Giving Thanks For the People You Didn't Choose

Gathering in person is good for you -- even when other people are difficult.

Photo by Kelsey Chance on Unsplash

Happy American Thanksgiving, readers, and thank you (wherever you are and whatever you celebrate) for being here. I am incredibly grateful for you and your support.

I hope you’re able to take some time today to give thanks for all the things you have, which are in such short supply for so many. Maybe that’s physical safety; maybe it’s a home; maybe it’s plentiful food; maybe it’s the people in your life who love and support you. And I hope you’re able to take time to give thanks for the things that aren’t such obvious reasons for gratitude, but are still crucial teachers and shapers of who we are: The challenges and hardships of the past year; your moments of shortcoming or even failure; and the people in your life you find difficult or challenging or annoying or even enraging.

I hope you break bread with some of those people today.

I’m missing Thanksgiving this year, having just moved halfway around the world. I’ll miss Christmas at home, too. The tradeoff is ok — I’m choosing an exciting new chapter over a previously stable but quiet setup, and it feels very right — but today, I am reflecting on what we lose when our tethers to our kin and clan extend longer, or wear thinner.

We know that close to connections to other people make us happier and healthier; people with deep friendships and connections to others live longer than people who are more isolated. Gatherings like holidays and celebrations help us to maintain these bonds, not just with the people we have chosen to have in our lives, but to the people we were connected to by pure accident of birth or circumstance. It’s a subset of those people who can bring us unexpected gifts.

That subset: the people you might not have chosen to be in your life, if you had had the choice. The people you have perhaps considered not having in your life.

Maybe that’s a difficult mother. Maybe it’s a Trumpy uncle. Maybe it’s a best friend who hasn’t shown up in the ways you need her to. Maybe it’s an emotionally demanding sibling. Maybe it’s an unreasonable in-law. Maybe it’s weird rude cousin. You know who I’m talking about: The people about whom 10,000 letters to advice columnists are written, mostly between mid-November and late December.

Particularly since the rise of Donald Trump, there’s been a push across the political spectrum to disengage with those whose politics or views you find abhorrent. Pitched political moments create deep rifts and sometimes fissures in friendships and previously collegial acquaintanceships. There’s been what I believe to be a loosely related dynamic in advice columns and online message boards and social media and I presume in a lot of therapists’ offices to encourage a firm cut-off of any relationship that isn’t “serving you.” Advice for dealing with difficult family members often ends in the suggestion to go no-contact or low-contact; advice for navigating challenging friendships or relationships, even very long-term ones, is often to simply end them and find something better. This is often cast the cross-bred language of therapy and feminism: Of “boundaries” and “trauma” and “toxicity” and “emotional labor.”

Obviously sometimes this advice is good. Women especially often tolerate far too much from romantic partners and loved ones, and don’t demand nearly enough. “But we’re family” has too often been a justification for tolerating abuse or cruelty. I think it’s generally a bad idea for people to be in romantic relationships with partners who behave in ways that undermine their basic rights and freedoms — for women to date men who vote for anti-abortion politicians, for example. It is good to learn how to set boundaries and identify unhelpful or dangerous relationship patterns, with partners and family members and friends alike.

What’s not good, though, is cocooning oneself off away from people and situations that feel challenging or uncomfortable or angering. That’s bad for you and your growth. It’s bad for your kin and your clan and your community. And it’s bad for society more broadly.

Two weeks ago, I moved to Hong Kong. And these initial days in a dynamic unfamiliar city have been thrilling, but they have also, at times, been stressful and frustrating and confusing. This has been my experience in every new place I’ve lived, or even spent significant time: The excitement is immediate and overwhelming and also inevitably tempered by at least a little bit of aggravation, usually around things not working the way they should (by which I mean the way I am used to). Part of this is just a reflection of reality: No place is perfect, and all places offer legitimate moments of annoyance or less-than-ideal cultural or social norms that feel outsized to an outsider. But a lot of it is less about any objective reality than the experience of losing a sense of control, of being a foreigner navigating the unfamiliar, and of moving through all of that discomfort — a process that, it turns out, is really uncomfortable.

