Do We Have Enemies, Or Do We Make Them? - Undividing #12

Plus Taking Your Inner Dog For A Walk, And The Ministry For The Future

---

Welcome to Undividing where we are reconnecting a divided world.

---

Um, what the heck happened this week?!

Last Tuesday Undividing was going out to just over 300 folks. Now we’re over 2.1K in a week!!! What the what?! All I can say is thank you all so much for joining; my dream has always been to make a community of us who want to undivide this world.

And thank you for all the wonderful supportive comments! It made my week!

Undividing the newsletter lands in your inbox every Tuesday. And every Thursday is the Emotions Diary, a practice to undivided ourselves. Like I always say, “let the Emotions Diary explain you to you.” Here’s last week’s T.E.D to see what it’s all about.

In Undividing #12 we’re diving into:

• Undividing Our World - Do We Have Enemies, Or Do We Make Them? - I want to tell you a story about a friend, who became an enemy. But maybe I turned him into one.

• Undividing Ourselves - Take Your Inner-Dog For A Walk - My new best reason to get outside.

• Undividing Extras - The Ministry For The Future - A book I couldn’t put down. And now that I’ve finished it, my brain can’t put it down.

Let’s get undividing!

---

Would you like to buy me a coffee?

Undividing is my gift to the world. The biggest way you can pay me, and everyone, is by putting things you learn here into action in yourself and in the world.

That said, I would also appreciate your financial support to keep it going. A paid subscription is like buying me a coffee a month. And you get four Undividing newsletters and four Emotions Diaries. It’s a deal, it’s a steal.

Or if you just want to help out with buying me a single coffee, that would be amazing too. I take mine black, no sugar.

---

Undividing Our World: Do We Have Enemies, Or Do We Make Them?

Pic by Curated Lifestyle on Unsplash

I used to have this great friend, let’s call him Fred. Fred and I met 20 years ago at a dinner in Berlin. He is gregarious, opinionated, outrageous, generous and hilarious. We became instant fast friends.

Back in the mid 2000s I was coming to Berlin for four months a year on a recurring freelance job. Fred was my man in B-Town. The moment I landed and swapped SIM cards, he was my first call.

Check in at the hotel, dump bags, meet up with Fred, paint Berlin red. For months on end. A huge part of my love affair with the German capital, was my friendship with Fred.

Fred also taught me one of the greatest lessons about friendship. He had been due to stay with me in LA, and I’d had to cancel as I took a job out of town during the time he was meant to stay with me. He could understand that, but the way I had told him, in a group setting, he quite rightly took offence at.

Sitting me down later, he explained to me his definition of friendship. That as a friend, you are held to a higher standard. That there is a responsibility to being someone’s friend, that the way I had told him was cowardly, and that if our friendship meant anything he had to tell me this to my face.

Fred was right, I had chickened out. And so we talked it out. I apologised, and we had a very frank discourse about it. That frankness became a new superpower we carried through our friendship.

Then, between lockdowns in 2020, single, depressed, and locked in my apartment alone, I took the last flight to Gran Canaria to stay with a friend for a week. I stayed on the island for nearly 7 months. I was by the beach, I was free, I was writing everyday. I was happy again.

Fred wasn’t. Even though we were all housebound, he felt I’d abandoned the friend group in Berlin, that I hadn’t been in touch enough, and that I didn’t deserve the group’s friendship anymore. This I heard through the grapevine. And soon, three other friends in our group stopped replying to my texts.

I returned to Berlin to find I was most definitley out. No discussions. No appeals. And suddenly, Berlin was a very lonely place.

And I’ve had thought dark thoughts about the whole episode a couple of times every week since. Fred had become my enemy. He had wronged me. He’d not held up his own idea of friendship. And I was convinced that he’d gone on a rampage to convince everyone else to kick me out of the group.

I’ve hated him ever since then. I even wrote a piece inspired by it titled, “I’ve lived in this city long enough to have an enemy.”

“Enemyfying” - the world’s favorite pastime.

Adam Kahane is an author whose book Collaborating With The Enemy, I just finished. In it, he coins this term—Enemyfying.

“…thinking and acting as if the people we are dealing with are our enemies—people who are the cause of our problems and are hurting us… [Enemyfying] dominates the media every day: people identifying others not as opponents to be defeated, but as enemies to be destroyed.”

