ableism – Pith Rant

Happiness is an Inside Job

Content note: ableism, transphobia, racism

[A light pink rectangle with a blue and teal decorative floral pattern at the top. The black sanserif text says, ‘Happiness is an inside job. Don’t assign anyone else that much power over your life. -Mandy Hale’ This actual quote is attributed to Mandy Hale. At the bottom of the rectangle, there is a blue-gray bar with a white image and white text. The image is on the left side, and is a logo that appears to be an abstract rendering of leaves with a circle around them, with possibly a sun or moon – a smaller circle floating above the leaves. The text says “Barbara Vercruysse” in a script font, and then “Start the Life of Your Dreams” in a sanserif font beneath.]

I Googled Barbara so you don’t have to.

On one hand, this woman is just doing her thing and living her life. In this economy, we all gotta get paid.

On the other hand, she’s a rich white lady who pays her bills by reassuring other rich white people that everyone is personally, individually responsible for their own ability to thrive.

I kind of wanted to see how much she charges for her services so I clicked on “shop,” thinking that it would include information about how to book a session or begin a wellness journey.

It’s an actual shop with products, though.

Her shop is called “Barbara’s Empire of Love.”

Among other things, you can purchase inspiration cards, a daily success journal, and a gratitude journal.

They’re branded with pink flowers – cherry blossoms, I think.

I eventually did find information about courses you can enroll in, and unsurprisingly, they aren’t cheap.

There’s a baseline assumption on her site that it’s not going to put you out significantly to spend $50 (which was approximately the conversion rate from British pounds to US dollars at the time of my Googling) on a spiral-bound planner.

I think she means well enough, in her Barbara way.

But as a generally well-meaning white cis woman myself, I recognize that “meaning well” doesn’t cut the mustard when it comes to actions that inflict real harm.

And I contend that there is real harm in profiting off of the message that one can choose to not be affected by adverse social conditions.

As is always the case here at Pith Rant, there are more generous interpretations available for the messages I feature.

I also recognize that the actual quote is attributed to Mandy Hale, and was only shared by Barbara Vercruyess, but Babs or a fan of Babs decided to add her stamp of approval to that message and promote it via social media, so we’ll leave Mandy alone for now.

I acknowledge that many viewers of this message and my response may think, “But I think it just means…” or “What about…”

And I have heard those concerns.

And I’m sticking to my angry metaphorical guns.

To wit:

By acknowledging that systemic racism is a thing, one isn’t “assigning power” to racists.

By recognizing the existence of heteronormativity, one isn’t “assigning power” to the straights, and observing that pervasive transphobia permits medical malpractice to flourish is not the same as “assigning power” to transphobic doctors.

It sucks, but these people already have power.

Racists who write laws that get passed are exerting the power they have to propagate white supremacist beliefs.

Homophobes who refuse to issue marriage licenses to same sex couples are reaching for any power they can grasp to prevent Big Gay Weddings.

Doctors who ignore their patients’ pronouns are reminding their trans or nonbinary patients that powerful institutions can choose to deny them security, protection, and/or comfort.

Messages like the one on display here absolutely prop up logic like:

“It’s their own fault if they let people treat them that way; I sure wouldn’t let someone control my life like that.”

The thing is:

Assholes.

Have.

Power.

Assholes tend to seek power.

They treat people shittily, and it has shitty consequences.

This does not mean that it’s therefore fine for directly affected folks (and also less directly affected folks – hi there, you’re not exempt!) to give up and acquiesce to injustice simply because hierarchical power structures create exploitable situations.

It means that it’s ridiculous to suggest that an individual can simply think and feel their way beyond a deeply entrenched social pattern that informs the actions of people who are, in fact, relatively powerful.

I do not mean that it is impossible for marginalized folx to be happy or successful as long as powerful assholes exist.

I mean that it’s okay to recognize that broad institutional support and the absence of naked aggression makes happiness easier and more sustainable.

So, yes.

Happiness is an inside job.

Because people who have power and influence over important structures that shape your life don’t necessarily care about your happiness.

They will not seek it for you. They will not lift a finger on behalf of your actual happiness. So in that sense, it is indeed up to you to find and protect your own happiness.

The part of the quote that I am fighting against is the idea that you’ve let someone take advantage of your circumstances in order to disenfranchise you.

