Maybe Everyone Isn't Treating You Badly

I just finished Lena Dunham's Famesick, and I think I finally understand why people find Lena Dunham so unlikeable.

This is slightly unfortunate for Lena Dunham because a considerable portion of Famesick is about how painful she finds it that people don't like her.

To be fair, some genuinely terrible things have happened to her. I don't mean terrible in the way we now sometimes use the word to describe a bad breakup or a friend who stopped inviting us to dinner. I mean actually terrible. Things that would change you. Things you would probably still be talking about in therapy twenty years later while your therapist nodded and agreed that yes, that one was in fact very bad.

I just don't think there are nearly as many of these things as Lena Dunham does.

A lot of the rest of the book is about things that are painful but also seem suspiciously similar to what happens when you live for forty years and know other people.

Boyfriends left. Friends left. Work relationships went badly. People were angry with her. She was angry with them. She felt misunderstood. She appears to have misunderstood several people herself. She also had career disappointments during a career in which she became extremely rich and famous before she was thirty, which I am willing to classify as a disappointment but perhaps not a humanitarian crisis.

I recently read "The Great Disaster". The idea, basically, is that there is The Great Disaster and then there is the regular assortment of awful things you get simply for participating in life. A child dying is a disaster. Being violently assaulted is a disaster. Losing your home is a disaster. Getting the kind of diagnosis where suddenly there is a before and an after is a disaster.

Then there is everything else.

Someone leaves you. A friendship ends. You get fired. You're excluded from something. Someone misunderstands you. Someone you really like doesn't like you back. Someone thinks you're an asshole.

Occasionally, adding insult to injury, you actually were an asshole.

I think we're becoming increasingly bad at telling these categories apart, and Famesick felt almost like a case study in what happens when you stop trying.

And Famesick is interesting because Dunham seems to experience a remarkable percentage of her life as something that happened to her. That was the part that started to wear me out.

It's not that she doesn't have explanations for why she behaves the way she does. She has hundreds of pages of explanations. Her childhood explains things. Her health explains things. Her trauma explains things. Her addiction explains things. Her fame explains things. Her relationships explain things.

And, individually, I'm sure many of those explanations are correct.

But after a while I started feeling like everyone who has ever known her has been assigned an unreasonable amount of required reading before they're permitted to find her annoying. You can't just be irritated. First you need the background.

And I think we all know people like this.

Usually it doesn't start out exhausting. It starts out sad.

You know something awful happened to them, so you give them a lot of grace. Then you learn that criticism has to be delivered carefully. Then there are certain subjects you avoid. Certain jokes you don't make. Certain things you don't tell them until the timing is right. When they have a reaction that seems wildly bigger than the thing that happened, you remind yourself that the reaction isn't really about the thing that happened.

Which is fine. This is part of loving people.

But sometimes, very slowly, loving that person starts to involve a lot of work. You are no longer just having dinner. You are also monitoring whether they feel included at dinner. You are not just disagreeing with them. You are finding the exact combination of words that will allow you to disagree without accidentally activating three other issues. You aren't just tired and a little quiet. You are explaining that your being tired and quiet is not evidence that you are withdrawing from the relationship.

They notice all of this, obviously.

And this is where the whole thing can become almost impossible to escape, because your getting tired is then folded into the person's existing understanding of what happens to them. You call less because every conversation has become emotionally expensive. They experience abandonment. You're more guarded because you've learned that saying the wrong thing creates a two-hour argument. They experience emotional distance. You stop inviting them to certain things because you don't want to spend the entire night worrying about whether they're having a good time. They experience exclusion.

At no point does anyone ask the fairly obvious question: have I become difficult to be around? Instead, everybody leaving becomes proof that people always leave.

It's an incredibly effective system.

This is basically what I kept thinking while reading Famesick. Lena Dunham seems deeply hurt that so many people have disliked her, and meanwhile I am several hundred pages into Lena Dunham's own explanation of Lena Dunham thinking, well, I do sort of see their point.

That doesn't mean I think she's evil. I don't. Some of what happened to her, particularly the things people said about her publicly, was vicious and disgusting and far beyond anything she deserved. I also think she sounds exhausting. Both things can be true.

Beyond all of this, I also think we should all be confident in whatever version of ourselves we're putting out there. But if you're unlikeable, and you get told you're unlikeable, and you don't want to change that, then you might need to accept that interacting with the world the way you do is going to keep making people dislike you.

We've become extremely good at explaining ourselves. We know about trauma and attachment styles and triggers and boundaries and emotional safety. Everyone knows what gaslighting is now, although statistically I remain doubtful that this many people are being gaslit this often. Most of this language is useful, and a lot of it has helped people recognize genuinely harmful situations they might once have simply tolerated.

But I think somewhere along the way we started confusing an explanation with a get out of jail free card.

Your feelings can be valid and your interpretation can still be wrong. You can genuinely feel abandoned and have driven someone away. You can feel attacked and have been criticized. You can feel misunderstood and have actually been understood perfectly well. You can have trauma that explains why you reacted the way you did and still owe someone an apology for how you reacted.

More uncomfortably, you can have been a victim in one situation and be the asshole in another.

I think there is something seductive about a victim mentality because it removes one of the most unpleasant possibilities we occasionally have to consider about ourselves: maybe I'm the problem. Not always, not entirely, and maybe not even mostly, but sometimes. If every painful feeling can be traced back to something someone else did, you never really have to sit with that possibility.

There is always another explanation: trauma, attachment, a toxic friendship, a narcissistic ex, an unsafe workplace, a boundary violation, someone who didn't respect your needs or hold space correctly. We have developed an enormous vocabulary for describing the ways other people have harmed us, and I sometimes wonder whether we've developed anything like the same vocabulary for saying, I behaved badly and eventually people got sick of it.

There is also something unfair about expecting the people around you to indefinitely absorb the consequences of things they didn't do to you. Your friend didn't create your abandonment issues. Your new partner didn't cause your abandonment issues. Your friend didn't create your childhood. Your coworker didn't bully you in Grade 8. They can know about those things. They can be compassionate. They can give you more grace because they understand why something is hard for you.

Maybe that's the danger of seeing yourself primarily as someone who has been wronged. Eventually everything starts looking like evidence, and when the people around you finally get tired of being defendants in a trial they never knew they were part of, their leaving becomes Exhibit A.