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Heretic Hereafter Podcast: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Katharine Strange
Heretic Hereafter is about figuring out how to live the good life after leaving Evangelical Christianity. Whether you're religious or not, join us for a weekly dose of humor and reflection that helps us look past the superficial for life's deeper meanings.
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- 5 days ago5 min
The Secret Lives of Christian Wives
The Dishwasher DigSeveral years ago, a houseguest complimented me on my dishwasher loading. At first, I was flattered: yes, I am very efficient at loading the dishwasher and probably everyone else in this house could take a page from my book!!!But then he said, “It makes sense [that you’re good at it.] The dishwasher is your domain.”He meant this as a compliment (I think???) but it was one of those sentences that rattled through my brain with a nefarious clang: your domain is the dishwasheryour domain is the dishwasheryour domain is the dishwasherWas the subtext, “stay in the kitchen, that’s where women belong”? I didn’t want to think this person saw me that way, but I wondered. This offhand comment had me spiraling into self-doubt and wondering how others saw me. Don’t get me wrong; washing dishes is a vital (and often overlooked) task. But I doubt anyone wants to think of it as their life’s work.Heretic Hereafter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Ladies: Don’t Forget to Live, Laugh, Love! This memory came back to me as I began reading Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s latest book, Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made. In it, Du Mez traces the evolution of white Evangelical women’s culture, starting in the late 19th century and continuing to the present, up to and including Erica Kirk.As someone who grew up reading Focus on the Family’s Brio magazine, many figures and movements (such as Rebecca St. James and True Love Waits) were old hat to me, but there were plenty of bombshells in Live Laugh Love, including surprising details behind the creation of some childhood favorites like Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie series and The Hiding Place by Corrie ten Boom. But the most striking part of Du Mez’s book was the way she was able to trace the pernicious influence of “New Thought” in Christian Fundamentalism.What is “New Thought”? Maybe you know it by the name “The Secret,” “The Law of Attraction,” or "the prosperity gospel.” If you were LDS, it was “keep sweet.” Maybe you know it as the reason you were forced to grit your teeth into a smile at church and pretend that everything was fine—it’s the idea that God blesses those who obey authority and think happy thoughts. Long before your high school classmates started selling Amway, Christian Fundamentalism embedded this pyramid-shaped power structure into its churches and para-church movements. Surrendering to authority was the same as obeying God. Any suffering a person experienced could be traced back to disobedience or doubt.Women were expected to cede authority and decision-making to men, to never criticize or question. In return, men would protect and provide for us. It’s the 1950s housewife (minus the pill addiction) and the 2020s tradwife (minus the army of paid help). Du Mez’s history shows how old this song-and-dance is. Female Christian Influencers have been peddling New Thought since Hannah Whitehall Smith’s The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life was first published in January 1883. The Dark Reality Behind the Fairy TaleDu Mez effectively demonstrates, again and again, that the women who espoused New Thought as the way to happiness often concealed lives of struggle including broken marriages and disillusionment with Christianity. The story of Elisabeth Elliot, former missionary, was particularly affecting. White Evangelical women have been sold a bargain: that if we give up our agency and power in order to submit to men, those men will take care of us. New Thought and white femininity combined to form a sort of magical thinking: who needs to fight for equal rights when we can have something almost like equality bestowed upon us by our benevolent husbands?But proximity to power isn’t power. Obedience and subservience aren’t power. Only power is power. Women forget that at our own peril.Don’t get it twisted: I’m not saying that marriage is bad or that men can’t be trusted. I am a big proponent of a healthy, interdependent marriage. What I am saying is that it is the height of delusion for women to believe that we can cede our critical thinking and our agency to anyone and come away better for it. Such dependent relationships are not an equal partnership; they’re more akin to a parent-child relationship. And, indeed, much of the advice Du Mez quotes from marriage manuals such as the infamous Fascinating Womanhood advocate that women a
- 1 weeks ago5 min
I Thought I Had Gender Roles Figured Out. Then I Had a Son.
