EEDA Newsletter Vol 5, Iss 10: You Deserve Satisfaction and Accommodation
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Hi friends! Before I get into it, I want to share again a fundraiser I am taking part in for TGI Justice Project. Every year I make a donation to TGI Justice Project and they’re currently trying to raise $5K. I set up a site for my network to pull together $500. We are over halfway there! Thanks to the folks who have donated.
May is a rollercoaster of emotions for us. We had our wedding anniversary, which we mentioned in our most recent podcast episode. We went out for a nice meal then we went and got new-to-us library cards (Redwood City!). The following day was my mother’s birthday. Trying to run away from grief is like trying to jump away from gravity -- it’s always going to bring you down at some point. I foolishly tried to work that day and had to tap out midday. This weekend we will go to a wedding and some auxiliary wedding celebrations as well. Sunday is Mother’s Day so I’ve planned a theatrical distraction for Nicole and I both.
Like I said, it’s a rollercoaster.
Here is a photo of my mom and I on my wedding day. If you ever needed to be serious in any situation, she was certainly not the person you should sit next to.
Today I want to talk about a form of people-pleasing that I continue to struggle with in my own behavior: not speaking up for myself or expressing my desires for fear of being “inconvenient.” This shows up in so many ways in our lives and as a person on the internet, I’m constantly learning about new ways in which some of these are almost universal experiences, especially for folks in the U.S.
The first thing that comes to mind is: bad haircuts. Why are so many of us terrified of giving honest feedback during our appointment at the salon? People would rather get their hair butchered and cry in their car than to speak up about their needs. It took me forever just to speak up and let my stylist know she put my part on the wrong side. Did I think she would get mad or that her feelings would get hurt? I’m paying for hair that I like and in turn, she also wants me to walk out of there satisfied. A good stylist will appreciate your speaking up rather than giving you a hairstyle that makes you unhappy.
In The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence by Gavin de Becker, he gives the example of a woman stepping into an empty elevator and then a man steps in after her. She recognizes her discomfort and the man gives her a bad vibe, but she doesn’t want to seem “rude” so she stays on the elevator. While this book is old and has many issues that often come with a book being old, like being incredibly gendered and not once mentioning things like how white supremacy comes into play, it does make me think about how sometimes people may stay in harm’s way rather than seeming rude.
When I was in grad school, I caught someone plagiarizing my work and I reported her to the professor. He told the homework thief to email me an apology and then he begged me to allow that to be enough. I didn’t speak up for myself because I didn’t want to “seem like the bad guy” even though it was my work being stolen.
It happens in other more common situations as well. When we are at the grocery store and the cashier asks if we found everything we were looking for and we say we did, even if we didn’t. When we are at a restaurant and the server asks if we are enjoying our food and we say yes, even if we aren’t. If we’re in a therapy appointment and the therapist “tries something new” and we don’t say it’s not working for us. When we’re at the doctor, we sometimes just sit there and get talked at and not spoken with. If we’re being intimate with a partner (or partners) and we don’t tell them to slow down or speed up or use more lube or simply, “this isn’t working, let’s try something else.”
In all of these situations, the other people are actually interested in getting things “right” for you (if they’re good at their job or a good partner). Many people would rather have feedback than get things wrong. So many of us, especially those of us who are/were girls/women/femmes/AFAB, were taught to be accommodating and never that we, too, deserve to be accommodated. We deserve to be accommodated even if it means someone else has to do something a little extra.
I’ve gotten better at this since the beginning of the pandemic. Like I said, we’re going to a wedding soon and I asked if there will be outdoor seating for dinner. If not, then Nicole and I were going to eat before we got there so we could remain masked indoors. Our friend getting married is someone that I used to teach with and one of the things we taught was harm reduction so they willingly made accommodations so we could be safe. For Tết Nguyên Đán, one of our friends was having a small celebration at her apartment that included food. We wanted to go and so we asked that everyone take a Covid test. Not sacrificing my own sense of safety and community care for the comfort of others in this way has helped me speak up in other parts of my life.
“Can we start this meeting 10 minutes later so I have some room to breathe in between meetings?”
“The purple you mixed for my hair is too blue, can we add more pink?”
“I’m sorry, that time doesn’t work for me, will one of these other times work?”
I am far from an expert at this and it’s a constant exercise. Am I absolutely terrified during any of these interactions, even if they’re an email? Yep, sure am! So, I do it scared. I let my voice shake, I let myself be nervous, and I speak up anyway (sometimes). Like I said, I still have a lot of work to do. My suggestion is to practice with small, low-stakes things. Therapy sessions are actually a great place to practice these things safely. The grocery store might be another option. If you have a partner or friend you trust, that can work too.
If any of this resonates, just know that you’re not alone. If you want to read more about advocating for ourselves, you can check out EEDA Volume 1, Issue 13, EEDA Volume 2, Issue 3, and EEDA Volume 3, Issue 17.
That’s it for this week! You can shop many books I’ve mentioned in this newsletter at my affiliate shop, The Infophile’s Bookshop, and support independent bookstores. In fact, any Bookshop, Amazon, or Etsy links in this newsletter are affiliate links so if you shop through those, it helps support my work. Or you can leave me a tip on Ko-fi, Paypal, or Venmo.
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