The Right Way To Live?

This week I was scrolling Substack Notes when a post caught my eye. It was someone I like and admire enormously offering an opinion about a current news story, making it clear they thought the person at the centre of it was behaving badly.

It is a story I have been following because it is about a topic that interests me (meaning it’s about family and family dynamics, which is at the heart of the current novel I am writing, but is also something I am grappling with, not exactly elegantly, in my own life at the moment) and in my typical namby-pamby, fence-sitting way I feel really sorry for everyone involved and am not quite so sure I know the rights and wrongs of it. In truth I empathise strongly with the person at the centre of it, knowing this is a space in which I struggle too.

As I scrolled down to read the rest of the comments, I was surprised to see just how many people vehemently agreed with the original poster. That all of them bought into a certain code of behaviour or set of rules about family and what is ok/not ok that I just… don’t. The whole post gave me an internal ‘ouch’ as though I had just been flicked with the elastic band of judgement. I had that uneasy sense that I oh-so-frequently have, that everyone else was issued a manual at birth entitled ‘The Right Way To Live’ and that somehow, probably because I had got distracted by something and was at the back of the queue, they had run out of copies before they got to me.

Except of course that can’t be true, because there are as many right ways to live as there are people. Certainly, it seems to me that this topic is what makes up 95% of social media (and Substack is social media, whether we like it or not, I am definitely right about that if nothing else).

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