And so this time around, I’m trying to challenge myself in the inevitable moments of annoyance: Instead of drawing some grand and borne-of-frustration conclusion about what my frustration says about some objective shortcoming, what does my reaction in this moment, or my most immediate observations about this place, say about me?

This is not easy work, and it’s not nearly as immediately emotionally satisfying as being annoyed and also positive that your annoyance is the only objective and rational response. But it’s growth-inducing work. And it’s happiness-making work that helps to pull you (or at least me) out of the spin of irritation that comes when I don’t feel control over a situation, and into a space of a little more calm and rationality. Basically, I feel less annoyed when I step back and realize I can’t control this situation, but I can learn something from my own reaction to it.

Navigating other people isn’t so different from navigating new homes.

This doesn’t mean accepting everything other people say or do without pushback or comment. It does mean, though, that it’s healthier to approach other people — and especially challenging people — from a place of curiosity rather than a place of apprehension or avoidance or loathing or dread of the inevitable rude comment or bad idea or irritating act. Pushing back on people who say rude or offensive things by offering a counterpoint or asking for clarification or more detail isn’t ungracious or ruining the holidays; it is in many ways of act of trust, respect, and connection.

It’s also just good practice for being a person in the world.

And it could be a lifeline. One delightful thing about human beings is that we have wildly different opinions on all manner of behavior and personality. The person I think is disgustingly boorish you might find to be hilariously unrestrained; the person I think is sweet and understated might have a cousin who finds them boring and standoffish. The world has all kinds of people in it, and all kinds of people find love and friendship and community.

But there are unquestionably some people who struggle to hack it socially. Maybe they never learned basic manners or social skills. Maybe they live with a neurodivergence that makes it harder for them to forge or maintain connections, or a mental illness that makes them difficult to deal with. Maybe they’re just kind of an abrasive asshole. You don’t need to be best friends or lovers with a person you and many others find incredibly challenging. But it is a gift to spend a little bit of time with them — for them and for you, too.

Societies are, at least in theory, vast webs of people connected in myriad ways, some by long, thin strands and some by close, thick ones. Maybe you’re in the middle of a tight cluster. Who among your attachments lives nearly alone at the end of a long thread? Or maybe you’re the person who feels like they’re living on the periphery of the web, the place where the intersections between filaments are farthest apart. Who is still tied to you? How can you inch your way toward them?

Every year since 2016, magazines, newspapers, and websites have published some version of “How to have Thanksgiving dinner and not kill people at your table whose politics you hate.” This advice is often given for self-preservation. I’d suggest something else: Whether it’s someone whose politics you find offensive or someone who you just don’t really enjoy as a person, can a day of giving thanks also be a day of expansion of self and movement toward them instead of habitual self-protection and retreat away? Even if you’re not feeling personally expansive of magnanimous, can you try for connection and curiosity for the greater good of (maybe) pulling someone out of darkness — whether that’s the kind of emotional disregulation that often animates difficult people, or an ideological hole they’ve dug themselves into and then thoroughly reinforced? (Perhaps it will help to remember that, almost surely, someone somewhere believes that you are the difficult person).

We are very, very electronically connected. We are far less deeply, personally connected, and we may be invisibly barreling toward a mass desocializing event (more on that in a subsequent newsletter). A more atomized way of living, even if you believe you hold the whole world in the tiny computer in your hand, is a smaller, sadder, sicker way of living. Connections aren’t just about constant warm-fuzzy feelings and being around people who are easy for us to love. Connection is also, sometimes, zooming out to better see your social and familial web, and on occasion tending to its most fragile strands.

Thank you again for being a reader and supporter. Happy Thanksgiving, friends.

xx Jill