I certainly felt that way about Fred. I actively enemyfied him and daydreamed all kinds of scenarios where I would have my revenge. Fred would be destroyed to prove I was right.

But here is the issue. Fred and I never spoke about our disagreement. So I filled in the vacuum with all the reasons why he did what he did. And I decided that was the truth. And I’m sure he did the same thing.

We both enemyfied someone we used to call a friend. As I’m sure everyone reading here has too. Now imagine how we can enemyfy people we’ve never even met, who we believe oppose all our values, and even our very existences.

Cheerleaders are your drug dealers

The Pew Research Centre found that 71% of people encounter online content that challenges their views often leading to anger, outrage, and enemyfying of the challengers (we’re looking at you algorithm). What was surprising to me was that 55% of people then actively engage with it; reading, commenting, sending to friends, reposting with derogatory comments.

Why spread the rage around?

Enemyfying is a drug. During my divorce I was on a mission to win over me and my ex-husband’s friend group. I told them all the worst things that my ex-husband had done, underscoring all what I perceived to be the “dirty tactics” he was using against me.

I wouldn’t stop till I got the hit—when they would be outraged on my behalf, and swear they would cut him off too. I had won them to my side! Victory!

But their support, was turning me into a junkie.

The dopamine rush of self-righteousness they gave me was an addictive as any drug I’ve ever encountered.

I never had to think about what our divorce was like for my ex, because we’d descended into lawyers at ten paces very early on. We only spoke through them.

It was only when I wrote my book about it, How To Burn A Rainbow, that I had to put myself in his shoes. Writing whole scenes out often came with a shocking reveal. Times where I’d painted him as the devil himself, I suddenly realised, I was to blame. At least as much, if not more.

And when the whole narrative of a book hinges on that scene, but now the bad guy suddenly turns out to be you, the whole story has to change.

Wait! Do I have to change my identity now?

In last week’s Undividing, about the D-Bag in Seat 41C on my flight home, the third tip I offered was to go back and unpack some of your old victim stories.

I took my own medicine. Top of my list was Fred.

I realised that part of my identity during my divorce, was that my ex was my enemy. It was a cornerstone of who I thought myself to be in that period, Karl The Wronged by His Enemy The Ex. That was hard to give up. I had to write a whole book about it to change my mind. I’m that stubborn sometimes.

And in the last few years, Fred The Enemy had been some of bricks I’d used to build who I was these days in Berlin. On days where I felt I was getting nowhere in Berlin I’d think of Fred and feel the rush of self righteousness, or else blame him for my lonely circumstances.

So, just like writing about my ex, I found myself writing about Fred in The Emotions Diary. And it schooled me.

T.E.D. reminded me that in my final phone conversation with Fred, he’d asked when I was coming home to Berlin. My reply at the time was, “Not for a while, I’ve got nothing to come back for.”

I’d totally forgotten that I’d said that. What I meant was, I had no desire to return to a city where I’d be locked up back in my apartment, alone, and slipping into a depression again over it. Fred and all my other friends were coupled up and living together, I didn’t even have a plant to take care of.

But what Fred could have heard was, “You are not important enough to me, to come back for.” All of our emotions were high back then. Fred could easily have taken that as a slight, maybe even a deep wound.

And if that’s the way he took it, I could understand that. Given his idea of what friendship is. He could think I had broken it. That I was the villain here. That I abandoned him first.

As Light Watkins said in his last podcast with the Free Hug guy…

What’s the conclusion?

I wish my revelations about my own behaviours with my ex and Fred had been revealed to me in actual conversations with them. Misunderstandings could have been unearthed together, and maybe two friendships saved.

But writing is my way of doing the same thing, having that un-had conversation. And in both their cases the only way. I haven’t got in touch with Fred again. I don’t know if I ever will. There are more episodes between us I haven’t written about here, that need more unpacking. But I do know that for the last couple of weeks, I haven’t done any enemyfying of him. If anything, I think of him kindly.

I’ve swapped a hit of righteous dopamine every time I replayed the Fred Tapes to a new sense of calm. It’s not as sexy. It’ll never be a plot point on a Netflix show. But it’s a relief. And for that I’m grateful.

So here’s an exercise. While it can be really hard, remember, you’re doing this for you, and your sense of peace.

