'In The Right Headspace' Is The Most Emotionally Loaded Meme Of 2019
If you've been on Twitter lately, you may have seen the phrase "in the right headspace" floating around. If you're mystified as to where it comes from, you're in (bad) luck: we can catch you up.
Before we dig in, we hope you're in the right headspace to travel back in time two weeks: it was November 18th, the weather wasn't yet absolute trash, and you were still full of anxiety about reuniting with family at Thanksgiving and being unable to escape having the same conversation over and over with relatives asking you who your preferred candidate is.
Also, Twitter user Melissa A. Fabello just posted a long, thought-out thread about the best way to approach friends to initiate what could be a difficult or emotionally challenging conversation for the other party to have.
The notion that someone might not feel up to discussing something difficult is supremely reasonable. However, the inherent reasonableness of this idea was overshadowed by the final tweet in the thread, which proposed a template that someone could use in rebuffing a friend's attempt to initiate a conversation:
This last tweet got a lot of attention from Twitter, mainly because of the template's overly formal, distant tone that — given that it's supposed to be sent to a friend in emotional need — didn't strike anyone as very friendly at all.
Some people also felt like Fabello was misusing the term "emotional labor" throughout her thread, which term was originally intended to denote, as the person who coined the term, Arlie Hochschild, puts it, "the work of managing one's own emotions that was required by certain professions." In other words, emotional labor is the imperative to perform emotions in the context of a job — in retail, for example, or customer service.
The word thrown around most in criticism of Fabello's tweet was the word "transactional": most people were of the opinion that even if you didn't feel able to wholeheartedly support a friend at a certain point in time, implying that you had a limited amount of emotional space and couldn't offer them even a word of comfort would be the worst possible way to tell them that.
But the tweet thread did also have defenders: people who put emphasis on the fact that sometimes people are in their own crises and aren't able to help anyone else out, and who pointed out that the template Fabello offered is just that: a sample to be tweaked at will.
Ultimately, the heated debate gave way to more lighthearted tweets that imagined using the template exactly as-is:
Anyways. Back to "in the right headspace." Fast-forward to just a couple days ago, when the following tweet appeared:
The thing about this tweet that's causing people to react poorly is mainly its inherent contradiction: that while it takes care to be sensitive to the fact that the subject at hand might be too much for the receiving party to handle in that particular moment, it ignores the fact that floating such a loaded hint about the subject could be equally impactful.
Hence the torrent of responses this time around, some of which point out how awful it would feel to receive a message like this — it's essentially an even more loaded "We need to talk" text — while others take a more satirical approach that underscores how, uh, impractical the message would be in so many contexts.
Jokes aside, most of us are instinctively sensitive to the fact that some topics of conversation are heavier than others, sometimes we're in better or worse headspaces than usual and we should take cues from our friends when we talk to them.
Or, to put it more succinctly:
