, like, I dunno, opening my emails at the start of the day, or waking up in the morning, or existing in the universe, my brain, my stupid, stupid, endlessly self-sabotaging brain has thoughtfully asked me, “Nathan, my delicate, delicate little flower, my fragile little snowflake, are you in the right headspace right now to receive information that could possibly hurt you?” 

And every single fucking time the other part of my stupid brain replied, “Thanks for asking! I am NOT now in the right headspace to receive information that could possibly hurt me so let’s put off receiving that information until we’re in a better place emotionally, which, to be fair, could very well never happen, like, literally, at any point.”

In the recent past I have given myself permission to never address shit that might cause me pain out of an understandable fear of getting hurt. 

Because life is full of information that could possibly hurt you, particularly if you make an uncertain living as a full time pop culture freelance writer and website proprietor, as I do. It’s full of rejected pitches and cancelled columns and bad news and websites either shutting down completely or changing in ways that make everyone’s life harder. 

I let that shit control me for too long. I was afraid that the world was full of Pandora’s boxes and that if I peeked inside I would unleash all the evil in the world, or at least uncover some shit that would seriously fuck with my fragile sense of self. 

Then I finally went into online therapy and started confronting all the shit I’d let slide out of a reasonable if ultimately counter-productive fear that I did not have the emotional resources to handle particularly bad news.

I don’t ask myself if I’m in the right headspace to receive information that might hurt me anymore.  Instead I open those emails and messages and deal with the reality, which is seldom as terrifying or apocalyptic as my fears make them out to be. 

Deal with shit as it comes. The world is less scary and overwhelming if you don’t spend your life running away from ghosts and demons and ugliness that might exist only in your own mind. 

Also, if a real friend REALLY needs you, maybe you should be thinking about how you can be there for them and not how you can blow them off with the least possible strain or hassle. 

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