manipulative: “none of you give a shit about me”
not manipulative: “i’m depressed and i feel alone and i need someone to talk to”
manipulative: “nobody likes me so i’m going to kill myself”
not manipulative: “i’m feeling suicidal / considering suicide”
big difference, that! if someone’s doing the second and you treat them like they’re doing the first, they will not feel safe reaching out when they’re struggling.
people should not have to apologize for wanting their friends’ support. it’s cool to tell someone you don’t have time/energy to help them at the moment, but it’s not cool to make them feel guilty for reaching out. sometimes just five minutes of light reassurance can pull someone back from suicide, and you don’t know when that’s going to be.
so like. i know the pendulum’s in full counterswing, culturally, but take an extra sec before you fire off at the friend coming into in your inbox with an unsolicited declaration of their current emotional state, or you reblog that post about how everybody hates people who talk about their feelings on snapchat.
all these pushes to get rid of harmful behavior patterns are only useful if they recognize that people do these things for reasons. the reason people may not know where boundaries are or should be, might be that they simply lack the skill to tell. if they know better, but are desperate enough to foist their issues onto bystanders anyway, it’s likely they don’t have a safe outlet at all. if someone’s sadposting on their social media, it may mean they are actively trying to avoid directly burdening the few people they do trust, and are actually trying their best to both respect boundaries and have their needs met.
that doesn’t mean it’s your job then and there to help them, but it does mean kindness is more constructive than meanness.
coming back to “emotional labor”, that was invented to describe how men at large treat women at large like they exist as passive listeners for men’s free use. how customers will bend the barista’s ear for half an hour. how autistic women are forced to mask while autistic men receive excuses. how a husband comes home and tells his stay-at-home wife all about the bad day he had but doesn’t ask how hers was with all the housework and childcare, and expects her to be his reservoir ever full. caring about people or being asked to care about people or being asked to help people or listen to people is not inherently emotional labor. it can be, but it isn’t inherently.
“your friends are not your therapists” presupposes both access to capable therapists and the ability to benefit from their work without an unacceptable level of cost. worse, it presupposes the idea that the natural healthy state of a human is to be emotionally level and independent, and that deviations from this state can be reliably fixed by medical interference.
with both expressions, the original intent is sound, but the popular usage has warped something liberating into something used to further isolate and marginalize vulnerable people, especially neurodivergent people.
the even exchange of energy between people is at the root of human well-being. nothing about us is solitary by nature. we run out of energy for others and ourselves because of the situations we are forced to live in. withdrawing is not the solution. more compassion is.
if you complain about people you call friends hitting you up when they feel low, reconsider what the meaning of friendship is to you. think about whether you yourself ever feel the need to reach out and what you do when that happens. if you always go to your therapist with your problems, imagine how it might be for someone who has never felt understood by mental health professionals or can’t afford them or who have been abused by them in the past, to be told they need to find a therapist before bothering any of their friends with their feelings. imagine how much more alone that would make you feel. imagine how that might worsen a suicidal episode or retraumatize someone who has attachment issues from neglect.
it’s right to call out someone who exhibits a pattern of unfairly making demands on others’ energy without offering anything back. it’s right to shut down someone who backs their requests for closeness with implicit guilt. it’s not right to make a person feel guilty simply for being open about their emotional and mental state. especially if you fucking asked how they are in the first place. or if you’ve ever told them they can come to you when they need a friend.
all i’m saying is i have seen some people be downright evil to people who are suffering deeply and need help, under the guise of protecting their own energy.
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