Imagine for a moment that you went to the gym, and everyone there was really fit. Muscular and tone. You look around for cameras because you think you might be at a photo shoot. How would that make you feel? You might be excited because you are in the right place to improve. Or you might be like me and worry about fitting in, worry about annoying folks, worry that your goal of being a little bit healthier is too small.

That’s how YouTube is for me. I look at Guy in a Cube, and SQLBI, and Curbal; and I feel inferior. I think I’ll never charge those rates, I’ll never have that many subscribers, I’ll never reach that pinnacle. It’s demoralizing. It’s also utter horsecrap. I’m pretty sure they all see me as a peer.

Imagine again that in that gym you go to talk to one of the instructors and they say “If you want to become an Olympic level athlete, you will have to train for YEARS. If you want to be the best of the best you need 10,000 hours of dedicated practice. You may have to spend 20, 40, or 60 hours per week training to reach that level!”

Would you feel pumped up? Would you feel inspired? Would you feel excited?

Personally, I would leave that gym. And I would never come back, because it wasn’t a place where I belonged.

The problem with hustle culture

Hustle culture, like most cultures, has some admirable values. Grit, determination, and self-reliance are positive virtues. But taken to an extreme, it places all on the onus on the individual to “work” their way through any problem. In the past, I’ve hurt myself and others because of this mindset.

I worked at my last job far longer than I should have, because I thought if I just worked harder and more hours, I could fix it all. I thought I just needed to get better, faster, smarter. In reality, the kindest things I did for everyone was quit my job.

I’m painfully German, so the way I show love is through acts of service, not kind words, not quality time. My German grandpa showed me love by having me pour concrete. I’m not sure if he ever said “I love you”. And in my marriage, I thought I was only of value if I was “doing” things. I didn’t value just being present, and that led to some bumps the first few years of our marriage. I always thought I had to be “doing” something to earn my place.

Hustle culture places all of the responsibility on the individual. It ignores the role of community and society. It blames the individual for all of their problems. We as a community can do more than that. We can take on each other’s challenges.

Welcoming everyone

I hope you will forgive the religious reference that follows, but I believe that if you take the Christian faith seriously, truly seriously, then you have to believe that every single person is important. Every single person is made in the image of God and deserving of respect. Regardless of how many hours they work or their career aspirations.

It’s good to inspire greatness, but it’s better to remind people that they are already great.

And if you continue to take that faith seriously, then you have to be willing to meet people wherever they are, in whatever circumstances they are in, and be present. Be present and witness their suffering. See the single parent that is trying to manage parenting and a job at the same time. See the woman whom everyone assumes that she works in marketing or HR, and see her struggles and anger. See the person with depression or anxiety that struggles to get out of bed, much less make it through the work day.

To welcome everyone, we have to see everyone. And to see everyone, we have to tolerate their pain and suffering, and bear part of it ourselves.

Taking care of yourself

People making proclamations about what you should do or must do, they don’t know your life circumstances. They physically can’t. You know your limits and you should respect them. And even that inner voice in my head that compares myself to people on YouTube often forgets the full picture.

I spent last Sunday bringing my mom over to my house so we could bury her dog. It was sad, and it was human, and it was the best way I could have spent that Sunday. Better than anything work could provide.

In 2022, I worked too much and got myself burnt out. This year, I want to work less, take better care of myself, and stop comparing myself to subscriber counts on YouTube.

How I think about safety at the events has changed dramatically over the past 10 years. When I was young and unmarried, I didn’t think about it at all. I’m 6’2”, heavy set, and broad shouldered; no one is going to mess with me. And regarding emotional safety, I may have had worries or concerns about fitting in or being accepted, but I never thought of it as safety.

That has changed over time, as I learn that other people’s lived experiences were dramatically different than mine. It changed when my female-presenting spouse was harassed at a SQL Saturday speaker’s dinner. I had made a joke to a speaker I just met that “my spouse only wears dresses 3 times per year, and one was at our wedding.” He made a joke in kind that would have been appropriate if we were friends for years. We had just met. Later that night when he made another comment, I had to quickly shut it down.

