Playbooks for What Comes Next
how our parasocial relationships teach us real life lessons
A hi from Sunday…I think? Seriously, what day is it?
I am continuing on with the subscription donation project. For November, the organization is the Museum of Chinese in America. Which, yes, is the same one it was for October. I’ve decided each organization is going to get two months now. If you are new here (welcome!) or need a refresher, you can always find more details of the project on my About page. Also, if you want to be a matching donor, let me know.
I have also decided to extend the paid subscription discount offer! Paid subscriptions are 10% off for the whole next year as a celebration for NYC Decade-aversary. If you want to upgrade, now is a great time.
This newsletter means a lot to me. If you are connecting with the work at all, please consider clicking the heart button and/or leaving a comment and/or sharing it. You’d be my favorite.
Programming Note: I’m traveling for a little bit and will thus be taking next week off. Possibly the week after that as well because it’s Thanksgiving times. But definitely next week (11/19). I know it will be hard but don’t miss me too much.
CW: This is some incredibly frank talk about aging, disease, cancer, death, parasocial relationships, and grieving. If that’s not your thing right now, I’ll see you when you decide to read. If that’s not your thing at all, I’ll see you on the next one. Take care of yourselves, please.
We are here to keep watch, not to keep.
- Kathryn Schulz
I hate being in situations where I feel like I’m expected to react a certain way.
This is one of the reasons why I feel weird receiving gifts. Also why I think being thrown a surprise party would be both deeply affirming and my worst nightmare. I worry however I react in the moment of whatever will be disappointing. I worry that I will sever important connections because I don’t know how to be watched. While I know how just to be with myself, I fear that flailing through being with other people is a deeply personal slight, albeit an unintentional one. I am a good reader of people and I fear being in a moment I don’t know how to let anyone else be a good reader of me.
I think this is why I have always felt uncomfortable with parasocial relationships. I know how it makes me feel to be watched, how it makes me feel when people have more information about me than I am aware of and so, I figure, the people on the other end of our parasocial relationships must feel that way too.
Parasocial relationships are one-sided relationships, where one person extends emotional energy, interest and time, and the other party, the persona, is completely unaware of the other’s existence.
That’s not to say that I don’t have my fair share of parasocial relationships. There are plenty of YouTubers who I’m sure I could be best friends with. There are plenty of celebrities that I think I could end up in a room with somehow. Hell, I have a recurring dream—this is embarrassing— where I am sobbing on the steps of a brownstone in New York City and some celebrity comes to check on me and then we form a deep and lasting bond. Best friends forever! My celebrity guest does vary based on what media I’m consuming at the time.
Parasocial relationships serve a function, I know that. An important one in a lot of cases. And I’ve been thinking about these types of relationships so much lately—particularly in terms of aging, disease, and handling grief.
Millennials are hitting that time of our lives when aging is no longer something we joke about but something we realize to be an unstoppable truth. Our aging means that our parents and caretakers are aging. Our aging means that our siblings and friends are aging too. One of the symptoms of aging is being confronted with disease on a more regular basis.
For some, this has actually been a reality for a long time. It’s likely that some of your friends have already lost parents and relatives. They may be living with chronic disease and pain themselves. Aging is a gift that not everyone gets but there is also an unfairness in aging. For those who are living in the physical and/or mental confines of a body that rebels against you, there is an unfairness in not being able to age in the way you would like to. The unthinkable for some is a long-held reality for others. We’ve been taught that if you’re already living in that reality and have earned that painful knowledge it’s better to hold it close to your chest. Regardless of how it makes you feel, the cultural message seems to be that it is more important not to make anyone else uncomfortable. Here in America, anyway. The national motto might as well be: You can handle it on your own. In fact, you have to.
Simply stated, that motto is an untruth. An impossibility. It is the motto of a place that doesn’t want you to realize there is personal strength to be gained through community. Being with others in a group means, yes, you get built up. But it also means the community, as a whole, gets stronger. And that’s bad for the bottom line.
Here’s where parasocial relationships come back into play.
There are a lot of experiences we can witness through parasocial relationships—getting a new pet, buying a house, becoming a parent, starting a new relationship, breaking up or even things as simple as trying a new recipe or riding a rollercoaster—that can make us more understanding and expansive people. Oftentimes we need to see someone else do something to know that it’s possible for us too. Or to know that it’s absolutely something we do not want to do. Possibility is more tangible when you have an emotional connection with the person showing you it is achievable. And I do think this is often regardless of whether or not you know the person in real life. Sure, a real life connection has advantages a parasocial one doesn’t but that doesn’t mean the parasocial should be discounted totally. Parasocial relationships serve a function.
Lately, their function seems to feel the most real in terms of cancer.
Within the last year, both Hank Green and Grace Helbig have announced and subsequently shared their journeys with cancer on the internet. Both long-time YouTubers, some of their audiences have been with them since the beginning of their careers. Hank, along with his brother, author John Green, have a huge community of people. Grace is someone that a lot of us grew up with. She’s experienced the social media age in a relatable way, coming in-and-out depending on larger circumstances and mental health. Both are around 40 years old. There are a lot of other celebrities, athletes, internet personalities, etc. who have made similar announcements in the last few years. Other “regular” people too. That’s part of social media. These two are just the two that have been particularly prevalent on my radar.
