Sometimes it’s best to ignore the drama
Last year, right around this time, when twinkle lights illuminated newly pitch-black afternoons, and Christmas carols wore themselves out long before the holidays, my inbox exploded with a reply-all email brawl. It wasn’t my fight, but it was wild, and there I was, CCed on everything.
My instinct, usually, would have been to get into it, to “help,” but due to some latebreaking awareness that things that have nothing to do with me have nothing to do with me, I decided to ignore it.
It was the right decision, because I have enough to think about already, a personal reef of undone-ness that needs my attention, but “ignoring it” is also on trend, especially since right now everyone wants to talk about emotional labour.
This is extra-especially true since Gemma Hartley’s book Fed Up — about the “unpaid, invisible” work that women do, and often do all of in a household, like remembering birthdays and organizing babysitters and delegating tasks — was released in November. (And, extra-extra-especially since Arlie Hochschild, who originated the term “emotional labour” in 1983 to mean work that specifically involves emotion, like nursing or waitressing, told the Atlantic magazine that we’re all using it wrong).
Ignoring the personal, emotional or care-related work that we usually do has also been trending in self-help, where counterintuitive takes have made their way onto bestseller lists, like The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck and The LifeChanging Magic of Not Giving a F*ck (asterisks not mine, trust me). I first heard the explicit suggestion to ignore something in a 2016 episode of self-help writer Gretchen Rubin’s podcast Happier, second-hand from her friend Michael Melcher, an executive coach. Considering a mutual friend’s problem, Melcher asked what would happen if she ignored it. Rubin said “So often, we’re trying to control other people, or nudge other people, or we get all worked up about something that someone else is doing, and then I realized, if I just said to myself, ‘What happens if I ignore it?’ Nothing happens.”
Nothing happens, because usually, in the problem situations that are obsessed over but unresolvable, nothing helps, not wondering or planning or logic-ing. The problems are too big, or too far away, for our efforts to penetrate. Nothing, for better or worse, happens, if we think about it, or not; if we do something, or do nothing.
This can be a revelation for those of us used to solving problems with a giganticon of thinking, private or projected rage or guilt or whatever, heavy emotional conversations, and text consultations with friends who land in different places on the x-axis of “tells us what we want to hear” and the y-axis of “invested in other people’s drama.”
Since the email thing, I have been — not on purpose, but not coincidentally — ignoring a lot, the emotional distractions that I realized I couldn’t change, and was getting bored of, and didn’t have time for.
I also did stuff like cut my holiday-card list by maybe 80 per cent, stopped responding to emails that didn’t need one, and gave my husband more to do in the “emotional labour” realm, whether I’m using the phrase correctly or not.
Gretchen Rubin’s Happier co-host, her sister Liz Craft, was careful to say that “ignoring it” is the wrong move for something like a medical issue; I’ll add that “ignoring it” is an emotional delicacy, a way to deal better with some things, but not the problems of life that are predictable, chronic, and solvable. “Ignoring it” isn’t a way out of having an uncomfortable conversation with someone, or whatever else actually needs doing.
This tactic is particularly useful going into the holiday season, when friends and family come together to celebrate and make each other insane. Often, the most effective course of action in family situations, in particular, where ancient and ultimately stupid issues donut wildly like a car in an icy parking lot, is to ignore it. (Not when someone says something racist or sexist or otherwise bigoted, obvi.)
“Ignore it” doesn’t mean you don’t care. (I still care about everything.) It just means that in that moment, you care more about yourself.