Power in upset - what, or when?
12 August 2026
There have been a couple of instances recently where I have felt compelled to share upsetting personal news with friends. I want to talk here about the decisions I make when doing this, to the extent I do at all. These decisions are deeply personal and I don’t claim that there is one good way of going about making them. Even less so do I claim that this is it.
The first point is that I like to share the news in at least some lucidity. In part this is probably due to a misplaced attribution of honour, but I append something I wrote in one of these moments, to give a sense of my thoughts in the time.
“” To tell a story when you are not, in that moment, brought to your knees by it gives you autonomy on the presentation. You wrestle control in that moment, and are able to describe your feelings in a way that is not simply dumping. This can come across as unusual because it sometimes suggests a sense of detachment from it. But no, in fact it is awareness that it indicates. Awareness that it is not always that you are able to deal with this thing in a lucid and willful way. Occasionally it is able to subdue you and emotion spills over. By telling the story to those in your life in the moments you have control you are able to ring fence it, and then those moments of spillover become inconsequential. The tragedy is left powerless. “”
It’s interesting reading the above, because, as I said, I wrote it in a moment of upset. But you see that I am framing it as me versus the thing, whatever the thing is. The person I am telling almost doesn’t feature at all. Me sharing it as a story is less so about the actual expression of it than it is about exerting some control over the situation. Indeed, I’m making the point that expressing the situation clearly and deliberately is exactly the thing that gives one autonomy where precious little is found otherwise.
I want to take a moment to position this against a sort of at-all-costs stoicism that it may come across as on first read. After the first delivery of the news is done, this whole bother is gone. I can break down as wiltingly as my heart desires. So it doesn’t necessarily require a stoic outlook, though I think it can be useful. And this idea of exerting control is not always a good one. Sometimes one must let the emotion do the work. But the moment someone hears news is almost always the moment they remember the news for and I would rather it be me - my whole self, full of joy and humour and optimism - telling it, rather than it be only the part of me affected at that moment telling it.
I was reminded of these thoughts by a discussion with a friend who posts videos online, and by virtue of the subject matter they sometimes contain personal details about his struggles. He mentioned that people sometimes start conversations that he’s not ready for based on the videos. To him, he made that video 6 months ago and now it exists only as a reference. A window to a past thought. To them, he told them last night at 2am while they were in bed on their phone. And thus it is important to me not only to be intentional about how I tell my story, but when a person hears it. This represents an interesting general tradeoff, albeit with some exceptions: you can either control what people see or when they see it. If it is delivered live you relinquish control over what is seen, but not when it is seen. Conversely, if you carefully package it and send it out into the world then you relinquish control over when it is seen.
I want my news to be in person. It’s what makes interaction so rich - the immediate reciprocity. But I also want it to be lucid. I don’t want to be caught up in the moment, and I want to be fair to the other person in their witnessing of it. The balance I try to strike here is to be authentically vulnerable in moments of strife, but to share these moments when I am able to do so without them bursting at the seams. This is not because I object to - or am uncomfortable in - doing so (I claim) but rather because I find that it is preferable to in the first instance not allow the tragedy to tell the story. When you burst at the seams it is not you telling the story, it is the negativity telling the story. It always seems a shame to let negativity tell the story.