Turning those social media trolls 'Inside Out'
"And though the tongue has no bones, it can sometimes break millions of them."
- F.L. Lucas, On the Fascination of Style
Morning, yogis.
This past weekend, I took myself to go see Inside Out, the Disney Pixar movie. (Today's email has a couple minor "spoilers" that truly won't ruin the movie for you, but feel free to skip to What's Up!) It's about a tween named Riley whose family moves to a new city when she's 11 years old. But mostly it's about Riley's emotions: Joy, Sadness, Disgust, Anger and Fear.
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When I went to the movies, I'd just closed out a work week spending hours every day dealing with mobs of social media trolls attacking the organization I work for. First hundreds, now thousands. It's been a seemingly endless stream and it's my job to listen. Normally this community management is a joy -- I get to read posts about people doing good in the world, I get a glimpse into the generosity of people. I thank them. They thank me back, not knowing who I am. And yet the exchange feels so genuine I internalize a piece of gratitude in some small way. My work feels meaningful for a moment. We exchange some bit of human connection though I am not exactly playing a human role, and yet I kind of am.
Other times, like this past week, it's not so delightful. Sometimes people share offensive pictures at me, they tell me to "burn in hell." Well, again, they don't exactly tell me to burn in hell. But I'm on the receiving end, I'm the human that reacts in this exchange, so who else would they be telling?
There's this quote from literary critic Frank Laurence Lucas I came across years ago, and I think of it every so often these days. It seems like a comment more relevant now than ever, which was:
"Words can be more powerful, and more treacherous, than we sometimes suspect; communication more difficult than we may think. We are all serving life sentences of solitary confinement within our own bodies; like prisoners, we have, as it were, to tap in awkward code to our fellow men in their neighboring cells."
Tap in awkward code to our fellow men! Dang, if that's not the most unintentionally perfect description of Twitter I've ever read, written 46 years before Twitter was invented! And how often this awkward tapping gets us into trouble.
During Inside Out, they look inside the emotional headquarters of main character Riley, as well as those of her family. For me there is something so fundamentally touching about the characters that play the emotions. I could relate to them in a more profound way than I could the human characters themselves. The five emotions are universal (even if their clothes and hairstyles vary from person to person, for successful comedic effect). I found myself contemplating my hypothetical Emotional Headquarters console, and wondering what colors illuminate my core memory bank. Throughout the movie, you see how the simple words that the human characters say go on to trigger emotions in various ways.
After I had a good cry, I went home and flicked open my work Twitter feed to a new onslaught of attacks. I got mad again. But mostly disgusted. The full spectrum of emotions on a Saturday night, you could say. Everyone says not to pay attention to Internet trolls, and I agree for your own personal sanity that's the best idea. But in this case, I couldn't hit block and ignore. It was my job to read, process, assess, transmit, even respond occasionally. It is so easy for people to say hateful things on the Internet without acceptance of the consequences of their words, without recognition of where they will fall, because of the space between their fingers and someone else's screen, the air between satellites and the miles of fiber-optic cable that disconnect us. Women, feminist writers especially, know this all too well. Women face such heinous personal attacks on a regular basis online. And so more than anything, I feel fortunate these comments I'm digesting have simply been at me, rather than on me.
Unfortunately the subject matter hit home, it made me defensive of fellow women and our rights and our health. It made me enraged and then I was enraged that trolls were indirectly enraging me. And so I wondered if I could take the formula of Inside Out and apply it within an empathy experiment. In a sense, I wondered if I could understand where these people were coming from. It is indeed hard enough to practice empathy when we are sitting across from one another, how could I possibly begin to imagine the Emotional Headquarters of a person named "Quack Quack" on Twitter whose image is a Bible verse? But, I reasoned, a troll is still a person. Even if it's a bot (which I realize many are), it was created by a person with some specific intention, some set of unique experiences and memories. A troll is no less a person than me, sitting at work, generating a listening report. I decided that if part of my job is to deal with trolls and Internet militants, I have to humanize them, I have to reflect on their human capacity for mistakes, the messed up or transformative experiences that may have shaped their beliefs and personality, the ways in which our lives are fundamentally different. If I don't, I'm just going to be pissed off all the time.
So this weekend I started that work. I imagined what may have happened to them, these Internet trolls. What caused their Sadness to drop a little blue sad memory into their core memory bank, or if perhaps Anger or Fear rules the roost of their Emotional HQ, rather than Joy. What filled them with such strong feelings that they are blind to the facts? And perhaps I am giving these people, these trolls, too much credit. Perhaps I could grow an even thicker skin and go forth. But instead I imagined. We'll probably never understand certain people, especially those separated from us by wireless frequencies, but we can spend our lives practicing it. Because I have to say, the next time I scrolled through that feed, I felt a lot better.
What's up.
A Vox explainer on every single "is yoga actually good for you?" study that was ever done. TL;DR? Yoga is really good for your lower back slash back pain in general. And that's literally it apparently. Because apparently yoga is just an exercise routine. Or something.
Namaste! Namaste! Namaste's for everyone.
Maybe gluten isn't the problem, maybe we're the problem.
Dear god never pay $340 for a pair of yoga pants but if you do, here's how to keep them from pilling.
Try this at home.
Option #1 is just to go see the movie Inside Out. Option #2 is a sort of empathy-building exercise. It goes like this, and if it sounds crazy it's because I made it up. I know the movie was made for kids but actually, it's got some applications for adults, too.
Imagine a person in your life who has challenged you recently. This could be a parent, a child, a friend, a stranger, etc. Maybe they said something that offended you, maybe they challenged your authority or morals, maybe they broke your trust or disrespected your time, whatever.
Take five minutes, on your commute or before you go to bed, anytime you can concentrate without disturbance. And imagine what their Emotional Headquarters looks like (borrowing from the movie again here). Draw in your mind's eye how their Joy acts, what their Sadness sounds like, what their Fear reacts to.
Now imagine a recent scenario that really set you off about this challenging person. Play that scenario in your mind as it's happened before. Remind yourself of the whole familiar story line.
Now, imagine it all over again, but this time instead, instead picture their emotions on the inside rather than their face. What could you do or say to trigger their Joy, rather than maybe some of the other emotions.
Now, imagine what sort of activity your Emotional Headquarters would go into in response to this.
Anything interesting?
Tunes
New additions to the Yoga Playlist to the People including mellow tunes from Jose Gonzalez, My Bubba & J. Tillman.
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