Bad Day, Dark Night, Or Wretched World View?

In two months, I’ll end my term on the school board. These four years have been eventful in our school division, in some ways that are unique to Arlington and in other ways that will feel familiar nearly everywhere.

Over the past four years a lot has happened in my life outside the school board, too. My mother got sick with cancer and died. One member of my close family suffered a significant mental health crisis. Another was diagnosed with early onset dementia. I’ve been laid off twice. I very nearly lost a relationship with someone dear to me. I went through menopause.

It’s been the most difficult time of my life. I’m not sharing this to court pity; I know some of my board colleagues have shouldered their own sorrows and challenges, too. And I’m not suggesting that my school board work has been an additional burden. Actually, it has given me a sense of purpose and community that has been a balm.

I bring it up because these difficult experiences remind me that quite often, we don’t know what’s going on in other people’s lives.

When people seek me out as a school board member, sometimes they are not calm or kind. It’s sometimes tempting to write them off or refuse to engage until they can be more level-headed. I’m uncomfortable, however, with this idea that constituents have to conform to my definition of “level-headed” or “reasonable” or “respectful”. I’m acutely aware that there’s already a power imbalance: I make decisions that feel incredibly consequential when you’re a parent worried about your child or a staff member wanting to do your very best work.
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Outside of the issue at hand, these people are often juggling other worries. I’ve learned that the Department of Government Efficiency eliminated their spouse’s job. Or they’ve lost extended family in a war-torn country halfway around the world. Their son has relapsed after rehab. (All real examples.) They are, like all of us at one time or another, in a dark night of the soul.

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​I met Dylan Marron in the first of the two jobs I lost while on the school board. Dylan taught an online course I produced called “How to Connect in a Divided World". He is something of an expert on this subject, having hosted an award-winning podcast called “Conversations With People Who Hate Me”. He reached out to people who had trolled him online, asked if they’d be open to a phone call, and invited them into a conversation. I encourage you to check it out.

Dylan suggests that when you encounter someone who seems like an asshat (my word, not his), you come up with one or two backstories about that person’s day or week or month. What might be fueling their anger or impatience? It’s a great way to move towards curiosity and compassion instead of judgment and retaliatory ill will.

​Dylan also suggests that the rules of engagement shouldn’t center on whether we think the other person is respectful or level-headed. Rather, it’s about whether we feel like we’ll be physically and emotionally safe if we interact.

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​These ideas and practices help me through most of the difficult encounters I have, inside and outside my school board life. But sometimes I wonder—and increasingly, lately—how much compassion and understanding I should summon for someone who is not making me feel physically or emotionally unsafe, but whose opinions or actions make life feel unsafe for others.

During the 2018-2019 school year when I led a local education nonprofit, my organization sponsored a monthly series for DC high school students called “Speak Truth”. Students from across DC’s public and private schools gathered to discuss topics they identified were important to them. One month, they talked about belonging and inclusion.

A student at Georgetown Day School shared that he felt like an outsider because he was a political conservative in what he experienced as an overwhelmingly liberal school community. He wondered whether those on the left who championed inclusion could actually include people on the right.

A DACA student from Dunbar High School responded, “There is this idea of inclusion, and there is also a more basic right to exist. I can include anyone until they deny my right to exist.”

Her statement stuck with me. Someone’s right to exist. Their ability to access the same opportunities and protections that are available to others.
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This goes beyond someone having a bad day, or a dark night of the soul, and not being the best version of themselves as they interact with others: it’s about creating the conditions that make others unsafe or define them as less than human. And it’s not exclusively a conservative thing or a liberal thing: it’s a close-minded, power-hoarding thing, an ungenerous and zero-sum view of humanity.

​For a long time, I wasn’t sure what to do with this, what it meant for me in my interactions with other humans. I’m still not entirely sure I know. But I lean towards the idea that engagement is still the answer. (If safety is not at stake.)  In his TED Talk, Dylan said:

Now in every one of my calls, I always ask my guests to tell me about themselves. And it's their answer to this question that allows me to empathize with them. And empathy, it turns out, is a key ingredient in getting these conversations off the ground, but it can feel very vulnerable to be empathizing with someone you profoundly disagree with. So I established a helpful mantra for myself. Empathy is not endorsement. Empathizing with someone you profoundly disagree with does not suddenly compromise your own deeply held beliefs and endorse theirs. Empathizing with someone who, for example, believes that being gay is a sin doesn't mean that I'm suddenly going to drop everything, pack my bags and grab my one-way ticket to hell, right? [Dylan is gay.] It just means that I'm acknowledging the humanity of someone who was raised to think very differently from me ….

​I'm also aware that this talk will appear on the internet. And with the internet comes comment sections, and with comment sections inevitably comes hate. So as you are watching this talk, you can feel free to call me whatever you'd like. You can call me a "gaywad," a "snowflake," a "cuck," a "beta," or "everything wrong with liberalism." But just know that if you do, I may ask you to talk. And if you refuse or block me automatically or agree and hang up on me, then maybe, babe, the snowflake is you.