Excerpt from: #32 The Case for Complaining (Without Becoming a Complainer)
II. Contexts and Power
Power is not an ornament here; it is a condition. The more power I carry, the louder my complaint registers, often regardless of merit. The less power I carry, the more “tone,” “timing,” and “style” are used as gates against me. This is not paranoia. It is an old fact with fresh platform polish. Women are framed as emotional. Poor people are framed as jealous. Immigrants are framed as confused. Accent becomes a stand-in for intelligence. Grammar gets treated like a moral test. The fix is not to beg for a different bias. The fix is receipts. Facts are not a charm against prejudice, but they anchor the conversation when people try to drag it toward tone. (Audre Lorde’s line—“your silence will not protect you”—is hers, and I agree with the claim about speech as survival. I am making a narrower claim about complaint as a structured case within that speech.)[^1]
So why do people stay quiet? Because quite often buys safety. Because they grew up being punished for factual sentences. Because they learned that keeping everyone else comfortable was the price of belonging. Because vagueness—maybe I’m overreacting—feels safer than conviction when conviction gets you labeled “difficult.” Because DARVO (deny–attack–reverse victim and offender) trains you to doubt your own eyes. Because gendered norms script women as agreeable and cast men who complain as authoritative, not dramatic. Because the bystander effect makes each of us wait for the other to stand first. Because sunk costs make us guard our investments even when they’re bleeding us out. Because perfectionism tells us that if the complaint isn’t irrefutable in every detail, better not to speak at all. Silence has private payoffs—peace, belonging, paychecks, sometimes literal survival. I won’t shame the quiet. I will say the bill comes due.
What does complaint give the speaker when it’s used with core? