Emotional labor and building support networks

[gement]

I ended up reading a lot of this thread about unpaid emotional labor (which has a wonderfully moderated comments section, this is a "do read the comments") and it's speaking to something I've been struggling with

Comments

[maribou]

It is generally my impression that people in our mutual friend circles have a reasonable amount of emotional-labour awareness (we know what could be done, and probably even feel an "ought" about doing it) and not a lot of emotional-labour energy (we have chronic illness that make functioning hard and/or jobs that drain all our extrovert and/or children and/or and/or).

I actually think in general people our age have a lot less "free time" than people a generation older did, and/or a much wider circle of family, friends and acquaintances, such that we are bound to feel like we are failing on the emotional labor front even when our intentions are sterling.

My parents aren't particularly good examples of this or any generalization (because hella dysfunctional) but if I think of my friends' parents, aunts and uncles, etc - it seems like having every adult in the household working 40 hours a week outside the home was dang rare, and their energy was mostly focused on their families and maybe 3 or 4 close friends and (to a much lesser degree) another 3 or 4 activity-related acquaintances - and when I look around at my friends and acquaintances, it seems like having every adult in the household working 40 hours a week is ... a lot less than the average amount of hours every adult in the household works. And might be kinda nice for them, and let them stay in much better touch with their favorite people. Who often number upwards of 20 before we even start counting family members.

In most of my friend circles, including those that don't necessarily overlap with yours, I've noticed that as we all get older and have more friends and more things going on, it becomes harder and harder to actually SEE each other. Four of our closest friends here, we used to see 3 weekends out of 4... now it is more like 1 weekend out of six, and one of us has to get really fired up to make it happen. And these are still our CLOSEST friends, and 2 of the 4 are really good at emotional labor and do a ton of it (the other 2 aren't bad at it! just not holy cow off-the-charts good). Just everyone is kinda busy and outa cope when they aren't busy and we know we can trust each other to still be friends.

In the latter case, those 4 people? I know with no hesitation that in a crisis they would totally be there for me. And I would equally not hesitate to be there for them. This has been proven many times (would that we had fewer crises in our lives). It did take me a while to really BELIEVE that though, even though I knew it. It's really kind of weird to know that even if we hadn't talked in 2 months I could call them and ask them to meet me at the hospital, no questions asked. But it's also completely true.

Which is a really long way to say I sympathize? But also that just because you haven't been "keeping up your friendships" doesn't mean those people don't love you and won't want to help you. Even if they CAN'T help you, it doesn't mean that they don't want to! And I think most of them will want to, and some will be able to. *hugs*

Sorry if the above is incoherent, I just started a new med yesterday and incoherent is kind of where my brain is at.

[gement]

That was pretty damn coherent and incredibly helpful. I think the sheer head-count of people we expect ourselves to keep track of, sans the yesteryearly Feminine Kin-Keeping Training that some people on the thread are talking about their families expecting, goes a long way toward explaining my expectation gap.

So, yeah, I could be doing better, but it's telling that I felt like I should personally notify nearly a hundred people about my diagnosis before splashing it on social media, and then some of those have been getting back to me a week later saying "I kind of fail on keeping up with communication lately sorry" and are clearly feeling the same way I do.

Thank you.