My appreciation for safety again changed when my husband came out as transgender. We’ve thankfully never had an issue at any event, and everyone we’ve talked to has been warm and welcoming. But now what was once background noise for me is something I pay close attention to, hoping I don’t hear sirens.

How should we think about safety?

The way many lucky people like myself normally think about the word safety is unhelpful in this context. 10 years ago, I would hear the word and think about muggings and stabbings. Now, I think a better analogy is food safety.

Think about how you evaluate leftovers in your fridge to see if they have gone bad. You think about how old they are, you give them a look, and a sniff. I can count the number of times I’ve had food poisoning on one hand, I will regularly eat undercooked food. I am privileged in that regard. But many of us have had bad experiences with old food. We’ve found mold or had food poisoning. One bad experience and you start just throwing it out instead of risking it.

Think about how you evaluate restaurants. Do you look at the inspection notices? If your friend says they had food poisoning there once, how does that change your evaluation? You might write it off as bad luck. What if three of your friends have had food poisoning at a restaurant? You’d probably never go there and would tell others to avoid it as well. It’s rarely a binary decision.

For some people, food safety is deadly serious. If you have a peanut allergy, one thoughtless mistake could kill you. For me, I’m a diabetic and I learned the hard way that IHOP puts pancake batter in their scrambled eggs. What the heck! If I hadn’t tasted something was off, that could have sent me to the hospital. And that’s often the issue, I can eat peanuts thoughtlessly and safely. But for others it could harm them or kill them.

How I evaluate safety at conferences

So coming back to our topic, imagine if at every single restaurant you didn’t know how fresh the food was, and no one could tell you. What would you do? You would inspect it. You’d check for mold or hairs, you would give it a sniff. You might give it a small taste. Or maybe you’d provide your own food because of too many past incidents.

Based on my own personal lived experiences and what I’ve heard from others, I believe this is what it’s like to be a woman or queer in IT. You always have to inspect and sniff the food. And unsurprisingly, the chef is likely to take this personally as an insult. “I would never serve bad food!”. Well, maybe not intentionally you wouldn’t. But I can’t afford to assume that.

In the book, The Speed of Trust, trust comes down 2 things at the end of the day: character and competence. As a speaker and an attendee, I’m constantly sniffing out these two things out at every single event I attend, all while trying not to offend the chef.

Character in this case is your ability to acknowledge and understand these issues. If your conference does not have a Code of Conduct, maybe you don’t understand the benefits of one, or you need help writing it thoughtfully. If your conference is adamantly unwilling to have a code conduct, that’s like denying food inspectors into your establishment because your chefs are “well-trained”. In which case, I have no interest in attending or supporting your event. You could send me to the hospital.

Competence is your ability to execute on your character. You may have the best of intentions here. But if you espouse a commitment to diversity or new speakers at your conference, but have a very short CFS or 100% blind submissions, that sends mixed messages. While I can’t determine the cause, I will assume that either your values are false or that there is a challenge in your ability to execute on them. Sometimes it’s totally innocent reasons, but if I have a peanut allergy I don’t give a damn about whether it was an accident that my meal included peanuts. I simply can’t afford to ignore it, for my own safety.

So what can you do to signal safety?

Simply put, talk the talk and walk the walk.

Have a code of conduct, have a policy for harassment. But more than that, think about how you support unrelated marginalized groups. If a conference provides child support, I will see that as a “smell” of good character and competence even if I don’t have a child. Conversely, if they put pronouns in the bios but have 0 other DEI initiatives, I will read that as virtue signaling. I could be wrong in either case, but all I have are sniffs and tastes.

Talk the talk and walk the walk.

So, for 2023 I’ve decided that I want to learn Azure Synapse. I want to be able to make training content on it by the end of the year. I’d like to be able to consult on it in two years. And right now, I am absolutely banging my head against the learning curve. Let’s talk about why.

The integration problem

Occasionally, I’ll describe Power BI as “3 raccoons in a trench coat: PowerQuery, DAX, and visuals”. What I mean by that is it is 3 separate products masquerading as a single, perfectly cohesive  product. Each of those pieces started out as separate Excel add-ins, and then were later combined into a single product. And it shows.

