Dear Jen: How do you handle dirty laundry?
This month's question is on the secrets we carry and what to do with them. It's also about literal laundry.
Cut the reruns I'm back, albeit a few days late! Before we jump right to this month's juicy question, a few quick announcements:
Finished Projects: I finished a second revision of my essay collection! I am looking forward to somehow sharing this thing.
Submit a Question: As always, please submit your questions via this Google Form or else you get more useless content. Don't dare me, there's a ton of questionable detritus floating around in this brain.
Fundraiser for Democracy: In this newsletter's two-month hiatus, there has been a presidential debate debacle, then an attempted assassination of a candidate, then the historic announcement of a new Democratic candidate, and then a strange inundation of people asking me if I am a weird unburdened BRAT who fell out of a coconut tree. All of this has been the impetus to a recent fundraising effort I started with my partner on behalf of Seed the Vote. It's an effort to support down-ballot candidates (not just Kamala) and/or for the memes. You can support this effort here. As a reminder, I wrote a newsletter about how to handle the hijinks of the 2024 election, which you can read here. In addition, if you're wondering where I stand this year politically not much has changed since I drew this in 2017:
And now my answer to a question I quite love from one of my favorite people:
"How do you manage dirty laundry, both literally and metaphorically?” – Jessika
Dear Jessika,
A warning – your question was surprisingly sneaky. Thus, the structure of my answer is going to be semi-confusing with a nesting structure under select points. More specifically, there will be:
A literal answer
An answer to the figurative version of "dirty laundry," which is divided into:
An answer to the sub-question, "Am I the holder or receiver of said dirty laundry?" The answers to this sub-question to the original question further consists of:
Guidance for being the dirty laundry holder
Guidance for being the dirty laundry receiver
An answer to another sub-question: "To air dirty laundry or to not air?"
You ready? Me neither, so here we go.
Let's start with the literal. When it comes to my dirty laundry, I:
prioritize it as the "anchor chore" of my weekend. What this means is that if laundry is not done by Sunday night, the weekend was a productive failure in "adulting."
split the load into two (lights and colors) to avoid the white-turned-pink situation that has happened far more than I care to say. By the way, that shade of laundry pink is a very specific and distinct hue of "I fucked up." I'm surprised it has not appeared on a triggering Pantone color swatch.
read the multi-translated novellas that appear on the side tags of shirts and try to follow those directions.
Now to the question of figurative dirty laundry.
For the uninitiated, "airing dirty laundry" is an idiom about secrets – often embarrassing and unpleasant secrets – becoming public. Perhaps it's a challenging, unsettled relationship problem that becomes externalized in a terse exchange on Valentine's Day because all that holiday gives us is pain, false expectations, and overpriced tiramisu. Maybe it is a deeply entrenched familial secret. I think the most common form of "airing dirty laundry" is the lifelong journey of revealing more about ourselves – what gives us true joy, what brings us shame, what angers us, what we really want – even if the revelation is at odds with what others expect from us.
Before I delve into my responses, I want to remind all 7 of my readers that I am not a therapist. I'm just another Substack schlup who answers questions via anonymous Google Form submission. There are real implications to carrying deeply held shame and harboring challenging secrets on behalf of ourselves and others. If desired and needed, I also encourage you to seek professional assistance. As always, my responses are offerings of framing questions that I use for myself.
Sub-question #1: Am I the holder or receiver of said dirty laundry?
If I am the holder of dirty laundry (as in I am carrying the secret), the main framing questions I ask myself are:
Am I harming myself by holding on to the secret?
Am I harming others by holding on to the secret?
I am very aware that answering a figurative question with broad rhetorical questions is really ephemeral, so here are some specific examples:
I harmed myself by suppressing being queer for 15+ years.
I harm my partner and myself each time I am angered at certain behaviors, don't say anything about it and develop resentment.
I get annoyed by little things from family members, friends, and colleagues, but I can tolerate it if the behaviors aren't harmful. Now, here comes another answer within an answer of the overall answer:
There have been rare occasions where I was not the biggest fan of a person a friend was dating (and I know for the fact that my friends have experienced the inverse with me). In these situations, if the friend is happy and still making independent decisions, I let it go.
I really dislike being BCC'd on party invitations, but I can live with the annoyance of not knowing who else is going to a divorce party, so long as there is cake.
Sometimes holding a secret can be powerful. Sometimes it can be consuming. Sometimes, it doesn't really matter. Each iteration mandates its own subsequent response. For me, the journey begins with assessing potential harm.
Now, if I am the receiver of dirty laundry (as in someone is telling me the secret), I am always upfront about my limitations, about what I can and cannot do.
From there, the main framing questions shift to:
How can I be helpful?
What role do you want me to play? For example, do you want me to be a sounding board, offer guidance, etc.?
What should I do with this information within my limitations?
The underlying principle is not creating more harm for myself or others. Although this comes across a relatively simple operating framework, I am surprised how often people (including myself) fall through. If you don't already know, I would encourage learning about the troubling posthumous revelations involving Nobel Prize winning writer, Alice Munro. It's a high profile example of someone shitting the bed (and much worse) in assessing how to support her daughter's long-held secret without creating more harm. A warning - it's a story about sexual abuse.
Sub-question #2: To air dirty laundry or to not?
When it comes to the question of airing versus not airing, the most important thing I think about are the conditions of sharing. More specifically, are the conditions safe or set up for a decent outcome?
Early in my career as an educator, I would often work with students on whether they should reveal something publicly. Sometimes it was as innocuous as changing their major, other times it was something as vulnerable as their documentation status. The calculation was typically based on plans of safety and security – on the ideas of mitigating harm by thinking through timing, support systems, financial factors, and most of all, what keeping the secret would do to themselves. If the conditions are not currently right, how do we manipulate the conditions to make it so?
On a less serious note, there are times I think we're all kind of trashy sieves of information where there's always a path of travel for secrets. I really love the example of "Chisme Math," where telling your mom something means that the secret spreads to the vast stretches of the community, eventually landing at the local club's bottle girl. There's a Vietnamese version of this too, where my coming out to my parents meant that some 70 year old guy smoking his third cigarette at a coffee shop on Bellaire knew about it too. In my case, it didn't matter because I had already set up my personal situation to withstand it. With this context in mind, make sure that if things become public, have a plan in place you take care of yourself.
One more thought. We have been using "dirty laundry," which has some negative connotation to it. The dirtiest secret is that not all secrets are worthy of shame or suppression. At least, that's been the case for me. I'd encourage reassessing whether the laundry is truly "dirty" and perhaps, on reflection, reframing it.
Good luck with that dirty laundry, whether it's in your head or your hamper,
JTVN