Saying the unspoken thing

Why is it so hard to love across the political divide? Or: what you can learn from three year olds about building a shared reality.

Apr 30, 2025

(Hey! I’m facilitating a Climate Wayfinding workshop this spring in Vancouver; scroll to the end for more!)

I was staying at my mom’s house in Florida when the news broke that the Supreme Court was poised to overturn Roe v. Wade. My kids were babies then, eight months old, plump and wide eyed and flopping around the house like a pair of little seals.

Taking care of two babies had gotten easier by that point but it was still pretty all-consuming. We weren’t sleeping much and every meal ended with a vigorous mopping of the floor and walls with beach towels, but for three weeks my mom and her husband took care of us and life was easier. They cooked and cleaned, turned over the laundry, washed bottles, read books, and hustled babies around the house. They gave up their bedroom so we could have more space. And they sent me on bike rides and errands so I could feel, even if for only half an hour, the thrill of solitude. We crashed their peaceful retired life with our endless needs and they welcomed it without complaint.

But when it came out that Roe was going to fall, I felt my days rupture into two separate realities: the steady physical labor of caring for babies and the frantic exchange of links and headlines and rage and despair that was happening on my phone. All the women in my life were grieving and furious. All of them except, it seemed, the one whose house I was in.

I don’t know what my mom thought of Roe falling. I was too afraid to ask and she carried on as if nothing remarkable was happening.

For most of my twenties my mom and I argued about politics. But somewhere along the way, argument gave way to silence. I guess we decided, without ever really discussing it, that it was better to prioritize getting along. Or maybe we finally accepted that neither of us was going to sway the other. And, if I’m honest, ignoring the political world worked pretty well when we were on opposite sides of the continent. But up close it felt surreal and lonely.

Roe felt personal to me. When my pregnancy went sideways at eighteen weeks, termination was an option I took seriously. And when I heard Roe was going to fall, I kept thinking of all the pregnant people in my position—a high-risk pregnancy with a late but potentially fatal diagnosis—who would not be given the same choices I was. I ached for everyone with a uterus, but especially for them.

We chose a risky surgery over termination, but it was not hard to imagine all the reasons we might have chosen differently: if I didn’t have paid medical leave from work, or if my insurance wouldn’t cover the surgery or the weeks our premature babies were all but certain to spend in the NICU—or the specialized care they might need if they had a brain bleed or heart condition or chronic lung problems, all of which were possible outcomes, even if they survived the rest of the pregnancy itself. I might’ve chosen differently if I had another kid at home who needed my care. Or, honestly, if I thought we had a chance of ever getting pregnant again. We had put so much time and effort and money into trying to get pregnant without even a hint of success. I did not believe we would get a second chance.

The diagnosis was devastating, but it felt good—by which I mean dignified and humane and safe and even kind of holy—to be entrusted with that choice, to feel that the system—the doctors and insurance providers and lawmakers—believed that Mark and I were the best people to determine the path forward.

I thought I understood the phrase “my body, my choice” before, but after I could see that it had only been a theoretical understanding. It was a much different thing in practice. I was so afraid. More afraid than I’d ever been before in my life. But the fear was mediated by the fact that I had gotten to determine what was right for me. It made everything that came after, as hard as it was, feel like something I could do, something I wanted to do. It made my body feel like a holy place. I say this without exaggeration.

And so as my mom and I fed and bounced and bathed and tickled the fat, healthy little seals, I grieved on the inside. I texted furiously. Only late at night in the dark did I turn to Mark to whisper my grief aloud above the endless ocean waves of the white noise machine.

My kids are three and a half now, but I have been thinking a lot about those days as we move through yet another season of political outrage and grief. I’ve been trying to understand exactly why political disagreement feels so lonely now—much more so than it did even a decade ago.

Maybe it feels impossible to talk about politics when you disagree with someone because, even though you aren’t talking about the worst thing that ever happened to you or someone you love (or the worst thing that could happen), it feels like you are. That unspoken thing is the subtext of every political conversation.

I looked at a bunch of baby owl photos when I was drawing this and I can confirm that when they lean together like this, it is simply not possible to say where one ends and the other begins.