If you’re rich enough to be preoccupied by the perfection of your own pursuit of happiness, you probably are exerting power over someone else’s life in a way that limits their access to the kind of stability that enables happiness.

I had a separate post going for this second macro, but it’s helpful to see them together:

A vertical rectangle with a solid green background on the top half and a solid purple background on the bottom half. The top half, with the green background, has an oval shape that appears to have abstract green, purple, and yellow are in it. The serif text changes color - the first two words are magenta, and appear on the green half, and the rest of the words are white and appear over the purple background. The message says, "My happy thoughts help create my healthy body." I apparently didn't save any information about the creator or sharer of this one, but as you'll see in the blog post below, there are many instantiations available. — [A vertical rectangle with a solid green background on the top half and a solid purple background on the bottom half. The top half, with the green background, has an oval shape that appears to have abstract green, purple, and yellow are in it. The serif text changes color – the first two words are magenta, and appear on the green half, and the rest of the words are white and appear over the purple background. The message says, “My happy thoughts help create my healthy body.” I apparently didn’t save any information about the creator or sharer of this one, but as you’ll see in the blog post below, there are many instantiations available.]

As though people with “unhealthy” bodies just didn’t remember to think the right way about their genetic and physiological makeup.

As though people with “unhealthy” bodies have allowed someone else to exert sufficient control over their minds that they are not able to make appropriately “healthy” thought choices of their own.

As though the existence of people who have, in fact, elected to put their own health and well-being on the back burner in order to pay bills for their families or prioritize the needs of others – thereby “choosing” an “unhealthy” body – somehow cancels out the existence or the rights of people who tried to take good care of their bodies but “failed.”

As though people can’t experience depression and mental illness at the same time as physical health.

I recognize that I’m using lots of black-and-white, either/or scenarios, but that’s really what this breed of macro encourages.

This second macro tries to soften its message with the word “help,” but I guarantee the other version exists (“My happy thoughts create my healthy body”).

(I actually Googled the sentence without the word “help,” but it still turned up variations of this exact same quote with different backgrounds. Elsewhere, the actual quote is attributed to one Louise Hay.)

To conclude:

Happiness is sure nice, and it’s good to feel happy sometimes.

There are lots of other feelings to experience, though. Sometimes happiness isn’t as valuable as discomfort, even if nice white ladies want you to embrace your personal happiness as an ultimate and all-consuming goal.

People who seek power over your life often suck (including those who want the power to remind you how happy you should be all the time), so it’s up to you to remember to connect with your own happiness.

No one has the right to take your happiness away from you, but shitty people are going to keep trying, regardless of whether or not you’ve given permission. That is, you are not “giving” or “assigning” anyone power by acknowledging that your needs are at odds with their wants.

Sometimes it’s best to ignore these people, but sometimes you can’t ignore the consequences of their behaviors (I write from America in the year 2022 where the right to abortion is no longer protected by the constitution).

Your mental and physical health can absolutely inform and interact with one another in a range of fascinating ways, but thoughts aren’t magic.

Health (in whatever way it manifests according to a vast array of different bodies and circumstances) promotes the ability to have and maintain happy thoughts.

That is, we will do better to increase “happiness” in the world by providing more and better health care for all people in all circumstances than we will by telling people that they are obligated to be happy in order to properly preserve their health.

Your own personal happiness may be an inside job, but don’t let smug assholes convince you that what’s on the outside doesn’t count.

The Stuff That Weighs You Down

A photoshopped or filtered photo with a heavily saturated warm pastel color palette, featuring little spindly pink flowers, an orange butterfly on the left of the image, and some kind of light-colored circles that may be out-of-focus dandelion fluff or dust or sunlight reflections. The gray serif font in the middle reads, "If you wanna fly, you gotta give up the stuff that weighs you down." It also attributes the work to a photograph, saying "Photo by Joel Olives" in a new, darker gray sanserif font at the bottom, and lists what is presumably the name of a site or company, "Butterflies and Pebbles," in a third sanserif font across the bottom of the entire image. — A photoshopped or filtered photo with a heavily saturated warm pastel color palette, featuring little spindly pink flowers, an orange butterfly on the left of the image, and some kind of light-colored circles that may be out-of-focus dandelion fluff or dust or sunlight reflections. The gray serif font in the middle reads, “If you wanna fly, you gotta give up the stuff that weighs you down.” It also attributes the work to a photograph, saying “Photo by Joel Olives” in a new, darker gray sanserif font at the bottom, and lists what is presumably the name of a site or company, “Butterflies and Pebbles,” in a third sanserif font across the bottom of the entire image.

