The healing-industrial complex has mushroomed into a gazillion dollar business, and for good reason: there’s an endless volume of toxicity being spewed at us daily, either in the news or from people in our lives. These days, there’s something historically unprecedented happening every five minutes. Ingesting even ten minutes of news is the equivalent of smoking 3 packs of Marlboro. I’m a news-addict so I’ve come up with a compromise that works for me: I scan headlines through tightly squinted eyes so I only get an impressionistic sense of the horrors happening in the world.
But even if you stopped watching the news altogether, there are toxic people whose lives inevitably intersect with yours. And there’s no amount of squinting that can filter their malignancy. Ideally, you cut them out of your life. If, however, you can’t because they’re family members or work colleagues or whatever, there’s an app that’s been around for a while but I only just discovered. Before we get to the solution, here are a few common toxic types to be on the lookout for. You can find a more complete list here:
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Energy vampires. These are people who constantly share their relentlessly dire worldview with you. For instance, they’ll read an article about something, zero in on the darkest of prognostications and then insist on sharing them. I have a friend who told me about an article in the Atlantic Monthly that said writers would be replaced by AI any day now. He says this knowing I’m a writer for a living—a mediocre writer at that. I’ll be the first on the chopping block. Well, it’s been eight years and I’m still hacking away. You’re constantly having to beat back their dark-talk with light and optimism, and that’s very draining. Don’t waste your time and energy being someone else’s emotional sherpa—avoid them and definitely don’t read articles they forward.
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Gaslighters. These people will fuck with you by blatantly lying right to your face. Even when they’re caught in a lie, they don’t back down. In fact, they don’t own up to any of the shit they do. If they’ve hurt your feelings and you tell them so, they’ll say you’re over-sensitive. Or it was just a joke. ‘When I said you were a total failure I was just kidding!’ Or, in a complete reversal, they’ll say you hurt their feelings in some way.
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Bat-sh*t crazies. Like my borderline personality mother who spent years trying to break up her children’s marriages. She hasn’t slowed with age: her mischief-making, soul-sucking energy would exhaust Satan. We keep getting calls from assisted-living staff members, asking us to ask our mother to stop calling overweight staff and residents ‘fatty-pies.’ Up until recently she had a habit of calling me at 4am, forgetting accidentally-on-purpose that I live in a time zone three hours behind her. There are few things more traumatizing than being woken up at 4am to hear your mother asking you in baby-talk to come live with her in her retirement community, a 300 square-foot bachelor. ‘We can be roomies!’ she says with total lack of irony.
If anybody in your contact list matches the above, block them. That way they can’t send you texts, and their calls go straight to voicemails. The problem arises when they notice that you never return their calls.
For every problem, there is a solution. Meet SlyDial. Like the name implies, it’s devilishly clever: it's an app that allows you to return calls without having to speak to the toxic person because the app puts you straight into their voicemail. You can leave a message where you sound very disappointed about missing them. ‘I got your message and I thought if I called you right away I’d catch you. Damn!’ And if you really want to gaslight the gaslighter in your life, say something like, ‘are you trying to avoid me?! You just called me and now you’re not answering!’ And then I usually close with, ‘well, I’ll try you again a little later,’ which makes it sound like you really do want to talk to them and they don’t need to call you again—they should just wait for your call.
Of course, you may decide to just leave this person behind—absolutely acceptable no matter who it is—but in the meanwhile, SlyDial. Speaking of which, I need to go SlyDial my mom. I’m going to leave a voicemail telling her I’m sorry I missed her call and that coming to live with her at The Incontinental would be a dream come true.