In a moment of tween desperation, I asked my mom whether I could try out for cheerleading. It was the late 90s and the girls at cheer camp seemed to have cracked some secret code to girlhood: their hair was always perfectly styled; their lips impeccably glossy. If I could just don that pleated skirt, I was sure their power would rub off on me and I’d stop being the middle school weirdo.“Girls shouldn’t cheer for boys,” my mom replied, “they should cheer for themselves.” Cryptic, vaguely feminist sayings like this occasionally sprang from her mouth, despite her staunch Complementarian beliefs (Complementarianism is the belief that men and women hold separate but equal roles in church and family life and that these roles are prescribed by God). Heretic Hereafter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.On the one hand, Mom would insist that all women had a divine calling to marriage, motherhood, and subservience to men. Then she’d turn around and spout off a defiant little opinion that hinted at her own internal conflict.I never became a cheerleader. Instead, I grew into a youth group superstar and then a know-it-all Christian college freshman. There I decided that it made no sense that I by dint of my femaleness was assumed to know less about faith than some random dude. I rejected my parents’ complementarianism and became an egalitarian and a—gasp! —feminist.And yet, the sexism of my upbringing hadn’t left me. I still believed marriage and motherhood were my ultimate calling and doubted my ability to get by without the guidance of either my father or a husband. The truth was, I’d never been taught to cheer for myself or believe myself capable of big things. Still, I imagined myself one day raising a fierce feminist daughter who would grow up to achieve great things. And then I had two sons.Boys were not entirely foreign to me—I had two younger brothers whom I’d spent a large chunk of my childhood mothering. But I wanted to do things differently. When my first son, A, was born, I bought him gender neutral clothes and toys—blocks and balls and a doll he’d occasionally poke in the eye. I was going to raise him to be a sensitive little feminist.Then one Christmas, a family member received a set of Dollar Store plastic samurai swords and A, then 18 months old, shrieked, grabbed one, and immediately began chasing people around the house, whacking and stabbing them. Even as I laughed at the spectacle, I couldn’t believe his tiny bloodlust. He didn’t watch TV; he’d never even seen a sword before. How did he know what it was for before he was even potty trained?!?!?Until A was born, I’d always thought of gender as something that was, largely, culturally programmed. But the sword incident, coupled with his fascination with vehicles, left me questioning this assumption. There was something innate to this small human that loudly insisted I AM A BOY!!!!!If masculinity is a spectrum, A has always been on the extreme end. In our liberal Seattle neighborhood, where plenty of little boys are painting their nails and belting songs from Frozen, there was my little warrior, dressed in head-to-toe camo, toting a Nerf gun to the park longer than he was tall, while I follow along behind, cringing and hoping my neighbors didn’t think I was in the NRA.Now a high school freshman, A is in the thick of the work of adolescence: figuring out who he is. While I appreciate that our culture has evolved from suffocating gender roles and casual playground homophobia, I’ll admit that our culture’s shifting social mores around gender roles has left a bit of a vacuum, into which, I project all my anxieties about raising a good men.So, over the next two months I want to look at gender roles. Here are some questions I have:* Is gender innate, culturally constructed, or both? And does the answer change how we think about it?* Are gender roles inherently limiting? Are they ever helpful?* How do we deprogram ourselves from our own internalized misogyny?* How has the church’s emphasis on restrictive gender roles shaped how we understand ourselves/our spirituality?* What can non-binary, trans, and genderqueer people teach us about gender?* What about the whole “toxic masculinity” label—is it helpful? Should we chuck it? How can we criticize the power structure without denigrating individuals caught in it?* How do we talk positively about masculinity without downplaying or dismissing women?* What role does virtue play in “becoming a man/woman”?* What about coming-of-age rituals? Are they more necessary for boys than girls?* Why does the phrase “be a man” squick me out so much? What shou
- 3 weeks ago6 min
Love in the ER
