“Alain de Botton on Love, Vulnerability, and the Psychological Paradox of the Sulk”
“Sulking pays homage to a beautiful, dangerous ideal that can be traced back to our earliest childhoods: the promise of wordless understanding. In the womb, we never had to explain. Our every requirement was catered to. The right sort of comfort simply happened. Some of this idyll continued in our first years. We didn’t have to make our every requirement known: large, kind people guessed for us. They saw past our tears, our inarticulacy, our confusions: they found the explanations for discomforts which we lacked the ability to verbalize.
That may be why, in relationships, even the most eloquent among us may instinctively prefer not to spell things out when our partners are at risk of failing to read us properly. Only wordless and accurate mind reading can feel like a true sign that our partner is someone to be trusted; only when we don’t have to explain can we feel certain that we are genuinely understood.”
A friend shared this with me after listening to the audiobook (which she strongly recommends) and I’ve been living with the message for a week or so now and I’ve been thinking about it a lot. In particular, I’m thinking about the times when I am being sulky about my need for the people around me to recognize my pain when black people are killed for triggering white fear.
The week that I am writing this reflection is the week after Philandro Castro and Alton Sterling were shot by police and my newsfeed filled with people all over the country and the world sharing the videos and sharing news and sharing articles and sharing their personal reactions and processing and thoughts and support for each other and it was a very heady space that was at times healing and at times traumatic and I realized very quickly that my habit in times like this is to bury myself in these online spaces and express myself on them while hiding from the people I share daily, physical space with.
This is partially because it isn’t really emotionally safe for me to be open and vulnerable with my feelings in my work spaces which have been predominantly (if not exclusively) white and privileged and where no one talks about “uncomfortable” politics and where my grief and alienation and frustration would, I fear, at best be met with uncomfortable silence and at worst with a silencing populist/mainstream #AllLivesMatter dismissal that would label me a workplace outcast.
And my mostly-white friend group isn’t necessarily more prepared to sense and react to my feelings and pain. As I’ve come into my blackness, I’ve found myself still softening my identify when I’m with my non-black friends in the assumption that if they can’t see it already then they won’t be good people to communicate with about race. And with their failure to support me (a failure which I have in part engineered), I begin to feel resentful and aggressively, exhaustingly isolated.
In sum, I always go into a sulk. I am trying harder to tell people what is happening to me and to give them an opportunity to meet my expectations. And it isn’t necessarily getting me what I need, but it is clearing away that stress of secretiveness and I anticipate that it is helping my relationships to grow in the long term.
(Credit to DK)
