I saw Oleanna, David Mamet’s two-character play, in the theatre last year. It stuck with me for longer than most theatre outings.
There I was, applauding at the end, completely confused. My partner and I had spent three hours watching the same two people on stage - a university professor and his student - have the same argument. Yet we couldn’t agree on who was right and who was wrong. Months went by and still, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Because I was having my own Oleanna situation at work.
I’m a journalist and, for the best part of a decade, I’ve worked in magazines. This was a job, that for five of those years, I loved. For the most part, I was happy and fulfilled, until someone more senior than me started to make my days at work miserable.
It was subtle. First, criticisms over work I was producing. Then it escalated to being belittled in meetings. Two months in, I was isolated from my team.
The day I returned to my desk in shock after a painful one-to-one brainstorm, I looked up the definition of workplace bullying. What did it look like? What did it feel like? This wasn’t a normal creative discussion, it felt like combat. But with no one else present, how could I be sure that I was reading this situation correctly?
Confiding in a friend, I remember saying that what I needed was a panel, a judge and jury to sit down and take a good look at my evidence and tell me that what I was experiencing was pure fact. I wanted to build a bullet-proof case to prove that I was right and this colleague wrong.
In desperation, I started recording conversations, making detailed notes of our interactions. It went on for weeks. But doing so was all-encompassing. I went to bed thinking about it, I woke up thinking about it and in trying to prove my point, I had burnt out. It was then that I decided to leave the job I loved.
I walked out of the office on my last day feeling twice as perplexed as when I’d left the theatre that day last year. What just happened? That was November and it still haunts me.
I have been thinking a lot about it recently and my insatiable desire to get right to the bottom of something to prove that the way I see it is the only way, the right way. You see, it’s a character trait that hasn’t served me well over the years. In trying to prove my point, I hold onto things, unable to let them go and move on. It must drive my friends mad.
And isn’t it this insatiable desire to be right and only see our point of view that has led to cancel culture? Comedian Jimmy Carr and author JK Rowling amongst many others have felt the wrath of the internet after remarks they’d made. Write a Tweet that’s open for misinterpretation or share an unpopular opinion, and you’re ostracised. It’s ended peoples’ careers, only some making it back from the dead.
If the need to be right leaves me feeling stuck and unable to move forward, is it having a similar effect on the wider world? Critics argue that cancel culture has a freezing effect on public discourse. Stopping us from having conversations that could drive us forward as a society. We seem to have such little tolerance for differing points of view and leave no room for misinterpretation. Me included.
“It’s as if we regard other people as psychological crystals,” writes Kathryn Schulz, in Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error. “With everything important refracted to the visible surface, while regarding ourselves as psychological icebergs, with the majority of what matters submerged and invisible.”
And so what I’ve learned from the confusion that I first felt watching Oleanna, and again at work, is that it’s necessary. Confusion is necessary in a truly nuanced world where understanding each other better requires messy discussions. Where badging someone ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ has no place. Confusion asks us to look below the surface.
Kathryn writes about this too. “To err is to wander, and wandering is the way we discover the world; and, lost in thought, it is also the way we discover ourselves. Being right might be gratifying, but in the end it is static, a mere statement."
I could have saved myself a difficult few months if I’d redirected my energy into finding a real resolution at work. Not one where I had the last word, proving myself right, but one where I found a way to move forwards that made room for the differences between me and my colleague.
Because isn’t it usually the case, that when we take the time to check out the way we’ve interpreted something, it isn’t always how it’s meant? So often, the truth lay somewhere in the middle and getting to it requires honest conversation.
But here’s what I also know to be true: That where there are messy discussions to be had, there are people more willing to have them, and places where it feels more appropriate to do so. The office isn’t one of them. The theatre, and Twitter for that matter, more so. It’d certainly cause less confusion if playwrights and Tweeters removed room for misinterpretation. But where’s the drama in that?
I've so many thoughts and feelings about what you've written here that I'm starting to feel like it might be a whole post rather than a comment but the gist is that much of what you have written resonates very strongly with me but there are a couple of points which don't sit quite as well. I'm not convinced that your choices examples of 'cancel culture' are the best, as I'm not convinced that it is a genuine thing when applied to celebrities, who seem to mostly dust themselves down, peform an act of contrition and come back just as strong and often stronger aftewards. Or in the case of Rowling, garner themselves a new fan base as leader of whatever abhorrent corner of the internet their particular brand of hatred most appeals to.
So much more, but that last paragraph (which is almost word for word what I said in a podcast interview in summer 2021 and still what I beleive to be true) is where the gold is, except for one small caveat. I think these conversations absolutely must be had in offices. Most of us spend a huge amount of time at our places of work and as your experience shows, poor working relationships can destroy our sense of safety and wellbeing. Healthy relationships in all areas of life come from being able to have difficult conversations and although it can feel off limits when there are systems of hierarchy at play, we must begin to shift the culture so that people feel safe to do so. This is something that is big in my mind at the moment and I am likely to be writing more about in the next few weeks as I figure out how to navigate some tricky work situations. With your permission I will lin to this article when I do. (I will probably use a chunk of this comment to get me started!).