Like, at one point i was giving peer support to a woman with severe depression who was having difficulty in her job at a grocery store. No one liked her, she said, because she wasn’t “perky” like the Not depressed people.
After some discussion it became clear that when people tried to small talk with her, she would talk about her mother having died five years ago and she was never the same since.
She understood that people were uncomfortable because she was not, like, saying random boring shit about the weather, or being cheerful. But she believed very strongly that she should not have to act like a non depressed person, so when someone said “hi how are you” she should give an honest answer.
It upset her greatly that she had trouble advancing in her job, and she felt strongly that this was ableist, because people expected her to act as if she were not depressed.
I disagreed, because I understood her plight, but unfortunately part of working in a store is presenting a specific demeanor even if it is not how you feel. That is not a good thing—hell, “emotional labor” was coined to describe THIS EXACT THING and how taxing it is!—but it is also not a thing that one individual is going to change.
I can’t speak to other people’s opinions, but when I say that some people seem stuck in a way that is unhelpful, and seem to present “stuck” as “being true to being disabled,” this is the kind of thing I mean.
I’m not saying everyone can get unstuck. I don’t think this individual actually could, for example. But I am saying that people like this telling other people how they should act makes me uneasy, because I think people like this are missing something important.
There also feels, to me, like there is an important distinction between “greeting customers with a curt nod instead of a perky hello” and “telling random grocery store people the full personal story of my mother’s death”.
And I don’t know which of these your Cashier lady was wishing to be able to do, but I’ve seen equivalently different situations conflated by people around here.
She wanted to be able to “be honest,” which for her meant talking openly about her depression with everyone she interacted with. I tried to explain to her that that was too intimate a topic for a grocery checkout line, but she was, basically, convinced it was ableist to EVER expect her to “act NT.”
I understood how she felt but that was… not the hill to die on.
Sort of tangential here, but I am really uncomfortable with cultural pushes toward “honesty” and “authenticity”. I’m all for not having to feel like you’re living a lie, but I’ve watched “come out to fight stigma” turn into “if you hide anything you must have internalized -isms”. So much of blogging and even a lot of journalism has such a confessional bent, and I almost wonder if attitudes like that lady’s are a by-product of that?
Like, people will share the most incredibly personal stories on social media and get praised for their “honesty”, which really rubs me wrong as a descriptor. It’s not dishonest to keep some things private! You’re not LYING by not telling the world every squishy secret! The word you’re looking for is “intimacy”, which can be a virtue, but it’s not the same as honesty. And yet so many people have conflated them that I wonder if that’s the motivator in a lot of these cases.
Oh, my god, someone finally said it. The expectation of performative vulnerability makes me so goddamn uncomfortable.
(I’m also somewhat ambivalent about the way ‘emotional labor’ gets used in these contexts; like, I’m an awkward introvert with a public-facing job, and it isn’t really that taxing for me to be like… civil and helpful to my patrons. When you’re expected to tolerate abuse with a smile, or offer significant emotional engagement and support–which, ironically, it sounds like this woman was after–that’s different. But ‘don’t dump all your emotional problems on random strangers making small talk’ just seems like basic manners to me.)
Agree.
I understand that it’s hard for people who have issues with social cues to magically divine that the proper answer to “how are you” is “fine, thank you.” I had a rough time grokking it myself! And sometimes I just don’t want to say it, so I just say “oh hi name” instead or something, which generally goes over fine.
But i also wonder: if you’re an adult… why is that massively burdensome, once you know what people are looking for? Say it, roll your eyes internally, go home, and complain about NT rituals to your buddies.
I do a lot of little social stuff like that purely because it puts people at ease, and when they are at ease, interacting with them is massively less unpleasant and sometimes even fun.
I am probably going to get called an ableist witch for this, but… interaction is a two way street and not every compromise is a burden.
Also, I can almost guarantee that your example woman wouldn’t have been happy if the people she was telling about her mother’s tragic death brushed it off or displayed no sympathy.
She wasn’t asking for the space to be honest about not feeling well. If that were the case, she could answer “How are you?” with “I’m feeling about normal.” She was, whether she realized it or not, expecting emotional support from every random stranger she came across.
That is not cool, NT or not.
Yes, she absolutely was doing that, and burned through a lot of the support she was getting from people because any time we tried to tell her that was too personal, her response was basically that sure, nondepressed people can talk without getting personal, but she has a disability so she shouldn’t be expected to communicate in the way others want.
It was… exhausting even for me, and I try very very hard not to be “staffish.”
I also don’t like that kind of small talk (I’m not in a work where that’s expected), but even if you want to be honest and consider it deceitful to say you’re fine, there’s no need to go out of your way to overshare.
If you want to go for a light tone without lying you could try some neutral not-too-snarky jokes like “uuh that’s a hard one…next question?” or “sorry, that’s top secret info”, but if you’re not in the mood for it or your customer is not much of a jokester, you can just say “oh I’ve had better days” and leave it at that, shrug or redirect the conversation or otherwise discreetly brush it off.
Tbh as someone who is mentally ill myself I really would not be comfortable with someone if every interaction with them was like that (remember the high empathy thing? Yeah, that doesn’t help), particularly if it’s the kind of person that you just end up feeling helpless about because nothing you do or say seems to help. It’s really distressing and mentally fatiguing in the long run.
Oh, I have a coworker like this. Everything is about her “broken back” and her latest surgery, and how rough her life is. Usually liberally sprinkled with profanity.
She shares intimate details about her life with everyone and has no filter. It’s exhausting just being around her. I also have high empathy, so it affects me more than most.
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