Refrigerator Magnets

On the carousel of care that asks nothing of anyone except the person reading it

The Carousel

Swipe. Swipe. Dead baby. Swipe. Cute dog. Swipe. Swipe. Woman crying about AI deepfakes being sent to her family. Swipe. “Drawing boundaries doesn’t make you a villain” and “you are not responsible for other people’s reactions to your healing.”

Really? No shit.

Elsewhere in the ecosystem: journal prompts for your inner child (my inner child is a dumbass, but thank you), somatic stretches to release trauma from your hips (I’m sure my psoas is holding thirty years of repression but I’m not convinced a Instagram yoga flow is going to fix it), breathwork to regulate your nervous system, and a persistent implication that if you are still struggling, you probably just haven’t found the right modality yet. Have you tried tapping? Have you tried cold plunges? Have you tried journaling?

Journaling always helps, apparently. Sometimes I don’t have the energy or the words. Sometimes I open the notebook and stare at it and nothing comes out because the feelings are not structured. They do not have a beginning, middle, and an insight at the end. They’re just there. Unprocessed. Inconvenient. The blank page doesn’t judge me, but I judge myself for having nothing to offer it. Weren’t feelings supposed to be writable? Isn’t that what all the prompts promised?

Have you tried asking for help?

I have tried asking for help. Sometimes what comes back is another carousel. Sometimes it’s a recommendation to try EMDR, or a podcast episode, or a reminder that I should really look into somatic therapy. Sometimes it’s “I hear you” followed by silence. Sometimes it’s a list of resources offered with the gentle finality of a case being closed. Sometimes it’s not help at all, it’s a referral to the concept of help, which is not the same thing.

The carousel keeps spinning. Another pastel slide. Another gentle serif font. Another phrase that sounds like wisdom but dissolves the moment you try to hold it. You are not your thoughts. You are worthy of love. Healing is not linear. These are not insights. These are refrigerator magnets. They ask nothing of anyone except the person reading them.

I have lost my ability to be kind without outcome

The thing is, these slides aren’t wrong. Drawing boundaries isn’t villainous. You’re not responsible for everyone else’s reactions. Sure. Fine. But somewhere between the slide and the soul, something got lost. The goal became: how quickly can you package your pain into something legible? How efficiently can you box and sort and sift yourself into something palatable?

I’ve caught myself doing it. A friend calls, mid-crisis, and I’m halfway to offering her a borrowed diagnosis before she’s finished her sentence. I’m already categorizing: attachment style, trauma response, nervous system dysregulation. I’m trying to speed up the process of understanding what’s difficult, as though naming it faster will fix it faster. As though the point is the label and not the person.

Why am I DSM-ing you?

I miss feeling sad. Not burnt out, not emotionally dysregulated, not anxiously avoidant — just sad. I don’t know how to describe my own misery in my own words anymore. My mouth has been stuffed with catch-all phrases that abstract the gnarly stuff into convenient little social ziplocks. I pick them up one by one, sniff from them, and present them to others like I’m being helpful. The feelings have been taxonomized so thoroughly that I’ve lost access to the raw material underneath. Every emotion arrives pre-labelled. Every struggle comes with a framework already attached.

I have lost my ability to be kind without outcome. I can’t just sit with someone and say “yeah, this sucks, let’s be sad together.” No. I must diagnose, suggest, solve. I must make it legible. I must make it a problem with a solution, because that’s what support looks like now. Feeling with someone isn’t enough. You have to offer them a framework. You have to demonstrate that your presence is useful, productive, moving things forward. Otherwise what’s the point of you?

Just suck on it, I guess

I should be clear: I’m not outside this. I am the carousel version of a friend. That’s all I have to give right now. I barely have space for my own feelings, so the idea of holding someone else’s is exhausting. So I do what I’ve learned to do. I cut emotions into smaller and smaller slices. I meal-prep my capacity to care. I freeze it into little cubes of therapy-speak and offer them to the people I love, silently praying they won’t expect me to thaw anything out. Just suck on it, I guess. It’s all I have.

Here. Have some validation. Have an “I hear you.” Have a “that sounds really hard.” Have a gentle suggestion that you might benefit from talking to someone. Someone else, to be precise. Someone professional, someone whose job it is to hold the weight I cannot. I love you. I mean it. But I am handing you to a system because I cannot be a system for you.

This is what we’ve been trained to do. Somewhere in the last decade, the vocabulary of therapy escaped the clinic. Words that were meant to help someone make sense of their inner life in a protected setting became the default way we talk about emotions everywhere. Instagram slides. Group chats. Dating profiles. Performance reviews. First dates. Breakup texts. The language spread so fast and so thoroughly that we barely noticed when it stopped being a tool and started becoming a test.

The Escaped Langauge

It happened gradually, then all at once. First it was just therapists talking to patients. Then it was self-help books, which had always borrowed clinical language but kept it contained. Then it was podcasts, millions of hours of intimate conversation about attachment and trauma and nervous systems, available to anyone with earbuds and a commute. People started listening to other people’s therapy. They started learning the vocabulary without the context, the interventions without the relationship, the insights without the slow work of arriving at them.

Then it was Instagram, where complex psychological concepts got flattened into slides and carousels and infographics designed for engagement. Attachment theory became a quiz. Trauma became an aesthetic. Healing became content. The algorithm rewarded simplicity, so the ideas got simpler. The algorithm rewarded engagement, so the ideas got more provocative. “You were parentified” became a way to explain any difficult childhood. “That’s a trauma response” became a way to explain any difficult behavior. Everything became diagnosable from the outside by people who had never met you.

Then it was everywhere. The language seeped out of its original container and flooded the culture, and now we’re all swimming in it, whether we asked to or not. We use clinical terms in casual conversation. We diagnose strangers on the internet. We speak about our own minds with the detached authority of people who have read the Wikipedia page but not the textbook.

Now we are all fluent. We know what it means to be triggered, to have boundaries, to be doing the work. We know how to identify our attachment styles and name our trauma responses. We speak of nervous systems and emotional regulation and inner children with the confidence of people who have read the right threads. This fluency has become a marker of maturity. If you can describe your damage clearly, if you can name it, historicize it, link it to a pattern, you are taken seriously. You are granted patience. People nod. People stay. If you can’t, if you are messy or inarticulate or stuck in a loop, people get uncomfortable. You’re seen as feral. Unprocessed. Not yet ready for polite company.

The language is supposed to give us insight. But what it often gives us is a performance requirement. There is now a culturally approved way to suffer. You are expected to be self-aware quickly, to explain yourself clearly, to reassure the people around you that this will resolve. Pain is permitted, but only if it is boxed up. Only if you can narrate your own healing arc while you’re still in the middle of it.

Compression, not healing

This is how a vocabulary that claims to expand empathy ends up shrinking it. We gain better words, but we lose tolerance. We become excellent at describing pain and worse at enduring it in other people. Language starts replacing presence.

No one is taking responsibility because no one can. So much of what we’re feeling, the precarity, the exhaustion, the sense that the ground keeps shifting, comes from systems we were never meant to survive on our own. The economy, the algorithms, the pace, the constant ambient dread. The cost of living that keeps climbing. The job market that keeps tightening. The news cycle that keeps delivering fresh horrors. The platforms that keep us engaged by keeping us anxious. These are not personal problems with personal solutions. But there’s nowhere else for them to go.

So we hand them to each other. And then we feel guilty, because we know it’s too much. We know it’s inhuman to expect a friend to metabolize what an entire system has produced. So we self-edit. We shrink the ask before we even make it. We pre-package our distress into something manageable because we know no one has the capacity for the full unprocessed weight of it.

This is what the therapy-speak is actually for. It’s not a language of healing. It’s a language of compression. It lets us make our pain smaller, easier to hand off, and less likely to overwhelm whoever receives it. We’re not learning to feel better. We’re learning to take up less space while we feel bad.

And the compression works in both directions. We shrink our own pain to hand it over. And we shrink other people’s pain to receive it. A friend says she’s struggling, and I find myself, almost automatically, translating her experience into something I can manage. Oh, that sounds like burnout. That sounds like an anxious attachment pattern. That sounds like you need to set better boundaries. I turn her into a case study because a case study has an endpoint. A case study doesn’t require me to feel alongside her. It just requires me to offer the right framework and move on.

The goal is no longer understanding. The goal is containment. Keep the feeling bounded. Keep it from spilling over. Keep it from asking too much of anyone, including yourself.

This isn’t an accident. Systems are designed this way.

Holding someone is expensive. It takes time that could be productive. It creates friction. It resists efficiency. And worse, it creates implication. Once you stay with someone’s pain, you become responsible for it. You might have to adjust expectations, extend timelines, acknowledge that something is wrong. You might have to change. Institutions are trained to avoid this. It’s safer to offer resources than involvement. It’s safer to point toward a tool than to stay.

This is why companies offer wellness programs instead of reducing workloads. Why they give you resilience training instead of structural change. Why they hand you a mental health day instead of sustained flexibility. These gestures signal care without redistributing anything. They address symptoms while protecting the system that produces them. You are sent away to regulate, journal, meditate, and return once you’re easier to deal with.

Think about it: every corporate mental health initiative is designed to make you better at surviving the conditions, not to change the conditions themselves. You get a meditation app, not a manageable workload. You get a webinar on stress management, not a conversation about why everyone is stressed. You get an Employee Assistance Program with six free therapy sessions, not a restructuring of the expectations that made you need therapy in the first place. You get a mindfulness workshop, not time to actually rest. The institution gets to say it cares. You get to feel like the problem is yours to fix. The system remains untouched.

This is the genius of it, really. By turning systemic problems into personal wellness opportunities, institutions offload the cost of care onto individuals while taking credit for providing support. The company didn’t burn you out, you just didn’t use the meditation app enough. The workplace isn’t toxic, you just need to work on your boundaries. The expectations aren’t unreasonable, you just need to get better at managing your stress. Every solution points inward. Every failure becomes yours.

And this logic is seductive, because it offers a feeling of agency. If the problem is your regulation, you can work on it. If the problem is your boundaries, you can set them. These are all things you can do alone, in private, without anyone else having to adjust. That’s the appeal. It lets everyone else off the hook. It’s so much more convenient to have a million individuals working on themselves than to have one system admit it’s broken.

But when you fail, you fail alone too. If you burn out despite the meditation app, that’s a personal failure. If you can’t regulate despite the resources, that’s a you problem. The system gave you tools. What more do you want?

The same logic has crept into how we treat each other. Holding someone means tolerating a mess without knowing when it will end. It means you can’t exit by saying “I tried to help.” Advice allows exit. Presence does not. So we reach for frameworks instead. It lets us feel supportive without having to reorganize our time, expectations, or emotional bandwidth. We get to feel like good friends while still protecting ourselves from the inconvenience of actual involvement.

And of course, this lands differently on women.

Women aren’t just encouraged to manage their feelings, they’re expected to manage the room. Emotional regulation isn’t a personal skill; it’s a job requirement. Smooth the conflict. Anticipate the reaction. Absorb the discomfort. Read the mood. Defuse the tension. Do it invisibly, or you’re not doing it well. Do it while also doing everything else. Do it while smiling.

So when the culture tells women to “do the work,” it doesn’t arrive as support. It arrives as confirmation. You were already supposed to be doing this. Self-awareness isn’t a tool for women; it’s a baseline expectation. Fall below it and you’re failing at your role. You are not a woman in pain; you are a woman who has failed to manage her pain correctly.

Men get to have circumstances. Stress. Pressure. A hard quarter. A difficult project. A lot on their plate. Women get pathologized. The same anger that makes a man “passionate” makes a woman “unregulated.” The same tears that make a man “honest” or “vulnerable” make a woman “unprofessional” or “emotional.” The same exhaustion that makes a man “overworked” makes a woman “unable to cope.” We are permitted to struggle only if it doesn’t show. Hurt, but stay pleasant. Heal, but make it invisible. Fall apart on your own time, and come back put together.

Even boundaries operate unevenly. Women are constantly told to set boundaries, but we’re also expected to manage the emotional fallout of those boundaries. You can say no, but you’d better say it gently. You can draw a line, but you’d better explain yourself for doing so. You can protect your energy, but you’d better make sure no one feels rejected by your protection. You can refuse, but you’d better do the emotional labor of making the refusal palatable. The boundary is yours; the cleanup is also yours.

Be self-aware enough to regulate, but warm enough to not seem cold. Be boundaried enough to protect yourself, but accommodating enough to not make anyone uncomfortable. Be healed enough to function, but not so healed that you stop being useful to everyone else’s emotional needs. Be autonomous, but remain available. Be strong, but stay soft. Be less, but also somehow more.