Two weeks ago, my husband shook me awake at 4:00 a.m. “I’m going to the emergency room,” he said.I tried to blink myself awake. Never much of a complainer, Ryan had grown increasingly miserable over the past few days due to a pain in the roof of his mouth. That night, the pain had kept him from sleeping.I think I mumbled something along the lines of, “What? How?” as I sat up in bed.“I’ll take an Uber,” he said. My sleep-fogged brain considered this. My pillow was calling to me. And Ryan had taken himself to the ER alone before—Boxing Day 2014 when we had a toddler and a newborn and he’d stepped on a (shockingly sharp!) toy excavator, slicing a deep gouge into his toe. Then, like now, I knew it was a gray area sort of injury: requiring immediate medical attention, but not something life-threatening. And here he was giving me an out to back to sleep…“No, I’ll take you,” I murmured, mentally running through the tasks this would require, what I needed to bring, whom I needed to notify. ***This summer I’ve been thinking about what it actually takes to make community work. Much has been written about the loneliness crisis, growing rates of estrangement, how we are replacing eye contact with screen staring. Somewhere in the past few months I heard the phrase, “Everyone wants a village, no one wants to be a villager,” and I wonder, could it really be that simple? Is our lack of community simply our own fault?***Heretic Hereafter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Ryan and I wound up at Seattle’s Harborview Medical Center. It’s a level one trauma center that I only knew from newspaper write ups about gunshot victims. I’d hoped that 4:00 a.m. on a Wednesday morning would be relatively quiet, that he’d get a quick exam, maybe some pain medicine, and we’d be on our merry way. We were greeted by five security guards, two police officers, and a metal detector. The waiting room benches hosted sleeping forms surrounded by piles of plastic bags and dirty backpacks, the tell-tale baggage of homelessness. Nurses seemed to know many patients by name—frequent fliers, I guessed. This ER felt like the last, fraying threads of a broken safety net. Here were the disabled, the poor, the mentally ill, the addicted. And yet people fell through the cracks here, too. As we waited, I witnessed security eject two patients who were acting aggressively. Even as I was relieved at their removal, I wondered where they would go.***Culturally, we are going through a profound shift in the way we understand relationships, and I think this has a lot to do with geography: for most of human history, community was not chosen but default. It was the people in your tribe, your extended family, your neighbors. Humans were tied to land and to ancestral homes. Waves of migration and industrialization disconnected many of us from the lands of our ancestors. Increasing economic pressure pushed generations of striving young people towards college education and the metropolitan hubs of various industries. Now, many of us have unprecedented levels of choice in where we live, what we do for work, and whom we associate with.The digital revolution, helped by the pandemic, further fractured the connection between place and relationship. Now your closest confidante might be someone you only chat with online and you may spend more time focused on parasocial relationships with podcasters or influencers rather than with friends you see in real life. Real life? Who has time for that?***A few hours after arriving, Ryan was finally taken to an exam room—and by “room” I mean “tiny alcove with curtain.” En route to our alcove, we walked through corridors lined with patients on gurneys—there didn’t seem to be a spare inch of space. Some patients slept in chairs hooked up to IVs.In the alcove stood a bed crowned with a variety of tubes and monitors. I looked around—there was no place for me to sit. The expectation, I realized, is that people come to this hospital alone. Indeed, no one I’d seen in the waiting room was accompanied. ***In the course of my 40+ years, I’ve said many goodbyes. I’ve moved 16 times. I have clashed with church communities whose beliefs I no longer held. I’ve gone no contact with family members. Maybe all of this had led me to a certain amount of overthinking on the topic of relationships and community. I notice how much time people in my community spend trying to optimize ourselves and our kids: we’ll do anything for work, anything to give our kids an extracurricular edge, even if these things (like travel sports) make us broke and miserable. There’s always a fear of being left behind.On the rare occasion that I’m able to get together with my neighbors we always find ourselves saying
- Aug 12, 20268 min
The Other Third Places We Need
Wild Waves/Enchanted Village, Seattle’s schlocky amusement park, is closing and I couldn’t be sadder about it. While significantly crappier than a Disney Park or even a Six Flags, running around Wild Waves is a rite of passage for many Seattle-area adolescents. It is THE end-of-year good behavior field trip that makes students think twice about racking up detentions. It’s not just Seattle—since 2020, at least 10 major American amusement parks have closed and many regional parks are struggling to return after pandemic losses. Nor is it just the rollercoaster lovers that are in trouble, other classic teen hangouts like malls are in serious decline. High school dance attendance is down too, blamed largely on teens preferring screen-based activities like gaming and scrolling.Where are the teens supposed to go? Is this just another sign of the times? Am I merely weeping for my own Millennial nostalgia, shaking my fist at a generation that would rather be playing Roblox?Heretic Hereafter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Online Connection is Still Connection…Right?It’s not like kids these days are digital hermits. Observing my own teens and their friends have showed me that many of their online activities are, in fact, very social. My sons love to game with friends while chatting away over headsets, alternatively strategizing and trash-talking.Likewise, technology enables teens to stay connected outside of school in ways an elder Millennial like me could only have dreamed of. Heck, we were confined to the world of desktops, dial up, and, if you were lucky enough, AIM chats. (Pity the rural kids like me, who were beyond the reach of AOL.)This heightened connectivity is also seen in the sprawling online presence of events like prom. This dance, one of the few to survive the decline, has spread into cyberspace, with kids planning (and posting) elaborate “prom-posals” and girls hopping into online groups to share which dresses they’ve purchased so that—gasp!