The team at Microsoft have done a great job of smoothing out the rough edges, but you still occasionally run into situations where the integration isn’t perfect. A simple example is where should I create my date tables in Power BI? Should I use M or DAX? The answer is either! Both of them have good tooling for it. Because these tools evolved separately, there’s going to be some overlap and there’s going to be some gaps.

Azure in general (and Synapse in particular) has this problem. If Power BI is 3 raccoons in a trench coat, Synapse is 10 of them wobbling from side to side. The power of the cloud is that Microsoft can quickly iterate and provide targeted tooling for specific needs. If a tool is unpopular or unsuccessful, like Azure Data Catalog, Microsoft can build a replacement, like Azure Purview.

But this makes learning difficult. Gone are the days of a monolithic SQL Server product where, in theory, all of the parts (SSRS/SSIS/SSAS) are designed to fit cohesively into a single product. Instead, Microsoft and us data professionals must provide the glue after the fact, after these products have evolved and taken shape. Unfortunately, this means understanding not only how these pieces fit together but when in practice they don’t.

This is the curse of the modern cloud professional. We are all generalists now.

The alternatives problem

The other big problem is just like the issue with M and DAX, there are multiple tools available to do the same job. And while M and DAX compete on the borders or on the joints, Azure Synapse has tools that are direct competitors. The most prominent example is the querying engines.

From what I understand, Azure Synapse has 3 main ways to access and process data: dedicated SQL pools , dedicated Spark pools, and SQL Serverless. Imagine if I told you that you had 3 ways to cut things: a scalpel, a butter knife, and a wood saw. These all cut things, it’s true. But then imagine if I immediately dived into what type of metal we use for our butter knives, that our saws have 60 teeth on them, etc.

It would be a little disorienting. It would be a little frustrating.

You might wonder how we ended up with 3 different tools that do similar things. You might wonder when you should use which. You might wonder when you shouldn’t use one of them especially. Giving your learners the general shape and parameters of a tool is a big deal.

Imagine if a course on Azure ButterKnife™ instead started with “This is Azure ButterKnife™, it is ideal for cutting food especially soft food. It shouldn’t be used on anything harder than a crispy piece of toast. It originally started as a way to spread butter on toast.” It would take 20 seconds to orient the learner, and if they were looking for a way to cut lumber, they could quickly move on.

The expertise problem

When I was doing a course on ksqlDB for Kafka, I ran into a particular problem. Because ksqlDB was a thin layer of SQL on top of a well-known Kafka infrastructure, so much of the content assumed you were experienced and entrenched in the Kafka ecosystem. It quickly covered terms and ideas that made sense in that world, but no sense if you were coming from the relational database world.

And a thing I would keep asking, to no one in particular, was “How did we end up here?”. What was the pain point that caused people to create an event stream technology and then put a SQL querying language on top instead of just using a relational database. I talk about this more on a podcast episode with the company that made ksqlDB.

Azure Synapse has a similar problem. It is an iteration on various technologies over the past decade. And it’s designed to support large datasets (multi-terabyte) and complex enterprise scenarios. And so a lot of the content out there assumes a certain level of expertise, in part because the people interested in it and the people training on it are both experts.

The challenge this presents is twofold. First, the more of an expert you are, the harder it is to empathize with a new learner. Often the best teacher is someone who learned a technology a year ago, and remembers all the stumbling blocks. This is a challenge I struggle with regularly myself.

The other issue is that the content often pre-supposes the learner knows what the foundational technologies are and why they are important. It might assume the learner Knows what delta lake is, and what parquet is, and um, why are we storing all our data in flat files to begin with???

That’s not to say that every course needs to be a 9 hour foundations course. But there are ways to briefly remind the viewer why something is important, what pain point it solves, and why they should care. And if they are totally new, this helps orient them quickly.

For example, a course could say “Here we are using the delta lake approach. This allows us to enhance the efficient column storage of parquet files with ACID compliance that we usually lose out on when using a data lake.” This explains to new learners why we are here and reminds seasoned learners why they should care. This can be done quickly and deftly, without feeling like you are talking down to experienced learners.

So now what?