Cancer is more of a classification of diseases than a single disease itself. (In today’s newsletter, it is also basically a stand-in for all diseases we might have or end up having a personal connection with.) There are so many different types of cancer and each type of cancer reacts differently both in general and within each individual person’s body. For example, one of my aunts died in February from aggressive liver cancer. From diagnosis to death it was one week, exactly seven days. It was so fast that even my therapist was thrown off guard. “When I saw you last, she had weeks.” That is, obviously, not the same trajectory that someone else with the same cancer would have.
So, from the jump, we know each journey through a cancer diagnosis is going to be different. Based on the most recent data for the general US population, the risk of developing cancer at some point in your life is 40%. (You’re very welcome for that information.) It will likely touch us all in some way at some point, if it hasn’t already. With every person who shares their journey, the more data we can collect for our own.
There is a common refrain when someone finds out a friend or loved one has hit a rough event—a cancer diagnosis, a miscarriage, a death, to name a few—which is, “I don’t want to get it wrong.” Oftentimes, we are so worried about saying or doing the wrong thing in times of strife that we don’t say or do anything. I think it’s a reasonable worry. It can also be a detrimental one. Being distant because of fear instead trying to be there in any capacity is both isolating for the person who first-hand experienced the event and us. At least for me, I’d always rather someone show up and get it wrong over not showing up at all.
One of the major roadblocks, I think, is that we don’t have national cultural rituals in regards to mourning and grief. I mean all kinds of grief, too. Not just death-related. You can grieve so much stuff. We don’t have those rituals In America, anyway. There are certainly some places throughout the country where rituals are in place but, on the whole, we don’t have anywhere collectively to start. Instead, what we usually have is, a few days of bereavement leave (if that) and then the expectation to get back to work or life immediately, almost as if nothing happened. Without guidance or examples or practical knowledge of how to grieve ourselves and how to be there for someone grieving, silence can seem like the best option. Without anywhere to start, we often won’t start at all.
Our parasocial friends are showing us where to start. Grace and Hank are my examples in this case.
They both have videos about their diagnosis. They both have videos talking about the treatment. They both have videos with suggestions of gifts you can give someone going through chemo. Hank’s videos tend to be more science-based while Grace’s are vlogs that, to me, feel a little bit more personally vulnerable. It is good to see them show up every so often so we know how they are doing. This is another instance where I would like to see the person. I hope to see them and to get the scoop, even if it’s awful. I feel like watching their content, listening to their journey is a reminder that people out there care for them, even if we don’t know each other personally.
On the whole, we are woefully lacking spaces that build empathy, that encourage us to step outside of ourselves and consider another person’s journey. Obviously, the internet doesn’t usually foster that sort of thing. It can but it usually fosters the exact opposite. Honestly, I feel really privileged to be invited in to be a witness to these journeys. It takes a lot of guts to broadcast a messy, scary, uncertain time to an audience of strangers. It takes a lot of guts to share messy, scary, uncertain times with people you know in real life so, of course this is hard too. I have a really hard time showing up anywhere when I don’t feel at my best. Or when I don’t feel like any sort of good version of myself. It feels awful and I hate it. But, some of our parasocials are doing it. Fortunately for us and, well, considering what they are going through, unfortunately for them, they are creating the playbooks for us—playbooks for how to support people going through a hard time and playbooks for when we will, inevitably, go through hard times ourselves.
And I think it’s important that we are, at least, aware that these playbooks are available. Because, we all have and/or will deal with ongoing medical issues or know someone who is. We will all have or know someone who has cancer. We all have and/or will lose a loved one. We all have and/or will struggle with either situational or long-term mental health issues. This shows us examples of what we can say when it happens. No matter how silly that seems.
Matthew Perry comes to mind on the “no matter how silly that seems” point. Regardless of how he died—there is, unfortunately, a lot of speculation—he will be remembered as a person who was open with his struggles. One of the things affecting me the most is thinking about the Friends cast. It’s more likely that most of us are not someone like Matthew but someone who has loved someone like Matthew. Most of us are people who have watched someone struggle with personal demons, trying to help, wishing we could do more, and waking up everyday hoping today is not the day you get the phone call. We have been there, as present as possible, feeling our own specific kind of pain. And sometimes, the phone call comes. It comes with silence. So, as silly as it seems, hearing the Friends cast say that they were like a family and they need time to grieve before figuring out the next public steps, is infinitely comforting. There is always a public and private aspect to grieving. You are allowed to have the private. You are also allowed to be in community even as you navigate the private.
Parasocial relationships still make me uncomfortable. Unless they’re with specific characters, there are real people on the other end of them and that is easy to forget sometimes. But, these relationships also give me a certain amount of hope. When you see an example of how to navigate these processes from either end, an example of the way a community can show up, you have a better idea of how you can also show up. When you see reminders of the hard things people go through, hopefully, it also reminds you to check on that friend who lost a parent or is dealing with a lot of medical issues or who is trying to pull themselves out of a deep, dark cavern.
The thing is, there won’t always be happy endings. But we can get an idea of where to start the next chapter when we will need to.
This week, it was an off week for paying subscribers and I. If you want to see what happened during an on week, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Remember, for the whole of NYC decade-aversary, paid subscriptions are 10% off.