— no one shows up in the same ‘fit.And yet, while the average teen has a higher quantity of social connections, the quality of these interactions has changed. Instead of tying up a family landline with marathon phone calls, many kids now mainly communicate via brief DMs. And that text-based communication has its downsides: it’s both less stimulating to the brain and lacks context clues (like facial expressions and tone of voice) leading to higher instances of misunderstanding. Studies show, we need face-to-face interaction to form deep relationships, but our technology is increasingly crowding out this option. Gaming systems have shifted away from in-person together play (via shared account and split-screen) to siloed play on separate accounts and screens. While older technology like the Nintendo Switch makes multiplayer, in-person gaming easy (provided you have enough controllers), many popular games and systems (such as Roblox or Xbox’s Halo) set up a ridiculous amount of hurdles to in-person gaming.There’s also a serious downside to real-life events turning into social media spectacle. This technology is, by nature, performative—are you actually having fun at the prom or are you merely performing having fun for your followers? If so much of your social life revolves around your platform, can you ever completely forget the virtual audience? Teen brains are already wired to see peer acceptance as a life-or-death situation, adding parasocial pressure is like throwing gasoline on an open flame.Why Community Needs Physical SpaceNo matter how much we enjoy connecting online, it turns out people need face-to-face interaction, and these interactions need to happen somewhere. In their book, The Great Good Place American sociologists Ray Oldenburg and Karen Christensen argue for the need for “third places”—spaces that are neither home or work (or, for kids we
- Aug 5, 20268 min
A Police Defunder Has Some Regrets
I’ve been following with rapt attention the new NPR/Seattle Times podcast, “We Keep Us Safe” which investigates the murder of 15-year-old Antonio Mays, Jr. at the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (CHOP) in 2020. This summer, we’ve been looking at what it takes to make community work. This new investigation of CHOP highlights the challenges of building a society from scratch apart from traditional institutions like the police. What Was CHOP?For those of you unfamiliar with CHOP, it was a protestor takeover of Seattle’s Cal Anderson Park and several blocks around it after the Seattle Police Department abandoned its East Precinct station in June of 2020 after several days of protest after the murder of George Floyd. The media portrayed CHOP, varyingly, as either a Summer-of-Love-type sit-in or a lawless hellscape. Anxious to cut through the hype, I visited CHOP and witnessed both its promise and problems first-hand. Heretic Hereafter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.There were many positive things happening at the park: tables offered free food and water to anyone who wanted them. There were medical personnel on hand and teach-ins using the “human microphone” technique many folks learned during the Occupy Wall Street protests. People were exchanging ideas and vigorously debating how to create the post-racist, just society so many of us were crying out for in those dark days.But while there were many in the park there to learn and vision together, the vibes weren’t exactly peace and love. Homeless people, some behaving erratically, had also streamed into the encampment. And as my friends and I sat eating tacos on the baseball field, we witnessed a group of masked men surround someone who was recording video. The group began shouting at the videographer, threatening violence. I’d seen enough and decided not to stick around past dark. Four days after my visit, 15-year-old Antonio Mays, Jr. would be murdered and his friend gravely wounded right in front of the abandoned police station. Questions remained: who killed Mays and why? And how had this protest against racialized violence ended up taking the life of a Black teenager?The InvestigationIn the days after Mays’ murder, rumors swirled: he was a gang member or a troublemaker, there to cause mayhem and possibly harm CHOP protestors. Having witnessed the various groups of people filtering in and out of CHOP, I all too easily accepted this explanation, figuring we’d probably never get the whole story. But reporters from our local NPR station and The Seattle Times were able to reconstruct a timeline of the murder using hours of security camera and livestream video scraped from social media. This, combined with eye-witness