I’m hoping this will help folks who make content in this area. If nothing else, I hope it will be a reminder to me a year from now, when I’ve forgotten what a pain this was. In the next blog post, I’ll write about the instructional design techniques people can use to get around these issues.

This T-SQL Tuesday is about Impostor Syndrome. I think that the term gets used in a broader context than the original meaning. From Wikipedia:

Imposter Syndrome is a psychological pattern in which one doubts one’s accomplishments and has a persistent internalized fear of being exposed as a “fraud”. Despite external evidence of their competence, those experiencing this phenomenon remain convinced that they are frauds, and do not deserve all they have achieved.

To me, it’s a syndrome when there is a persistent fear of being outed as a fraud. But I think there is a broader and more diffuse feeling of one’s skills falling short of what is expected or what other people perceive. I think a lot of people mean this when they say impostor syndrome. Heck, it might even apply to a broader sense of “winging it” or figuring it out as you go.

In this blog post I’m going to list concrete steps that have helped me fight this sense that I might be a fraud or don’t know what I’m doing. I personally believe it’s a tractable problem.

Pursue a growth mindset

Do you feel that you are born with a certain amount of intelligence and talent, or do you feel that it is something you can grow? When I was young, I felt that you were born with a certain IQ or a certain amount of smarts. The problem with this mindset is when you encounter evidence contrary.

Let’s say you screw something up at work. If you believe that you have a fixed amount of intelligence or skills, then you will see this a reflective of you as a person. If you have a growth mindset you are less likely to see this as reflective of you as a whole.

Build a peer network

So much of imposter syndrome can be broken down into two things: a disconnect with reality and a sense of invalidation. The disconnect is that, unless you are an actual fraud, your thoughts and feelings are not lining up with reality. In cognitive behavioral therapy, these things are called cognitive distortions.

The invalidation is the sense that this isn’t normal. That you are alone or unusual in the struggles you are having. That you should be feeling x or doing Y.

In both cases, having a peer network can ground you. Hearing other peoples experiences can be validating and reassuring. You’d be surprised how many of us are winging it. You’d be surprised how many of us have been handed a task and need to figure it out on the fly. For example, I am probably going to do a course on Azure Event Hubs and I know absolutely nothing about them.

Focus on just-in-time learning

In consulting, if you never say “I don’t know”, then you are full of crap. You can’t know everything. If you merely say “I don’t know”, then you are a fool. A good consultant says “I don’t know, but I can find out!”. That is one of the keys of consulting.

So much of my confidence in working as a consultant is knowing that I have a strong peer network I can reach out to. So much is knowing I have a strategy for just in time learning.

One way to do this is to practice presenting and blogging as a way of practicing your research skills. Another is to work on home labs. Multiple times I’ve had to learn something new like mirroring or availability groups for a customer job. By doing those home labs I was able to build confidence for the project as well as confidence for future learnings.

Present, write, and teach

A lot of this vague unease comes from never achieving mastery in a specific area. From those lingering unknown unknowns. One way to rout out those unknown unknowns is to create and share content on the subject.

Doing so will force you to think through the subject, to think through what questions people might ask. The first dozen presentations might be a bit rough. But as you continue, you’ll have a better sense of what it means to really know a topic.

Do paid consulting

I realize this simply isn’t an option for most people. Consulting can be stressful and anxiety inducing, especially if you are struggling with impostor syndrome. But it’s amazing how good it feels to charge for a project and by the end of it have a happy customer.

I still giggle when I tell people my hourly rate, and I keep expecting to get pushback about being too expensive. But it doesn’t happen. It turns out that other people value my time and skills more than I do.

Summary

My suggestions boil down to three things:

1. Build confidence in your ability to learn on-demand
2. Experience mastery through content creation
3. Find people who value your skills enough to pay for them

Content warning: depression, suicide

Matthew Roche recently blogged about his struggles with mental illness. I applaud his courage, because it’s easy to worry what people will think about you. More recently, a member of the SQL Community took her life, and frankly the thought scares the shit out of me. It scares me, because some day that could be me. In fact, it’s been a recent point of discussion with me and my wife.

I write this post because I hope that if you are struggling with these feelings, you will get help. Please do something, because there are people that love you and would be devastated if you left this world. Here is what depression looks like and what I do to stave it off.