This is why women are so tired. Not because self-reflection is useless, but because it’s demanded endlessly while nothing else changes. Awareness is expected to compensate for everything. Insight instead of relief. Understanding instead of adjustment. Clarity about what’s wrong instead of anything actually getting fixed.

We become extremely good at naming what’s wrong. And then we are left alone with it.

The Fly in a Beartrap

I keep thinking about what it would mean to opt out of this. To stop performing emotional fluency. To be allowed to struggle without having to narrate my own healing arc. To just be sad, without someone asking what I’m doing about it.

But opting out isn’t really available, is it? The performance requirement isn’t just cultural pressure, it’s tied to how people decide whether to stay. If I can speak the language, if I can demonstrate insight, I get patience. If I can’t, I get abandoned. The fluency is protection. The compression is survival. I learned these things because not learning them had consequences.

The very skills that make us visible to others are the same skills that keep us from being fully held. We learn to translate our pain into something manageable, and then we wonder why no one stays long enough to see the unmanageable parts. But we hid those parts. We had to. Because we knew, correctly, that the unmanageable parts were too much to ask for. We pre-emptively protected everyone else from the full weight of us, and now we’re lonely in a way we can barely articulate.

The loneliness is strange because it exists alongside connection. We have friends. We have people who care about us. We have group chats and check-ins and people who ask how we’re doing. But the connections feel thin. They feel conditional. They feel like they depend on us staying within certain bounds. Being honest, but not too honest. Being vulnerable, but not too vulnerable. Being in pain, but not for too long, and not in a way that asks too much of anyone.

So we become very good at being easy. We pre-emptively apologize for our own needs. We offer reassurance before anyone asks for it. I’m working on it, I know this is a lot, I don’t expect you to fix it, I just needed to vent, sorry to dump this on you. We make ourselves small before anyone can ask us to shrink. We manage other people’s discomfort at our own pain. We perform okayness even when we’re not okay, because not-okayness has costs. We have learned, through experience, that people stay longer when we are easy to be around.

And this works, in a way. People do stay. But they stay with the managed version. The version that has already been processed enough to be palatable. And somewhere underneath, the unmanaged version sits alone, wondering if anyone would stay for that too. Suspecting, probably correctly, that they wouldn’t.

And then we feel lonely, and we don’t quite understand why, because weren’t we doing everything right?

What the hell is a conclusion?

I don’t know what the alternative is. I’m not going to pretend I have a framework for care that isn’t broken, or that I’ve figured out how to hold people without rationing myself. I haven’t. I’m still handing out frozen cubes. I’m still flinching when someone’s pain looks like it might require more than I have. I’m still reaching for the carousel language because it’s the only language I know, and because the silence underneath it is terrifying.

I catch myself, sometimes, mid-sentence, offering someone a framework when what they needed was just for me to stay. I hear the therapy-speak coming out of my mouth, and I don’t know how to stop it. It’s become the default. It’s become the only way I know how to show I care, even though I suspect it’s also a way of keeping my distance. The language lets me be helpful without being present. It lets me give something without giving myself.

But I know something has been lost. I miss the sadness that was just sadness. I miss being able to say “this is hard” without immediately being asked what I’m doing about it. I miss the version of friendship where presence was enough, where you could just be in it together, undefined and unresolved, and that counted as something. Where you didn’t have to perform progress. Where you could fall apart without someone trying to help you put the pieces back together. Where being held didn’t require you to first prove you were holding yourself.

I think I miss being allowed to not be okay without it becoming a project. Without it becoming a problem I’m supposed to solve before I’m allowed to bring it to anyone.

I don’t have a conclusion. I don’t have a call to action or a five-step framework for reclaiming authentic emotional connection. I don’t have a carousel slide that fixes this. That would be too easy, and also too ironic.

I just have this: the suspicion that healing was never supposed to be something you do alone in order to become easier to be around. That care is not a resource to be optimized. That sometimes the point is just to stay. Just to witness. Just to sit in it together without anyone having to be fixed or improved or moved along.

I don’t know how to get back to that. I’m not sure we can get back to it. Maybe we have to build something new, something that doesn’t exist yet, something without a name or a framework or a content strategy.

But I know we’re not going to therapy-speak our way there.