interviews, led to some startling revelations about why Mays was at CHOP and who likely killed him. The whole podcast is available now; I won’t spoil the conclusions for you because I think it’s worth a listen.The AftermathThe podcast begins and ends by interviewing Antonio Mays, Sr. As much as his son’s death has been held up as a symbol for this or that movement, we ought never forget that Mays was a kid. He was a musician, an aspiring BBQ pitmaster, a son, a brother, a classmate, a friend. As a parent, I can’t help but put myself in his family’s shoes. How awful to lose a child, how awful to not know why. Mays, Sr. wants justice for his son. No one has yet been arrested for the murder. Given the many errors in the criminal investigation, it’s unclear whether his son’s killer will ever face legal consequences.Here’s the thing I’ve come to understand about the push for police reform: it’s not all or nothing. While political polarization and media sensationalism painted the sides of the debate as either “the police are great, they can do no wrong” or “abolish all police,” many would-be reformers are just regular people like the Mays family who want the police to investigate serious crimes while not abusing their power to harass or harm people of color.Was Defund the Answer?I attended multiple Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. We were fed up with biased policing and with the government-sanctioned murder of unarmed civilians. We dreamed of a world where people experiencing mental health crises were met with a helping hand rather than guns drawn. One of our main chants during this time was, “Defund the police, 50% at least!”During this time, I tried to be careful about what I said in front of my kids, not wanting to overwhelm them. Still, they picked up on more than I realized. My eldest, then 8, saw a newspaper headline about the protests. He asked, “So they’re goi
- Jul 29, 20268 min
The Hardest Goodbye
This summer, we’ve been looking at commitment and what it takes to make communities and relationships work. Sticking it out has its place, certainly, but what about its opposite, calling it quits? Is there ever a time when we are justified in stepping away from relationships, even one as sacred as that between a parent and child?Content Warning: suicidal ideation. If you or someone you know is thinking about suicide, please call or text 988 for help.During the summer of 2020, I debated going no-contact with my mother. While my social media feed lit up with photos of people retreating to childhood homes, praises for grandparents as backup daycare, and even intergenerational TikToks, I was staring at the bland cover of a self-help book that detailed the process of cutting off a loved one. I couldn’t even decide whether to read it.The library had been closed for months, so this book sat in a stack next to my desk, calling to me like the tell-tale heart each time I sat down to write. What was I going to do?Part of me was stuck in disbelief that things had gotten this bad. As a child, I’d idolized my mother. I remember going to JoAnne’s to pick out fabric for matching dresses, watching her lay out the pattern pieces on the fabric: her larger pieces in the center, my smaller ones filling in the gaps. I would ask her endless questions about her life before me, making note of how I ought to be in the world. My baby book catalogues my aspirations at various ages: ballerina, teacher, nurse, mommy—all her ambitions became my own.I loved her biting sense of humor and her creativity. Her smile, when she turned it my way, felt like stepping out of a cold shadow into sunlight. And if she often kept me at a distance, shooing me towards the TV whenever I broached the kitchen where she spent most of the day cleaning, cooking, and drinking white wine, well, I aspired to be less annoying, more useful.Heretic Hereafter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.We had our ups and downs. When I left home for college, she sank into a depression so deep I felt it even 500 miles away. She joked about how I “abandoned” her. When we’d lived together, I’d been adept at gauging her mood and avoiding her triggers, but on the phone it was difficult to take her emotional temperature and figure out the right thing to say. In the summer of 2020, our conversations felt like stepping on landmines. I wrestled with duty—what did I owe the woman who gave me life, who raised, fed, and clothed me? Who, as she often reminded me, “only lived” to be a grandma to my kids, then 8 and 5. I never doubted that she loved us. But I also could no longer ignore her increasingly erratic behavior. On our weekly Skype calls she was usually drunk and moody. One night, she accused me of not being grateful for the matching sweaters she’d recently sent my kids. I objected that I had thanked her on a previous call and promised to send a photo of the kids wearing them when the weather was…you know…more sweater appropriate? My explanation only enraged her further: she accused me of secretly hating the sweaters and her, before enlisting the help of family members to harangue me for my ingratitude. By now this was a familiar pattern. After many years of therapy, I’d begun to wonder about my mother’s drinking and the way my family readily accepted her version of events. As I’d worked towards having healthier communication