What is depression?

The English language does us a disservice in that the word for what is a crippling mental illness is the same word we use casually for being bummed out or sad. And while there is a spectrum, with there being things such as dysthymia or anhedonia (lack of pleasure), depression is often accompanied with what are called cognitive distortions.

If you think “I’m a failure”, that is a cognitive distortion, that is just factually wrong. You may have failed at a thing, but we are multifaceted, changing people. Depression is a matter of being disconnected with the reality at hand.

So what does the difference look like? We all get sad sometimes. Sadness is a good thing, grief is a good thing. These are healthy responses to difficulties in life. Victor Frankl, when writing about being in a concentration camp wrote, “An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior” . To never feel sadness or grief would be abnormal.

Here is a picture of what healthy grief looks like:

Depression is very different. It is an auto-immune disorder of the mind. It is very commonly accompanied with negative thoughts that are pervasive, persistent and pessimistic. Common themes are feelings of helplessness, hopelessness, worthlessness, and suicidal ideation.

Here is a picture of what depression feels like:

If you are uncertain if you are depressed, take this depression checklist. It’ll take 5 minutes and may reveal something you are uncomfortable admitting. I took it just took it now, and today I am a 14 out of 100, or mild depression. There have been days when it’s been in the mid 30’s, or moderate depression.

Open Source Mental Health performed a survey of 1570 people in technology.  Of those who answered the questions, 78% indicated they had a mental illness and around 70% of those indicated that they had a mood disorder such as depression or bipolar. We work in a field that often requires us to be on call or can make stressful demands on our lives. It’s more common than you might think.

It needs treated

I have a disease that requires daily treatment and medicine. My body doesn’t produce the chemicals I need. If I don’t treat it on a regular basis and monitor myself, someday I might die. That disease is called diabetes.

That’s right, I take insulin because my body stopped producing it years ago. I don’t think of myself of weak or less than because my body doesn’t work the way it should. Depression is often the same. Something has gone wrong in the brain. It could be a chemical imbalance, traumatic childhood events, or just a naturally lower set point for mood.

Whatever the cause, it still needs treated. It can be hard to admit and feel like a failing. I’m a guy, and I hate, hate, hate feeling like a burden to anyone. I hate asking for help. So much so, that when I was diagnosed with diabetes in the hospital, I told my now wife that I’d understand if she broke up with me. She just about slapped me. Boy was I dumb.

Get help. Please.

How I treat depression

Here are the ways I treat my depression:

Medication. Every single day, I take 10mg of Lexapro. I avoided it for a long time, I’ve heard horror stories about psych meds. I tried everything else, but eventually I decided I needed to take medicine.

The first month was hell and it takes 6 weeks to kick in. I had dry mouth and wanted to crawl out of my skin. After that my body acclimated, and the bleaker side of depression went away. I didn’t feels as dark and lethargic and hopeless. I still had negative thoughts and burnout, but I didn’t feel hopeless anymore. Many people have to try multiple medications to find one that works for them.

Exercise. The second most effective thing I’ve found to treat my depression is exercise, especially cardio exercise. I have to exercise every day, even if I’m sick. If I go a week without getting exercise, I start to get a resumption of symptoms. Exercise is as important as any of my other medications.

Sleep. Sleep is massively critical to good mental health. Sometimes I track my negative thoughts using a tally counter. A bad night’s sleep can double the number of negative thoughts I have in a given day. You wouldn’t give a SQL server 4 gigs of ram, why would you give your brain 4 hours of sleep and expect it to function properly.

Light. I hate the winters in Pittsburgh. It’s dark when you leave for work and it’s dark when you come home. I feel my symptoms most severely during the winter time. To deal with that I have lights everywhere. I have light alarm clocks, I have blue therapy lights to blast 1000 lux at my eyes and wake me up. I’ve even put hue lights in my room so my whole room lights up in the morning. The most effective thing is to just go outside, however.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. One of the most effective therapies is Cognitive Behavior Therapy. In short it identifies that it’s not just events that cause our emotional reactions, but also our beliefs about them. If you partner, come home late you could happy or sad depending on your beliefs.

