Kindness as an antidote to loneliness

A few weeks ago I received an email from a stranger. The subject: “Overuse of the word ‘like’ in audio piece on NPR.” 

The message was from a woman named Patty who noted that my recent interview would have been “much more palatable” if I had not used the word “like” so often. Almost fifty times in fourteen minutes, she said. Yes, she counted. “I would have considered purchasing your book but I was so annoyed by the end of the piece this morning that I was completely uninterested,” she concluded.

Anyone who does public-facing work has had some version of this experience. Patty was not the first person to let me know she would not be buying my book (though I am still surprised that anyone finds this a meaningful threat). So my first response was to roll my eyes. I understood that these critiques are almost always gendered, that women on the radio receive far more negative feedback than men, even in response to the exact same speech patterns. 

I sent a screenshot of the message to my mom, who immediately responded that I should not give Patty the satisfaction of a reply. A friend offered to sign Patty up for a some particularly annoying spam, and though I was touched by the loyalty of this offer, I did not take her up on it. Still, I couldn’t totally shake Patty’s response. It was so mean spirited. It made me feel scolded. I started worrying that the interview was legitimately bad. Sure, her comments were sexist, but maybe there was also something to them? 

I hadn’t actually heard the episode yet, so I listened to it while I got ready for bed. Patty was right: I did say “like” a lot. And also “um” and “you know.” Coming through my headphones was the voice of someone who is trying hard to think while she speaks. I could hear the pandemic fog hovering in my brain. I didn’t sound stupid or ditzy. I sounded exhausted. 

I’ve spent a lot of time these past few years thinking about the ways a public persona can leave you feeling small and separate from yourself. It seems to be related to the assumption that a career demands a certain amount of self-commodification—and that this commodification is both inevitable and worthwhile. You build your brand, sell your ideas, publicize your work. You morph from a person into a public figure. And in doing so, you invite emails like Patty’s. People seem to think that this is a fair tradeoff for whatever status you acquire in the process—but I’ve started wondering if it’s possible to resist this idea. So, against my mom’s good advice, I decided to write Patty back.

A couple of years ago I tried to convince my agent that I should write a book about kindness. As we talked through my notes, he kept pushing me to explain my motivation. “What is the problem you’re trying to solve here?” he asked.

I wanted it to be enough that kindness was interesting to me. But he was right: there must also be a conflict, some urgency that sparks that interest in the first place. What is the problem that kindness is trying to solve? It’s a good question.

My days consisted of a series of social interactions that were so often awkward or overly scripted or troubled by power differentials. I think I was hoping that kindness could be an answer to the problem of other people. “Maybe,” I said, as I tried to talk my way through my thoughts, “kindness is an antidote to the existential loneliness of being human.”

Sam (my agent) could’ve dismissed the grandiosity of this declaration. But instead he said, “It sounds like you’re writing a book about loneliness.” And that’s how we landed here in this newsletter. But I haven’t stopped thinking about kindness.

As I stood at the sink brushing my teeth and listening to my interview and thinking about how much I resented Patty’s inability to imagine me as an actual person on the other end of that email, this question of kindness came back to me.

I spent at least an hour writing my reply. It was only a few paragraphs, but I wanted to get it right. I told Patty about how hard the past few months had felt, living in a partial lockdown and spending eighteen hours a day in my office/bedroom. I told her about being separated from my family by a closed international border and not getting to meet my niece who was, by that point, already seven months old. I asked what her pandemic life was like, how she was handling things. And I told her that, though there were plenty of things I might change about the interview if I could re-do it, I was okay with my use of the word “like.” I linked to a podcast that had helped me think about why we attach such stigma to the ways women speak in public. And, since I assumed she’d been listening to my interview because she was interested in research on love and relationships, I recommend a few books. 

I don’t think my motivation to write back to Patty was especially kind, to be clear. But writing to her required me to become curious about her. I started wondering if she was having as difficult a year as I was—as most of us are. I considered what might motivate someone to stop the podcast episode they were listening to and replay it from the beginning for the sole purpose of counting how many times the interviewee said the word ‘like’. It’s easy to pose this question in a snarky, rhetorical way—but for the first time I actually wanted to know. Two listens plus the time it took to look me up and write to me: that was at least half an hour out of her day. 

Writing to Patty also required me to be kinder to myself. I had to remember the day of the interview. (It was the first week of a new semester, teaching brand new classes entirely online and I was already exhausted. I was missing my family after a year apart and still coming to terms with the news that my partner and I probably were not going to have a baby.) I had to see both of us with more nuance—and more compassion. And, in the process, I became slightly less of a jerk. Less bitter, less self-conscious, more open, more sincere. 

I thought of this article by George Saunders where he describes his revision process for writing fiction. Revising, he says, “is ultimately about imagining that your reader is as humane, bright, witty, experienced and well intentioned as you, and that, to communicate intimately with her, you have to maintain the state, through revision, of generously imagining her. You revise your reader up, in your imagination, with every pass....And in revising your reader up, you revise yourself up too.” I wanted Patty to see me as a whole and complex person. And in writing to her, I started seeing us both that way. Isn’t this what kindness is in the end—beginning with the assumption that we are all alike in some fundamental way, that we are of the same kind, that we are even kin. The etymological connection between kin and kindness seems to suggest that maybe kindness could be an answer—maybe the answer?—to the problem of other people.

And guess what? I woke up the next morning to find that Patty had written me back! It was a long note, full of musing on the pandemic, on love, on how touched she was by my message. “How fortunate I am that even when I was in ‘bitchy old lady’ mode, you chose to react with grace and openness,” she wrote. I thought a lot about how little grace and openness I felt before I sat down to write that email.

For the record, I’m not recommending anyone start writing back to every troll on the internet. (Engaging with people who are cruel or hateful can be legitimately dangerous.) But I am thinking about what kindness might offer us. Even if Patty hadn’t written back, just the act of writing to her had helped me feel less like a persona and more like a person, which is what I needed in that moment. 

If you are interested in kindness, two books that I love are On Kindness by Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor and The War for Kindness by Jamil Zaki. One is philosophy and the other psychology and you can’t go wrong with either. 

I received so many kind responses to my last newsletter (maybe you all are what motivated me to write back to Patty!) and I haven’t responded to them all yet. But I wanted to say thank you—really, thank you—for soothing my existential loneliness. 

Yours,

Mandy