in my own relationships, the difference between my household and my parents’ was thrown into stark relief. This new self-knowledge also made me question the past: had I always wanted to be just like Mom, or had that been my only safe option? I’d spent the previous several visits trying to set boundaries with her around her drinking. When confronted, she acted like she had no idea what I was talking about but eventually agreed to not drink around us, “since it’s so important to you.” But during her visits she continued to ask for alcohol, to purchase it under various guises (“it’s for the marinara.”) After she left, I’d find empty wine bottles hidden in various nooks throughout my house. After so much energy spent policing these boundaries, the forced separation of the pandemic came as a relief.I blamed our increasing distance on being COVID-cautious, but she could sense I was pulling away, which triggered more acting out. On a random evening, I might get half-a-dozen angry voicemails about what a terrible person I was. Sometimes she threatened to commit suicide since I obviously didn’t care enough about her to answer the phone. (When she did this, I’d contact family members who lived with or near her who would then call 911. Always take suicide threats seriously.)One of the hardest parts of having an addicted fami
- Jul 22, 20265 min
Text the Friend You're Thinking About
By my early 30s, I’d moved 16 times. I’d transferred schools 5 times, lived in 14 different cities, and moved boxes in and out of countless apartments and houses. I’d always considered this my social superpower: I knew how to harness the allure of being “the new kid.” I was both extroverted and judgy; I sorted people quickly and built friendships that blazed quick and hot. (There’s nothing like an expiration date to cement intense friendships.) The cycle was: meet, befriend, leave, over and over again. It took me years to realize that this supposed “superpower” was holding me back from real, deep friendship.Heretic Hereafter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Do We Still Need Friends? The Allure of the “Everything” RelationshipIt’s not just me who lacks friendship skills. From the “loneliness crisis” to viral content on “how to make friends as an adult,” it seems a lot of us are craving friendship.This lack feels baked into our culture. America doesn’t prioritize or center friendships, instead it’s largely oriented around romantic partnerships. (You can’t, for instance, share health insurance with a friend, no matter how close you are.)As many of our community affiliations (such as churches or civic groups) have dwindled in the past 50 years, more and more of our emotional and practical needs have fallen to our romantic partners. Our romantic expectations have never been higher: we want someone who will not only sweep us off our feet and do their fair share of domestic drudgery, they also need to also be our best friend. These expectations have given rise to what psychotherapist Esther Perel dubs, “The Everything Marriage”:“Everything that we wanted from a traditional marriage — companionship, family, children, economic support, a best friend, a passionate lover, a trusted confidante, an intellectual equal — we are asking from one person what an entire village once provided. And couples are crumbling under the weight of so much expectation.”(emphasis mine)Writing about this phenomenon for The Atlantic, author Rhaina Cohen calls it the “self-expressive” marriage: “spouses expected their partnership to be the site of self-discovery and personal growth.” (Gift link here.) As Perel and others have pointed out: expecting one person to be your everything generally doesn’t work. No one person is going to share all our interests, fill every single one of our needs, always be sexy and smart and interesting. Taking responsibilities for our needs means when one person can’t meet a specific need, we can find support in other relationships. I’m lucky to have a fantastic husband, but we don’t do everything together—he loves outer space and I love reality TV. I refused to see Project Hail Mary and he, in turn, doesn’t watch Love Island.We need friends to share our quirky hobbies with. We need them to help with care- and domestic work. We need people who’ll willingly listen to us complain about our spouses or our jobs or our kids. We need people to split the cost of a vacation house or a Netflix account. But for all these known benefits, many of us still struggle.Why Keeping Friendships Can Be So Hard & What to Do About ItAll the things that make friendship easy, like proximity and stage of life, can work against you as life goes on. That friend who lived down the hall in your college dorm now lives across the country. Things that were easy now take effort, and we only have so much effort to go around.Here is my Very Scientific List of Things that Make Maintaining Friendship Difficult:* Physical distance* Changing life circumstances: one friend gets married, has a kid or takes on other caretaking responsibilities, loses their job, etc.* Lack of clarity around the friendship. The label “best friends” hardly seems adequate for some of these relationships, which are more like platonic partnerships. But our culture/families doesn’t really understand ordering life around friendship vs. a romantic relationship. (More of this in The Atlantic article linked above) Yet maintaining friendships across these changes is possible! A highly scientific survey of readers on Substack Notes and on my Facebook revealed some great tips:* Embrace the awkwardness. If it’s been a while, things may feel weird at first. That’s okay! My tendency is to act like I know what’s going on, but I’m learning a better str
