Review Mode: Consider That You Might Be a Tertiary Character
I thought I was chiming in on an innocent conversation about morning routines. I didn’t realize I was stumbling into an active war zone.
Welcome to Review Mode, a biweekly newsletter where I mark up my social interactions, mining my, like, medical-grade self-monitoring for your reading pleasure.
Did you know that other people’s conversations can have subtext too? Because apparently I didn’t.
So, like a week ago, I was leaving a standup show, and two of my comedian friends — Hazel and Tanya — were chatting outside the venue.
Let’s meet our main characters here:
HAZEL (26), fun, confident, maybe a little self-absorbed. Like if Cher from Clueless were an adult who was super involved in the Brooklyn dyke scene.
TANYA (28), sweet, sensitive, perhaps occasionally a bit moralistic1. Like if Millie from Freaks and Geeks were also an adult who was super involved in the Brooklyn dyke scene.
I like Hazel and Tanya a lot. They’re both part of this one friend group that I’m, like, adjacent to, and I’m always happy to see those guys around. So, I was excited to join Hazel and Tanya’s conversation.
They were talking about meditating. Tanya was going on about how amazing it’s been for her to integrate a mindfulness practice into every morning, how it’s made her more thoughtful and less reactive. There was a clear “you should be doing this too” tone to it. Hazel wasn’t convinced.
“I just hate it,” Hazel said, laughing. “Why do I need to know what I'm feeling? That's none of my business.”
There was kind of an argumentative tone to the conversation, but I thought they were doing the thing people (especially comedians) do sometimes where they arbitrarily take a bold stance to keep things interesting.
Like, if you’ve ever heard me go on a tirade about the meager size of the water cups at a bar. It’s not that important to me, but it’s fun to have something to get worked up about that doesn’t matter at all. (Usually, I have to get worked up about stuff that matters.)
I was eager to get in on the conversation — this is the kind of thing I have opinions about. Cause in general, I tend to think people are a little quick to make the jump from “this worked for me” to “everyone should do this.” Like, I have friends who really love cold plunges. Doesn’t mean I need to be electively chilly.
So, I chimed in, arguing that people figure out the self-care routines that work best for them, which may or may not include meditating.
I don’t remember if I noticed the undertone of defensiveness — of, like, weightiness — to Hazel and Tanya’s voices. If I did, I probably chalked it up to me being oversensitive, projecting things that weren’t there. Like, why would they be getting so worked up about meditating?
In retrospect, the tones of their voices were definitely saying “there’s more going on here.” But while I may finally be mature enough to acknowledge that some of my own interactions with people aren’t about what they appear to be on the surface, I evidently haven’t made the jump to realizing that other people also lead full, complex lives that can also include conversations with multi-layered meanings. That’s my thing.
The meditation conversation continued for longer than I would’ve expected it to, but I didn’t make much of it. It wasn’t until several days later, when I ran into Tanya at a party, that I got the whole story.2
Tanya and I are the kinds of friends who are not necessarily close but who have easy rapport. Like, we don’t make a point of keeping each other in the loop about what’s going on in our lives, but if we happen to see each other when we’re going through something, there’s a good chance we’ll be pretty open about it.
“Was I going too hard in that conversation about meditating the other day?” Tanya asked.
“I didn’t think so,” I said.
What I really meant was, sure, she was maybe a little more insistent than I thought the subject warranted, but it seemed low enough stakes that it didn’t matter much one way or another.
“Okay, good,” she said.
Her relief surprised me.
“Why? What’s up?” I asked, finally showing some sensitivity to the fact that other people sometimes have things going on in their lives.
So, she told me what had happened a few weeks ago.
Okay, I don’t want to have to write this section in the pluperfect tense (the past tense of the past tense — e.g. Carson had explained an esoteric grammatical term that no one had been asking them to explain), so let’s rewind to three weeks earlier.
Tanya, holding longstanding romantic feelings for Hazel, asked Hazel to get coffee with her. At said coffee, Tanya finally told Hazel how she felt.
Hazel, rather than responding to her dear friend with kindness and sensitivity, said, “God, can I not trust anyone’s friendship?”
A reaction that not only failed to make space for the vulnerability of Tanya’s admission but that also implied that Tanya was doing something wrong by having — or perhaps by sharing — the feelings she had. Like Tanya developing feelings for Hazel — by no choice of Tanya’s own — was a deep betrayal of Hazel’s confidence.
It was an odd and certainly hurtful reaction, but Tanya understood where it was coming from. Hazel, who’s good-looking and very charismatic, has had a bunch of her friends confess feelings to her over the years.
Most recently, one year earlier, a close friend of Hazel’s, Elise, had asked her out (fuck — you can run from the pluperfect tense, but you can’t hide), and when Hazel had politely turned Elise down, Elise had been a real dick about it. She’d iced Hazel out and started trash talking Hazel to all their mutual friends. A couple of the other people who’d confessed their feelings to Hazel over the years had also been kind of shitty about it.
So, Tanya had the context for why Hazel said what she said. Still, it was obviously a cruel reaction. One that could’ve been avoided if, perhaps, Hazel had the mindfulness to notice what was coming up for her and chose to act differently. Or barring that, mindfulness might have at least helped Hazel see how unfairly she treated Tanya and apologize for it after the fact.
Hazel and Tanya’s coffee shop conversation continued on, and while neither of the two acknowledged the hurt Hazel had caused, they mutually agreed that, since their social lives were so intertwined, they wouldn’t let this conversation affect their friendship too much. They’d be normal. (Couldn’t be me — I can’t even act normal when things are normal.) So, after taking only like a week of space from each other, they were back into the swing of their friendship.
Back at the party, after she finished explaining all this to me, Tanya added, “So, I guess that conversation outside the show wasn’t totally just about meditating.”
No, yeah, I got that now.
The Lesson That I Should but Probably Won’t Learn from This: This may shock you, but people sometimes have things going on in their lives that have nothing to do with you. If a conversation seems a little strange, consider the wild possibility that you may not have all the information.
Carson’s Life Updates
I did some standup in Philadelphia with the very funny
. We got recognized in the one place that would happen — a queer/feminist bookstore/thrift shop run by a bunch of trans people. That’s a brag, I guess, but barely more so than it would be to say, “I got recognized at my parents’ house.”I cannot tell you how good it feels that there’s nothing I need to promote in this bullet point. We can just enjoy this shared space to take a deep breath and think about something we’re grateful for, like the start of summer or that one Kristen Stewart/Katy O’Brian photoshoot from last year.
I’m heading out of town this week to be the best of honor (my own nomenclature) at my friend’s wedding. If I understand Katherine Heigl movies correctly, I’m pretty sure I’m gonna fall in love with the other bride’s maid of honor.
Only, the other bride has two maids of honor, so that’s gonna be a very progressive Katherine Heigl movie.
The Boilerplate
Carson Olshansky (still they/them, despite the haters) is a Brooklyn-based comedian and writer. You can follow them at @carsonolshansky on Instagram and TikTok and at @carson-olshansky on YouTube.
Admittedly a somewhat hypocritical characterization coming from me, someone who writes a Substack that ends each time with a lesson.
Note: Sorry to disappoint, but you’re not gonna get any actual gossip here. This story is anonymized to the point where I think there’s only like a 40% chance that even Tanya would know this was about her. There’s an even smaller chance — maybe 15% — that Hazel would know, since I don’t think she’d be very self-aware about it. She probably doesn’t even remember the conversation.
That said, if you’re in my social circles, and you have guesses as to what this is actually about, I’d love to hear them, mostly because that way I can get gossip from you.
I looooove theseeeeee