CBT can be learned from books and I’ve found it to be effective. It feels a lot like having to catch your negative thoughts and then do a complex algebra problem, but I’ve gotten much better at labeling my automatic negative thoughts.

Meditation. Something new I’m trying is meditation. Those negative thoughts, or ruminations, can be hard to catch sometimes. They are like little mosquito bites. Independently, very small. But if you have 150 mosquito bites in a day, they add up. Meditation helps me catch myself and implement the CBT. I use the 10% Happier app and recommend the audio book. It’s fantastic and totally secular, if that’s your preference.

Biofeedback. Sometimes I count my negative thoughts with a physical tally counter. I think this week it was something like 30 -> 26 -> 22 -> 6 -> 7 -> 5 . I’ve had days where is was between 100 and 200. That’s a negative thought every few minutes.

I found that when I actually count them, I make more of an effort to catch myself and think healthier thoughts. Instead of thinking “I’m a failure” I think “I feel embarrassed.” Instead of thinking, “I hate myself”, I think “I feel scared and socially anxious.”

Social interaction. Depression is an isolating disease and IT can be an isolating job. Social interaction get’s us out of our heads and can be a source of support. Even just being at the library and near people can be helpful.

Talk therapy. While I’m not currently in therapy, I was for a while. I found it useful to be in a non-judgmental environment and have someone else I could bounce things off of.

Summary

While I have been in no way cured, there are a number of things I do to treat myself. There are a multitude of options you can take and a plethora of resources out there. Some of them may not work, but many of them are worth trying.

I recently saw on Twitter some abusive behavior, and I know that Twitter and trolls go together like peanut butter and jelly, but for whatever reason I’m angry. Maybe because I know the person who was abused, maybe because the abuser is a part of our community. I don’t know. But I’m feeling angry.

If you have to ask “Why are there so many tech events only for girls?” you are either:
1) Trolling
2) Severely lacking empathy and imagination
3) or both.

— Eugene M (@SQLGene) August 10, 2018

I want to do something, but there’s not much I can really do at this point. The abuser has deleted his account and I’ve already said my piece online. So, I thought I’d write a blog post about doing the bare minimum. For you, this post is likely to be utterly banal (“Well duh”), somehow offensive (“You are being too politically correct”), or both (“That’s your minimum? You can do better Eugene.”).

Well, damn it all and fire the cannons. I’m angryblogging.

Step 1. Be a safe person

The person you have the most control over is yourself. The person you have the least control over are abusive people, especially narcissists, psychopaths and anyone else who doesn’t feel a healthy sense of shame. So the most effective thing you can do is be a safer person.

Safe people apologize. Learn to apologize, practice apologizing, and understand that apologies are more than saying I’m sorry. In the book Apology Languages, the author breaks and apology down into 5 different parts.

1. 1. Expressing regret. “I’m sorry.”
   2. Accepting responsibility. “What I did was wrong.”
   3. Making restitution. “How can I make amends?”
   4. Genuinely repenting. “I won’t let this happen again.”
   5. Requesting forgiveness. “Will you forgive me?”

We all know how to say I’m sorry. It’s a cliché of mothers forcing small children to apologize, but often what’s more effective is putting your money where your mouth is. It’s taken a lot of practice for me to be able to say, “What I did was wrong, full stop.”, without needing to explain my motivation. Being safe takes practice.

Safe people listen, without always trying to solve the problem. Sometimes the other person just needs to be heard. Sometimes by trying to fix a problem you can accidently take away someone’s agency. I often ask my wife, “Do you want to vent or do you want advice?”. Her response is 50/50 each way.

Sometimes it’s not about the nail:

Safe people empathize and validate. I was in a really bad relationship once, and one of the things I understood later was the other person never said, “I can see why you’d feel that way.” They never said, “That’s understandable.” They never said, “I would feel the same way, in your shoes.” Validate the person’s feelings.

Toxic people are often unwilling or unable to empathize. For narcissists in particular, it presents a threat to their sense of self. Even worse, many do something called gaslighting, where you make the person question their own senses. Validation is a antidote to gaslighting. Let people know they aren’t crazy.

