Clown Class: How to React When Animals Attack

Hi everyone. You may notice that this issue is an advice column and that it’s come out on a Wednesday rather than a Friday. I’d said originally that the regular posts would come out on Wednesdays and the advice columns would come out on alternate Fridays but I think I might want to switch it. I love answering your questions more than anything else so it would make sense to do that the most. But tell me what you think because Clown Class is for you. What ratio would you like to see?

Also: send in more questions! Thank you. -Tina

Dear Tina, 

I come to you with a baffling situation from just this past month. A woman I thought to be my friend for well over a decade has suddenly turned ugly on me. Sarcastic, short tempered, and cruel.

I have asked her three times what has happened since I thought we were friends and she told me I was the one overreacting and that she is just joking. I told her none of her "jokes"—which are name calling and imitating my voice—are funny to me and I have asked her to stop. 

This past month she intensified in belittling me and emotionally depleting me. After many nights staying up replaying her words to me I decided I needed to remove her from my life. Whatever it was, it was making me far too sad and our interactions were without joy to me. 

It seems like whenever I have stood up for myself I have waited much too long to do so and by that point things have become normalized and have intensified in their nature. 

I should feel good about my situation, I said no to the toxic person, so why do I feel so sad? I should be happy that I stood up for myself! 

Please help me understand why people turn cruel, and why people say others are too sensitive when they tell them to not speak to them in a belittling, demeaning, disrespectful manner anymore. THANK YOU!!

Signed,

I Thought We Were Friends

Dear ITWWF,

Oh my goodness. This is a spicy and deeply relatable question. I sat on this one for a few weeks because I felt unqualified to help anyone understand why other people turn cruel. But yes! Why? Great question!

I’m reminded of a Philosophy of Religion course I took one summer during college for some extra school credit. This was a classroom full of people of all ages and one elderly gentleman whom I will never forget stood up from his seat every single Wednesday night and asked the professor the same question:

“Yes, I would like to know why do bad things happen to good people? I would like to know why bad things happen to good, Christian people.”

The gentleman would stand up slowly, ask this exact question phrased this same exact way, and sit back down patiently to receive the same answer he got every week.

The professor would say, “Yes, well, that’s the big question. That’s the Problem of Evil, isn’t it?” and then he’d swivel the subject back to whatever we were talking about as fast as he respectfully could.

I still revere that gentleman. The drive. The perseverance.

Your question is nowhere near as quixotic as my classmate’s question and I don’t blame you one bit for asking. But there’s a cry from the heart at the center of your question that nobody can answer with words.

That’s why I put it off.

A couple of long-term friends gave me gave me a birthday present recently:

The Wild Unknown Animal Spirit Deck  

I love this deck like mad and I’m pulling cards at every opportunity so guess what? You’re getting one. You already got one. I pulled it. We’ll get to it.

Let’s take a moment, though, and shout out the glory of long-term friends who are still actively on the scene, who’ve loved us through all our shifts and permutations and freakouts. The value of these people, the value of these relationships, right? Supertreasures. Go love up a trusted old friend who’s still by your side right now, everybody.

It feels like cheating somehow to pull an oracle card with an advice column. Like, get original, ma’am. You answer it. I think might not pull a card very often in this space, either, but your question is a real doozy so I’m going to bring in some animal friends, damn it.

Wild animals feel like excellent ambassadors for this situation, too, because when someone close in our field becomes threatening in a way we’ve never expected, our alertness levels skyrocket in this hair-standing-on-end, skirmish-in-a-nature-documentary way. One minute you and the other zebras and animal buddies in your neighborhood are drinking out of the river in the morning sun and everything’s cool and the next minute somebody you thought you could live with in peace by your regular tree has reared up looking for blood and zeroed in on you. Aaa!

Having a person turn on you with no apparent cause is saddening and angering and weirdly, primally scary. (All the core bad feelings, represent!)

A of all, you have to recalibrate how to relate to them on the run with all your knowledge of how your relationship works out the window. Communicating and processing at the same time is tricky enough with the most trusted friendship when you’re working something out. Overt, unfamiliar aggression only ramps the yikes factor up.

You say that when you’ve stood up for yourself in the past you’ve waited too long to do it, “and by that point things have become normalized and have intensified in their nature.” I get it and would love for you to cut yourself a break on this one. Some of us are conflict-averse and a little extra afraid of the unknown—like me, for example, good afternoon—and a freeze response kicks in whether we like it or not. It takes a certain kind of deep work to adjust that reaction time and that work takes a minute.  

B of all, I think a deeper fear gets activated which is

you mean they can take the love back 

Ugh, this one is the most horrifying. Yes, they can take the love back. Yes, particular sources of love can disappear. A person can act all sophisticated and not shocked about that basic truth but it is shocking. We are only ever partially adults, please remember. We may be as much as 98% adult but a baby rides with us who remains shocked and has the right to be shocked by this cruel fact of life. 

I have to confess that when I pulled a card for you I was hoping for a certain kind of animal. I was all heated up on your behalf with this person calling you names and making fun of the way you talk. I had a bit of “lion…lion…baby wants a lion” energy going when I was shuffling the deck. Somebody with teeth, some animal who makes everyone go “Oh, shit,” when they roll onto the scene. Panther, shark, somebody. 

This is who showed up.

Aw, come on. Butterfly*?

I drooped, I Thought We We Were Friends, when I pulled Butterfly. I thought THIS IS NOT GOING TO BE SATISFYING AT ALL.