Three actions you can try:

1. Pick someone you think of as an enemy.

2. Think about the whole thing from their point of view.

   1. Write down the disagreement from their POV.

   2. Ask “What would it be like to be them in this situation?”

   3. Note where you could potentially be at fault. Could they actually have been in the right anywhere?

   4. How does this change your understanding?

You may want to stop here. This could be enough. But if you feel ready, and want to, there’s two more steps.

1. Get in touch with them (email, text, VM, call, IRL).

   1. You could open with, “I’ve been thinking about what happened, and I wondered if you took it as X.” Or “I think I see where I was wrong here.”

   2. You may have imagined the wrong reason, or how they took it. But it’s saying to them you’ve been processing it, seeing your faults in it, and that you care about them and want to build a bridge.

2. Don’t expect them to feel the same, or want to do the same.

   1. You have no control over that. They might still need you as an enemy for their identity.

   2. But if it goes sideways, you may learn more that could help in the future.

Let me know if you try this and how it goes.

One last note; this is an example about enemies in a friendship and a marriage. Lots of us have people vested in having us as enemies for our gender, sexuality, religion, political views etc.

This is a whole other macro level of enemyfying. One that’s going to take a long time to change. I don’t have all the answers there. And no one should be putting themselves in harms way. I’m in a minority group myself, and I know what it is to face hatred.

But in my experience, things are always moved forward by conversations. In your families and friend groups is a good place to learn the skills.

---

Undividing Ourselves: It’s Your Turn To Take The Inner-Dog Out

Photo by Oscar Sutton on Unsplash

Something I always promise myself I’m going to do, and then never do, is go for a walk everyday.

I just don’t get around to it. Since I tore my meniscus last year which I wrote about in the very first Undividing I took it as a wake up call. Since then I’ve been at the gym five times a week, turning my rehab into a habit. Not bragging, it took a massive injury because my moral fibre needed massive prodding.

But walking, yeah… I know it feels good. I just never found a compelling reason. Till now.

A friend of my partner’s called Eymeld (like, I-melt) walked passed us in the street. Greetings were exchanged. Then we asked where she was going. To which she replied with great conviction, “I’m taking my inner-dog for a walk.”

We both burst out laughing, as she did, and after some hugs, Eymeld and her inner dog were on their way.

If you’ve had dogs, you know how they will hassle you to go out. So restless, they won’t leave you alone. And post-walk, they are always so chill. I know that restless feeling in myself. A restlessness that I don’t know what to do with. Now I do.

Now when my inner-dog is barking, I take it out for a walk. And I always feel more chill when I get home. It’s like a moving meditation; there’s no destination, it’s all about the journey.

Try it. Bonus, you don’t have other pick up poop either. Or break up any leg-humping.

---

Undividing Extra: The Ministry For The Future - It’s Sci-fi And You’re In It.

Kim Stanley Robinson is a NY Times bestselling author and there’s good reason for that. In the sci-fi genre, of which I’m a huge fan, he’s a grandmaster.

And this last book I read of his called The Ministry For The Future is nothing short of a masterpiece in my opinion. (Link is to its Wiki.)

No plot spoilers, but the story is essentially this; a few years from today, a deadly heatwave kills millions in India. The UN set up the Ministry For The Future, a body to protect the rights of future generations. Their mission: get the signatories to the Paris Accords of 2015 to keep their world on carbon emissions.

What follows is a scientifically, economically, politically, and environmentally sound story that is nothing short of unputdownable. And it involved every single person on earth. What is murky though, are the ethics. When you see what Robinson’s characters have to do to really change the course of human behaviour, it’s quite unsettling.

I found myself often not knowing who the good guys and bad guys were. And if those terms were even relevant. Intelligent and counter cultural, if you’re tired of clicking through Netflix to find something even watchable, pick up this book instead because it’s so very deeply readable.

---

Till the Emotions Diary on Thursday, big undividing hugs to you all,

Karl

Eat Pray Liz!

As always I would love your support of my book, How To Burn A Rainbow. It’s won a Readers Favorite Award (Goodreads) and the BIBA for LGBTQ+ memoir. And it’s even been given the thumbs up by a hero of mine, Elizabeth Gilbert who wrote Eat Pray Love.

HTBAR is the story of how my divorce set me on a journey to figure out who I am. A riches to rags rollercoaster of a story that goes from LA to Berlin, where I had to lose it all to find myself.

You can pick a copy up from Jeff at the US Amazon store or from Ru Paul’s Allstora who now ship internationally. Or order one at your local bookstore.