Step 2. Be aware of different experiences

I’ve written bad emails, angry emails. I’ve gotten in a feud with a co-worker. I’ve been stressed and blown up on people. And never once has someone told me I’m “too emotional”.

I’ve presented dozens of times and never once has some given the feedback that I should “smile more” or “present in lingerie”.

I’ve walked down many streets and I’ve never been catcalled or sexually harassed. I’ve never had to worry if someone was following me around. I’ve never had to run up to someone and say “help me, I’m being harassed.”

And all of this presents a challenge for me, because it makes it harder for me to empathize with women and their lived experiences. Because some experiences are so incongruous with my entire life that there is this cognitive dissonance. This dissonance can be quite uncomfortable.

It’s means that by default, certain experiences feel less credible because I’m never lived them. I don’t want to believe the crap people endure. Some of it seems too horrible to be true.

So that means I have work at it. I have to listen to the stories of other people and have a willingness to feel uncomfortable. The default is me minimizing and invalidating the experiences of others because they don’t match up with mine. So I have to do better than the default.

Step 3. Be alert

An embarrassing story: in the last year, I had the opportunity to stop some harassment in person and I didn’t. It wasn’t because I was scared or unwilling. No, it’s because I wasn’t paying attention.

I take martial arts and if someone was beating another person, I’d like to think I’d intervene. I haven’t been tested on that and hopefully never will, but I’m pretty confidant I’d jump in. But harassment can be subtle, almost invisible. And so I didn’t jump in.

In this case, nothing in the conversation was harassing. Nothing offensive was said. But something felt off. The non-verbals were screaming at me. And I didn’t hear them because I wasn’t listening.

You know when you cook some food and it’s 2 days expired and it smells off? Not moldy or anything, it looks perfectly fine, but you eat it and feel sick an hour later? Harassment and abuse can be like that. Nothing blatantly wrong but in your gut you know that something isn’t right.

Being able to stop harassment requires being alert and being aware. If you are someone like me who doesn’t worry about getting harassed personally, doesn’t get harassed regularly, this can take work. I never want to miss the signs ever again.

Step 4. Speak up. Step in. Intervene.

I hate conflict. I am a people pleaser. I have poor boundaries. So the idea of stepping in the middle of something gives me shivers.

I don’t like getting involved in Twitter fights, I don’t think they accomplish much. I don’t like the mob mentality on Twitter and online. When I think about the dog-pile culture on Twitter, I worry someday I’m going to say something tone deaf and lose my job over it. I say stupid things a lot.

But you know what? Say something. Do something. Step in.

I’m not encouraging people to put themselves in danger or incur abuse themselves. But for many of us that’s not a serious risk. I’m 6’ 2’’ and practice self-defense. I can afford to intervene in a conversation. My safety is not at risk.

Stepping in might mean just being physically present and making knowing eye contact. It might involve saying “Sir, that behavior is inappropriate.” It might involve entering the conversation and asking pointed questions that belies the true intentions of the abuser.

Online it might mean calling out bad behavior. Saying, “This is unacceptable.” or “This is harassment.” It doesn’t require being some internet crusader or dog-piling. You have a line personally, and you know in your gut if something crosses that line. You know in your gut something is wrong. If something is wrong, then say something.

I’ll say it again. I hate conflict. I’m a people pleaser. I have poor boundaries. But I’m working on speaking up more when I see something that I feel is harassment or abuse.

And remember, calling out bad behavior is not just about shaming the abuser. They aren’t likely to listen to you anyway. It’s about letting the victim know that they are seen, they are heard and they are not crazy. It’s about setting a standard for everyone else. There is a saying that “locks keep honest people honest”. Healthy accountability keeps everyone honest.

On doing more than the bare minimum

I’m not saying that we should all aim for just minimum. If your bare minimum is more than this, awesome. I’m not trying to encourage doing less. But for people like myself, the minimum is not the default. The minimum is a destination, not the starting point. Let’s change that.

What I’m trying to say is there are small, simple things we can all do without making a big leap out of our comfort zone. And that minimum bar is getting higher every year and we should all be aware of that. Times, they are a changin’.

Angryblogging, out.