*no disrespect to you, butterflies, if you read this newsletter

and especially not if you read this newsletter

But I’ll tell you what. The Wild Unknown Animal Spirit Oracle has done it again. Let me give you the whole thing:

You asked a question that I didn’t think I could answer when you asked me to tell you why people turn cruel. I can’t think of a better answer than this and it’s so bone obvious when I see it now.

Respect, butterfly. Thank you.

Brace yourself for the dumbest true sentence.

When a person changes, it’s because they’re changing.

When a person changes towards you, it’s because they’re changing.

When a person acts out like your friend did—when a person sets straight out to cause pain, even—it’s because their environment is shifting in some kind of way and it’s scaring and hurting them. Inner environment, outer environment, doesn’t really matter. You’re probably not going to know and it’s best to go forward not needing to know. But nobody does this kind of thing when they have inner stability and they’re doing great. Everybody has a time in their life when the heat gets turned up and the old self is forced into obsoletion.

Some people have the good fortune to have grace available during that process.

My grandfather, my dad’s dad, used to have this advice for people who were learning how to drive: Treat all other drivers on the road as though they’re homicidal maniacs and treat all pedestrians as though they’re hell bent on getting themselves run over in traffic.

I feel like we can borrow the heart of this advice for your situation, the heart being that people are unpredictable as hell and you’re going to have a smoother, safer time on the road if you never forget it.

You can try on this idea:

Nobody has grace when they’re changing.

It’s not true but not all drivers are homicidal maniacs, either, and the idea that they are is still situationally helpful.

I don’t like the fact that you got hurt, I Thought We Were Friends, and I empathize hard with this pain. About ten years ago I lost two big friendships that were deeply important to me. I was wandering around in shock for a while. My dreams about these lost friends were wild and brutal and these dreams went on for a couple of years. I’ll still get one from time to time, in a softer form.

I do still carry some heat about these friendships. I try to act cool about it. I court logic. I remind myself that I’m a complicated person who’s not going to be to everyone’s taste forever, I remind myself that not all of my behaviors throughout time have been amazing and charming and spot-on. I understand, intellectually and objectively, that no one is obligated to find my company rewarding in all its forms.

Baby Tina, meanwhile, is still shocked ten years later.

THEY TOOK THE LOVE AWAY

THEY DON’T LIKE ME

I GOT ALONED

They did! They probably don’t. I did. Every now and then my guard drops and I re-feel it. OW.

The butterfly’s advice is good here. Let solid friends and activities support us like cocoons. The innocent shocked person, hurt in an animal attack—like us, like the man in my Philosophy of Religion class—sees through those baby eyes. What the hell? My god! The world!

We can give that part direct care from all our good sources of love, the ones that are still flowing (including our love for our own selves), and that is all we can do for that part.

You said, “I should feel good about my situation, I said no to the toxic person, so why do I feel so sad? I should be happy that I stood up for myself!”

A source of love got spiky and dried up. It is weird and sad. Please let yourself feel that at maximum intensity. There’s more love everywhere for you but you don’t have to strangle your real feelings before they’ve had their say just because love still exists in abundance.

I want to say this, too:

There’s a conversation in the world about “toxicity” and the idea of toxic people.

I don’t think this concept is helping, I Thought We Were Friends.

What is a toxic person? A toxic person, I wager, is someone who hasn’t worked out how to be in the world without hurting people. Damage is real. Danger is real. Bad behavior is real. The need to skirt certain people, sometimes permanently, that’s real. You took wise steps to take care of yourself and that’s something you can feel good about.

There’s a notion that we’re always, by necessity, in our roles as the central figures in our own lives and consciousness, the Good Ones out there navigating a world full of Bad Ones that we can triumph over in the moment when we recognize their badness and act on that knowledge. I think this notion doesn’t feel good, doesn’t satisfy, because it’s not quite true. Truth tends to come in as a relief, at least eventually.

I can think of a hundred people off the top of my head, easy, that I would call bad people and when I say that, I do mean it. Patterns of horrible repeated behavior over time mean something and shorthand is inevitable. But if I had to slow down and speak what I feel to be the actual truth about everyone on that list, individually, I would probably spend a lot of time thinking into the causes of their terrible behavior and determine, instead, that they’re dangerous people. There’s a qualitative difference.

You treat a dangerous person the same way you treat a bad one, however.

Your friend, who was a friend of yours for more than ten years, demonstrated sufficient beautiful qualities over time for this new situation to shock and hurt you. Someone who’s never shown us their beautiful qualities can’t pull that off. Maybe there’s no need to file her under “Toxic”.

You were smart to withdraw, no doubt. It’s terrible and not at all okay that you were belittled by this person.

Your friendship is done and she’s retreated (or been sent back) into the Mystery. That’s the only truth that matters, really. She’s in her cocoon, you’re elsewhere. Your landscape is different without her.

The place in you that got belittled will sting for a while and then die down and then possibly rear up and sting again for five minutes here and there forever.

You’ll catch yourself telling stories in your mind about her that are also stories about yourself. Check the stories out, see if they’re balm or aggravation. And then you can choose. Sometimes it’s fun to aggravate ourselves with stories about the people who aren’t around us any more. I do it every day! I get to feel mad, haughty, tragic, pathetic, all kinds of interesting things.

It is more unnerving to let these disappeared friends float silently off into the cosmos with minimal storytelling. I think I like this way better because it feels more true. You can’t get a truer story than no story and truth cools down the sting.

Space Butterfly Nebula

Do you have an existential question you’d like help with? Do you struggle with the same kind of dilemma over and over in your life? All you need to do to submit a question for Clown Class is reply to any of these emails in your inbox. Please don’t be shy. I would never judge a question and I promise to respond with care.

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Thank you!