The Importance of Healthy Discussions
“Whenever someone tells me that I am being too sensitive, I feel like a nose who’s being lectured by a fart. Yeah, not the problem.”
— Hannah Gadsby, ‘Nanette’.
This joke by Gadsby was widely circulated and shared in the ‘liberal’ circles of social media. It is definitely funny, but hints at a much bigger problem. Recently, there has been a wave of people wrongly using the concept of emotional labour. This has seriously harmed the culture of engaging with each other, having healthy discussions and learning together. You are a young college-going individual going through the same dilemma — how to learn in a world which refuses to engage and takes offense whenever you say a deeply upsetting thing. How can you learn without triggering and upsetting people? You miss the simpler times when the term ‘emotional labour’ was only used to fight against the emotional exploitation of people in the service industry. Now, it is used as an excuse whenever a well-meaning person wants to engage in a discussion about issues they want to simply learn about. How is emotionally exploiting employees and saying disturbing things about someone’s trauma the same thing? How is simply educating other people about personal and possibly traumatic things labour of any form?
Your curiosity is regularly dismissed with condescension because apparently it’s your own job to educate yourself about questions that can be swiftly answered through the Internet and easily accessible books. You see people walking away from conversations saying that they ‘do not have the energy for it’ when they do not agree with something. Even in courses on gender, violence, and war, people often walk out of classes or refuse to respond to a point made by a peer on grounds of ‘protecting themselves.’ On social media too, you see a trend of people straight-up blocking people whose opinions and posts they do not agree with, just because they are upset and triggered by them. Why is it so hard to simply not claim that you have lived experiences, instead of claiming it and then refusing to engage? How tough is it to just spend one’s entire day educating other people about important things on social media? The laziness and unwillingness to learn from each other is baffling, frustrating, and greatly hinders your personal growth and learning.
Another thing — and possibly the worst thing — that having or not having such discussions can lead to for both of you, is them having to revisit unfortunate memories and so shying away from the discourse, which could seriously hinder your process of learning. It might be difficult (and your woke self acknowledges that in every political science paper) but it is always the moral responsibility of the oppressed to teach the world about their oppression. Their experiences are of course unfortunate, but are, more importantly, an opportunity to learn — for your scholarly research, debating, and MUNs. And, of course, crucial for a strong social media presence. You deserve to learn and you deserve to be taught. And your education always comes before someone’s well-being.
When you demand healthy discussions, you conveniently never consider the health and well-being of the person explaining their trauma. Healthy discussions are healthy only when you come out of it realising that you were right all along! After all, these conversations do lead to a healthy mind eventually, so the short term effects like an emotional breakdown should not be seen as reason enough to shy away from them. At the end of the discussion, it is also extremely important to appreciate yourself for at least being tolerant enough to hear opposing views, unlike your overly sensitive counterpart. Living in a world which continuously calls you apathetic is hard and you should never let go of an opportunity to appreciate yourself. It is extremely unfortunate that your privilege of not being oppressed has snatched you of your privilege of learning about oppression.
People who refuse to engage because of their experiences make the baffling assumption that they are the only ones who could be possibly hurt in these discussions. What they do not consider is that it is also extremely intimidating to see someone getting annoyed, screaming, or even crying when all you are trying to do is learn. It is ridiculous to be called apathetic when you are actually trying to build your empathy by asking them detailed questions and countering their lived experiences with your facts. It is, actually, anti-intellectual to take offense when you are only trying to learn how to evaluate their emotions with facts. A lot of times, the other side gets extremely worked up and inarticulate, making it difficult to face and therefore an unsuitable atmosphere for learning. Again, your woke self understands that it is personal to them but they have to look at the bigger aim of these conversations at the end. You are ready to go face all these uncomfortable situations because unlike them, you actually want to learn.
You want people to learn and find friends beyond people who agree with them. After all, how hard could having these healthy discussions and finding common grounds between the two extreme sides be? We could definitely find a common ground between believing whether certain minorities should exist or not. Or whether abuse is completely unjustified or maybe the survivor did actually make some mistakes? In the end, what people need to realise is that you are only humanizing people. You believe that by promoting a culture of making healthy discussions a priority, you are trying to get people to humanize other people, try to understand both sides and not be disruptive. Probably one day, you will understand that you are telling them to choose oppression over disruption.
