Part 2: What is Support
This is not about what you think it's about!
Before I begin, thank you so much to everyone who has turned on paid subscriptions in the past few weeks! It means a lot to me that these essays, which I write in my free time outside of my career and my family, provide value you to in any way, and I see and appreciate you each!
If you missed the last letter, this series is about a “spring cleaning” of my habits in an effort to organize and edit my brain while it’s on fire, in contrast to the series I wrote last year around this time about the way I approach organizing and editing my wardrobe. My last dispatch was about how I try to narrow down the immense, unruly, frankly dystopian amount of choice that I have access to every single day in order to put my financial resources into companies that do meaningful work and operate independently, so that I can Consume more purposefully. In this dispatch, I am talking about Support.
This is NOT the letter you think it is. I have written many times about how I approach giving, fundraising, and community engagement, and my personal goal for these letters is to not be repetitive or pedantic. I really care about your time, and I also really care about not sounding like a preachy butthead. Support can look like so many things, and I will give you some examples:
- for friends: a random loving text with a specific, personal compliment, a venmo for a coffee, showering their social media and personal projects with love so they don’t get lost in the algorithm amongst bigger powers, keeping them company while they grocery shop/do laundry or anything else errand-y, watching their kids or pets for a while if they need (where applicable), remembering their birthdays
- for organizations/non-profit communities: free labor to the capacity fit for your sustainable ability, showering their social media with love so they don’t get lost in the algorithm amongst bigger powers, holding meaningful fundraisers or volunteering (meaningful being that you get behind it with your whole chest, not just add it passively to your IG profile page), acting as an advocate for their work, providing professional advice
- for brands/stores: showering their social media with love so they don’t get lost in the algorithm amongst bigger powers, turning friends and audience members on to products you would genuinely recommend, choose to shop with them regularly and not just chase whatever deal around the internet like a chicken with their head cut off
That is a non-exhaustive list of support. But I’m going to talk about something a little different.
A few months ago, the writer
(author of one of my favorite ever books, Biography of X), published a letter on her Substack that has stuck with me ever since, because it spoke so deeply to a season I have found myself in in my late thirties and into the first year of my 40s.Her reader had asked:
“what do you make of people who speak to you in every crucial way yet exit your life without requisite or trumpet peal and what museums would you suggest visiting to begin to forget them?”
And part of her answer remains etched in my mind (aside from her very nice list of museums):
“But you also asked what I make of such a person who has taken up some meaningful space in your life then absconded life without warning. What I make of such a person is that they have revealed something essentially cruel in the way that they saw you and your place in their life. This is the pain you’re feeling, though you might mistake it for simply missing their company. It seems you have been fired like an employee because this person thought of you as being in attendance to them, not in relation to them. It seems you may still be (understandably) attached to the memory of their significance. But now the cruelty has transpired and you have to remember that the person you remember from before no longer exists.”
I am the eldest daughter in my family, and a role famous for being trained to tend to other people’s needs. That does not preclude being ambitious, or tenacious, or resilient, but it is a fact of my life, and I have long found that people both love to make fun of this trait and also simultaneously rely on me for it, heavily, inordinately.
Once at the beginning of my career my boss told me she had a dream that she got arrested and used her one phone call to call me, and the line cut off before she could tell me which jail she was in, but I found her anyway and bailed her out she wasn’t surprised at all. I have been told by three different people that I would be the ideal partner for The Amazing Race. I am the friend who got you to the emergency room at 3 am if you fell down the stairs of the after hours in Alphabet City. I am the friend who will come pick you up wherever, help you figure things out, take on disproportionate amounts of organizational and logistical labor, because I was never taught that there is an end or capacity limit to my utility if it pertains to helping others, and that, my friends, have given me some of the best experiences of my life and has also left me very, very tired and sad sometimes.
As it happens, when a large part of your relationship with someone is made up of you being of use to them, if and when the level of support you’re able to offer changes in any way, your utility in their eyes has expired. Or, as Catherine Lacey put it, “It seems you have been fired like an employee because this person thought of you as being in attendance to them, not in relation to them.” There are quite a few people and places in the world for whom my utility has expired after concentrated investment of time and attention, and at this point I realize I’m being directed to stop being such a tool (see what I did there?).
A few weeks ago I got to actualize an amazing internet friend in real life, a fellow older sister
, who not only understood this friction so well but also encouraged me to urgently learn how to become more useless. To stop existing in service to everyone all the time, and then dissolving into heartbreak when I fail to meet ever-moving goalposts. So much of this heartbreak is preventable by crafting boundaries (a concept I understand in full but was not raised with at all and failed to develop in my adult years and now is the main source of tension at age 40). I suspect that a lot of women my age who have put in loads of hard work to their personal and professional lives and hold themselves to very high expectations feel the same, and find themselves spreading well-intentioned energy out across a football field’s worth of scenarios, when really what needed and deserved their attention was the 1/10th of that field where their energy would be felt meaningfully. I suspect this because I hear it directly from women’s mouths all of the time.But the title of this letter is “What is Support?”, and I meant that. The answer is: Support is not selflessly sacrificing all of your resources - one of the most important being your spirit - into bottomless voids that do not see value in you beyond your utility. There are too many incredible and highly valuable places to put it where your spirit will go farther and mean more. Take that and apply it to whatever area of life you like: home, family, work, community, friendship, it applies to everything.
Support should be sustainable, measured, and consistent, and more than anything else, Support should be meaningful. Not just meaningful to you, but to the entity on the receiving end. Otherwise, it’s just sacrifice.
Yours, in a sustainable and consistent way,
Anja
I needed to read this today!
Awww yes! I will beat this drum until everyone is converted!