- Jul 15, 20265 min
A Post for When You Hate Everyone
Do you ever have one of those days where you fantasize about throwing someone out a window? Not that you would ever actually want to hurt someone, but there’s just that “leave me the fuck alone” feeling?Part of living in families and communities that doesn’t get a lot of airtime are the low-level irritations and resentments that can build up in long-term relationships. During this “Stuck Together Summer” we’ve gotta talk about feeling pissed off at the people you, ostensibly, love.Bruh, Why You Mad?I’m not immune from petty annoyances. When my husband was home with me for two weeks after a recent shoulder surgery, I might have, at one point, complained about how loudly he was breathing.When I find myself angry at people for doing things like breathing or behaving in ways that are intrinsic to them (such as my kids for being loud and argumentative) usually the problem is…me.In situations like this, some people like to use the acronym HALT (Am I Hungry, Angry, Lonely or Tired?) to check on themselves, I prefer the acronym SWaTHS: is the sun in my eyes? Do I have a wedgie (or other uncomfortable clothing situation)? Am I thirsty? Hangry? Sleepy? If SWaTHS doesn’t reveal a culprit, the problem is often boundary related. Many of us raised in high-control religions were taught to ignore our needs. The trouble is needs don’t magically disappear because you’re ignoring them! They just fester into irritation and resentment.Heretic Hereafter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.What Boundaries Are (and Aren’t!)“Boundaries,” like a lot of therapy speak, is a term being widely misused across social media. People say “boundaries” to try and control others, to set ultimatums, and to generally say “this is a thing I don’t want to do and so I won’t because: therapy!”Boundaries, sadly, aren’t magic words that get other people to do whatever we want. Boundaries are decisions people make for themselves about what kind of behavior they will tolerate in order to protect their own mental and physical health.For example: Say your Aunt Bertha constantly brings up your bald spot and it drives you absolutely crazy.Not boundaries: You say “Aunt Bertha stop laughing at my bald spot or I’ll throw you the window!”Boundaries: You decide to mention to Aunt Bertha that her comments bother you. You decide that if she keeps bringing it up, you’ll have to cut your phone call or visit short.Notice here that your decision is about what you will do. You can’t control whether Aunt Bertha makes a crack about your appearance. You can control your response.Why Some People Hate BoundariesIn my experience, most people are very respectful of boundaries if they’re framed in a gently, such as “I wish I could help you with your tuba solo, but I’m at capacity.” Some people, though, take boundaries EXTREMELY PERSONALLY because:* it triggers their guilt: were their previous actions hurtful and they didn’t know?* they have rejection sensitivity (common in ADHD) or other trauma related to boundaries* the previous arrangement (you being a doormat) worked well for them. When you set boundaries it threatens the status quoI’ve dealt with a fair amount of drama regarding pretty straight-forward boundaries around my kids’ needs for regular meals and bedtimes. It sucks to feel like you have to choose between good parenting and keeping the peace. But, regardless of how people feel about our boundaries, it’s important to stick to them. Their feelings are their issue, not yours.There are, however, more complex boundary situations.Boundaries with People Who Have Power Over YouBoundaries are more complicated with people whom you depend on for housing, a salary, or other needs. It’s a lot easier to set boundaries with Aunt Bertha when she’s not the one paying your rent or watching your kids on the reg.For instance, if you have reason to believe that your boss will punish you for setting boundaries, you might have to take a different tack, such as lowering your expectations (“Bob always microwaves tuna, that’s just how it is”) or, if the situation is really bad, looking for a different job. Boundaries with People You Have Power OverFor many of us, setting boundaries with people we have power over can be equally difficult. Having been on the receiving end of abusive bosses, I’ve been reluctant to do things like tell my babysitter to put her phone away and, you know, watch my kids. (We all want to be liked, right?) I have to remind myself there’s a difference between being clear about expectations and being a bad boss.</p
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About Heretic Hereafter Podcast
Heretic Hereafter is about figuring out how to live the good life after leaving Evangelical Christianity. Whether you're religious or not, join us for a weekly dose of humor and reflection that helps us look past the superficial for life's deeper meanings.
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