I love how this image feels positively weightless!

It’s like how the world would look if gravity wasn’t even a thing!

But I mean, still more fun than outer space. There’s oxygen here.

Does it really matter whether this gentle universal message is being shared by a physically healthy and mentally/emotionally supported person with a solid 401K and too many possessions, or if it’s being shared by a physically disabled and mentally ill person who is not entirely confident from month to month that they will be able to pay for all the things that they rely on for survival?

I mean, they both still have baggage to unload.

But poor people just also have extra baggage to unload before they can responsibly think about something like flight, amirite?

Okay, I have to push “pause” on the sarcasm button because I’m less comfortable leaving this open to minor misinterpretation than usual.

The point of invoking disability and poverty in this example is NOT to suggest that you, dear reader of any ability or financial status, are expected to feel sorry for “those people” on account of how their existence is.

Nor is the point of invoking disability and poverty to imply that you ought to be more grateful for all that you have, because “it could all be taken away in an instant.”

I’m not invoking disability and poverty as an appeal to pathos, or as a very special lesson, or as a cautionary tale.

I am using these relevant examples because CONTEXT MATTERS.

Allow me to offer a brief, honest anecdote in the interest of developing a thematically appropriate metaphorical framework.

One fine spring morning, not so very many years ago, I paused as I was about to open the latch of my back door and step outside.

There was a sparrow on the top step. I held my breath and hoped I wouldn’t scare it away.

It was just a magical little moment.

I marveled at the confluence of circumstances that had brought me and this little bird together for such a brief time.

Then the sparrow pooped on my stoop and flew away.

Of course, in order to take flight, birds freely and routinely give up the stuff that’s weighing them down without any regard for the mess it leaves behind.

Just look at how fluffy this picture is.

It’s like all you’ll ever have to throw away is cotton balls and glitter.

I get that the macro is not meant to be taken entirely literally, and that it’s referring to, like, emotional weight and not necessarily physical things.

Trust me, I read that message loud and clear.

But this macro wants you to perceive the relationship between you and your troubles to be like the relationship between a cute little sparrow bird and the way in which it’s perfectly poised to evacuate meaningless excess because physics (e.g., gravity) and biology (e.g., evolution) have been collaborating for millennia to bolster its precious body.

In life, one charming li’l stoop sparrow poops and takes flight and goes home to its cozy bird house and 2.5 chicks, and another adorable li’l flutter bucket gets snagged by a hawk and its untended eggs get eaten by a weasel.

That’s nature for ya.

But that doesn’t leave room for all the other factors that need to be accounted for in this metaphor, tho. Like society.

animated gif from the ’90s movie “Billy Madison” (*which is definitely a terrible movie but it burned so many quotes int0 my brain)* of actor Adam Sandler saying “society” while doing air quotes with his fingers to explain a heavy-handed metaphor

Here’s where I’ll depart from any lingering evolutionary parallels, because social Darwinism is just racism, and we’re coming back around to the land of choices, folx.

You’ve got to be able to choose to let go of the things that are weighing you down in order for this macro to work.

If you can’t choose to let go of something that\’s holding you back, you don’t get to fly.

For many folx who have access to appropriate treatment for any conditions that they are managing, though, it isn’t those disabilities or illnesses that are weighing them down. The heaviest barrier is the people around them who don’t understand that they won’t “get better” or “try harder” than they already are.

For folx who live with the most unpleasant realities of poverty on the daily, it’s not an option to just “give up” being poor. I’m pretty sure that the majority of people living beneath whatever the poverty line is defined as in their own neck of the woods would like to give up on debt and exhaustion in exchange for a nice long flight (or metaphorical flight of their preference).

It’s the people clinging to a dysfunctional system because it’s not terrible for them that prevent the system from letting go of what’s weighing it down.

Sometimes the stuff that’s weighing you down the most is not, in fact, coming from inside the house.

I mean, still check in on what’s coming from inside the house.

Poop away, my little birdies.

