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Decades ago, beginning to manage my own health care as a young adult, it was hard for me and I felt so much shame. I felt like I constantly got charged fees that I hadn't expected and I assumed it was my fault. I felt helpless and it discouraged me from using my healthcare.
Eventually I came to understand that it was not purely my fault, that the insurers profited from my confusion and deliberately created it, all while pretending they weren't doing so. And that they do this to all of us, unapologetically, draining us of money and time and life.
[I wrote this spurred by https://bsky.app/profile/effies.bsky.social/post/3lcqw3ci42k2c a satirical transcript of a health insurance company's automated phone system.]
Your phone tree reminds me that these days, when I gird myself to call those phone numbers and do battle with the insurer, I try to use my anger ("OH NO YOU DON'T") instead of falling into that old despair.
And that helps.
But it is reprehensible that we have to go through this.
Reading this again a second time, now that you've pointed back to it. I feel it still, but need to think about it more.
I arrived at anger earlier, I think.
Or maybe, I came late to strategic awareness around it, to recognizing the conditions of our common struggles. (on review, there's something more to this but will hold off on that for now)
In too many cases, our anger is a "feature" of various systems, a "successful" outcome.
If someone gets too angry to continue pursuing something, be it a claim or a bug or whatever, the systemic frustrations look insufficiently different from resolution. Peace, rather than justice.
It works because anger and its associated feelings can so flatten everything else. It washes everything else away. It becomes the only fact.
@idlestate I appreciate getting to learn your experiences here - adjacent to mine, different but related.
In your experience, do you sometimes get so angry about something that you stop pursuing it?
these processes have breaking points in them.
go find this form to fill out. get this piece of information.
so, you stop.
leave a message, then wait for a call back. sit on hold. wait for forms in the mail. wait until the weekend passes. until the holiday passes. wait until this thing is finished to start that thing.
anger helps push, but sometimes pushing doesn't help. patience becomes inaction. is it procrastination if the system is built to make you not want to face it? shame at how long you waited to try again, or anger that makes you forget your strategy. does it matter to the system, so long as you're demotivated or ineffective?
@idlestate I'm having trouble understanding your use of the second person in your reply. Are you describing your own experience, or asking about my own, or making generalizations about common experiences?
sorry. generic "you"
"one" conveys a similar sense, but feels more formal or stilted.
this is what some of it looks like to me, but I expect there might be overlap with how it lands for you.
I'm interested in where/how anger debilitates you in these processes.
"anger helps push, but sometimes pushing doesn't help" and "anger that makes you forget your strategy" - like, anger leading to impatience and treating other people badly?
yes, treating people badly, but also it's not a very sustainable state to be in. it's draining.
There are the ways it interacts with social constructs and roles. These intersect differently for you and me, I expect.
As I grew up, it took me a while to realize perhaps my size alone leads people to read me as a threat, even when I'm not angry.
To add to the intersectional component, I don't know exactly but I gather I might have something we could call "unhappy cis white man resting face" even when I'm just, you know, thinking?
So, starting already from a fairly high threshold for disconnection, it doesn't take much anger to break connection entirely. This is the troll's goal/payoff, symbolized by the leering line art and "u mad bro".
And this is what I recognize in perverse systemic incentives where disconnection from services reads as money retained, regardless of the damage done.
I've found anger has something like a temperature scale. White hot rage just lays waste to everything. On the other end is a cooler simmer that is much more companionable to determination & persistence, but again can make a mess of things if it boils over.
When I started out, I thought I was commiserating. But it seems not to have turned out that way. Sorry to have dumped this on you.
@idlestate I appreciated getting to learn about the experience of someone in a different life -- that's one of the things I appreciate most about the Internet, the chance to understand someone else's perspective. But I appreciate you reflecting on what you intended and what happened - thanks.
@brainwane that was one of the biggest culture shocks for me: I'd known that healthcare in America was expensive, but I was unprepared for how confusing and intentionally demoralizing it is.