I haven’t quite figured out what to do with this problem. But I have been thinking about my own children, the way they come home from daycare, loud and leaping out of the stroller. “Mama owl! Mama owl!” one shouts, “I’m flying out of my nest!” The other holds an elbow to my face and frowns: “I’m a baby owl and I have broken my wing. Mama owl, bandage it!”

My children are always living inside one imaginary reality or another. Multiple times a day, they invite us into this other world: we are an eagle (me), a sandpiper (Mark), a bear (Twin A), and a cougar (Twin B). We are R2D2, BB8, C3PO (me again: hi!), and Luke Skywalker. We are owls or otters or squids or construction vehicles that are also dinosaurs.

I have learned that if I want the baby owl to wash his hands when he gets home from daycare, I first have to bandage his wing. I have to say that if he washes his wingtips, he can have some mice (gummy vitamins) at the owl table. They have taught me that it’s a lot more fun this way, being an owl instead of an exhausted human parent. We make a shared reality together: one in which my children get their vitamins and the owls get their mouse snacks.

The loneliness of political polarization makes more sense to me when I think about it as a shared reality problem. I am lonely because, in many ways, I’m living in an entirely separate reality from the Trump voters in my life.

There was a time, not that long ago, when it felt possible to disagree about politics while still feeling that you and the person you disagreed with were operating from the same shared set of facts, even if you interpreted those facts differently. But now even that feels lost. Having a conversation with someone on the other end of the political spectrum feels like walking on quicksand. There is no solid ground, no shared reality. It is easier—safer, less destabilizing—to retreat into the echo chamber.

When I read the news, I am not only feeling grief about reproductive freedom or the scapegoating of immigrants and trans folks or the steady erosion of American democracy, I also feel a second layer of despair about the fact that I cannot voice this grief to some of the people I love the most, and the knowledge that even if I tried I’d be back on the quicksand, desperate and unsteady.

I want the people I love to care about what I care about simply because they care about me. In this way I am like my children: I am an owl with a broken wing! Don't you want to fix and protect me?? Don’t you want laws and leaders who can see my body as the holy place it turns out it actually is?? (Even as I type this, I can feel the quicksand shifting around that word “holy” and its many, kaleidoscopic implications.)

My children have mastered the art of invitation. They are always inviting me into their world. And this is what I keep coming back to: how bad we adults are at inviting others into our realities. How we’ve built walls of rage and frustration and silence that make invitation nearly impossible.

I think we often get stuck when we talk about political polarization because we imagine that the only solution is a meet-in-the-middle, group-hug kind of moment. I am not interested in meeting in the middle on reproductive justice or trans rights or the value of democratic norms. But shouldn’t it be possible to see one another—like really see each other, in all our messy humanity—even as we disagree?

When was the last time you told someone about your biggest fear or the hardest day of your life? When was the last time you asked someone about what scares them? I’m not saying all of our conversations should start there* but what if these were things we talked about regularly?

If I’m honest, the thought of inviting people in still makes me squirm. You have to make yourself vulnerable to extend an invitation—and you have no control over whether someone else will be willing to receive it. The stakes feel high. But that’s because they are.

It turns out there’s a ton of interesting research on shared reality theory. And researchers seem to agree that the construction of a shared reality satisfies two essential human needs: the need for connection and the need to understand the world. You could think about it this way: when we are curious about one another, when we share our experiences with a genuine desire to connect, we are making sense of the world together.

When you think about it this way, it is perhaps unsurprising that lonely people are more vulnerable to conspiracy theories. And also unsurprising that, while social media can offer the illusion of belonging, it is also exacerbating our tendency to dehumanize those who disagree with us.

I’m not naive enough to imagine that a single personal story will change someone’s political orientation. I am simply saying that maybe I’m so lonely (so many of us are so lonely) because I haven’t bothered to speak the unspoken thing, to invite people in. But how else do you remake a shared reality? Not by moralizing into the abyss of social media, or by ostracizing the loved ones who disagree with you, or keeping silent about the hard stuff, but through curiosity and invitation, by putting voice to the unspoken thing—and making others feel safe enough to do the same—again and again, without righteousness or judgment.

Yours,

Mandy

* Though Nick Epley, the other speaker for this podcast interview I did with Charles Duhigg a few months ago, has me thinking that maybe our conversations should start there.

The Loneliness Project

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