You may need to learn to poop more freely and efficiently, like that unencumbered and dropping-optimized stoop sparrow, and of course it’s okay if you need to practice that kind of jettisoning.

I firmly believe that we all have metaphorical emotional pooping to do, and that there is no shame in admitting this.

Just be careful about letting go of so much of what you’re carrying inside that you forget who fed it to you in the first place.

It’s not necessarily your little birdie poops that are contaminating rivers and polluting the groundwater, eh?

That metaphor got grosser than I originally anticipated.

Sorry-not-sorry.

*Animated gif of actor Lucille Ball, in character as “Lucy,” shrugging broadly and and squinching her face in a “Whaddaya do?” kind of expression*

True Self-Care

Content Note: Animated Gif

Square image from quotecatalog.com with a cartoon piece of strawberry shortcake on a black background. The pink sans serif text reads, "True self-care is not salt baths and chocolate cake, it is making the choice to build a life you don't need to regularly escape from." -Brianna Wiest — Square image from quotecatalog.com with a cartoon piece of strawberry shortcake on a black background. The pink sans serif text reads, “True self-care is not salt baths and chocolate cake, it is making the choice to build a life you don’t need to regularly escape from.” -Brianna Wiest

People who are well-off enough to periodically reject some of the many comforts available to them at any given moment are good about weirdly moralizing other people’s inconsistent access to comfort, at least partly due to a complex combination of projection and rationalization.

I am leaving that rat-maze of a sentence there, and barreling on to the cheese at the end.

For some reason, I haven’t seen a macro that says, “Don’t weirdly moralize other people’s access to and use of comforts you assume are equally available for everyone to reject in the name of self-righteousness!”

The rest of the article that this quote was pulled from does account for the fact that hygiene and food are not necessarily bad forms of self-care, but someone’s choice to pull the quote from that context speaks for itself, too.

The other squiffy implication of the framing “…the choice to build a life you don’t need to regularly escape from” is that you, cake-eaters and bath-takers, are wholly responsible for the stressful conditions that exist elsewhere in the world.

Probably your own shortcomings created the context in which you are mired in an exasperating, unsupportive, and/or dehumanizing workplace and/or life situation.

The infrastructures behind those exploitative systems supported by your employer / government / family / etc. are irrelevant here.

“…the choice to build a life you don’t need to regularly escape from” is just code for “pull yourself up by your bootstraps.”

The implication that small indulgences are “lesser” forms of self-care is grounded in the warped mentality that suffering and denial are inherently noble.

You built your own hedonistic little prison out of minor indulgences! For shame.

ME: Fix my problems, cake!

CAKE: Nope, sorry – you did your life too wrong to get to want things that are nice!

ME: (SOB)

(NOMNOM)

(SOB)

Decadent bath cakes will only shield you from the harshness of reality for a little while, without addressing the real roots of your own inadequacies.

This macro is the decontextualized quote version of the Onion article “Local Woman Authority on What Shouldn’t Be in Poor People’s Shopping Carts.”

Animated gif of drag queen Latrice Royale fanning herself and saying, “Shade.”

I can’t stand the kind of petty assholes who judge the adequacy of another person’s argument based on adherence to arbitrary grammatical conventions. That is some classist nonsense.

But you know what?

I bet that the Venn diagram of “people who have shared this macro” and “people who pride themselves on correcting internet grammar” is barely two circles.

And so, I’ll go ahead. I’ll be petty right back. I can get pedantic about a rule that doesn’t really matter to me.

Show a semicolon some love, you independent clauses.

From a design perspective, who decided to use strawberry shortcake instead of chocolate, like in the quote?

“The background is black, so chocolate wouldn’t contrast,” you say?…

THE SAME PERSON WHO CHOSE THE GRAPHIC CHOSE THE BACKGROUND.

The creation of this image did not require a design team. Stick that in your back pocket.

Lastly, I feel like the point of the quote is to reject the value of the cake, because finding comfort in cake means that you hate your life so much that cake is an escape from it.

So if you loved your life more, you wouldn’t need to seek solace in, like, physical comfort.

Shouldn’t the picture be… I don’t know… not cake?

Being truly happy because of how right your choices always are is like eating cake in the tub all the time, but without the guilt of knowing that you shouldn’t be eating cake, because you actually aren’t.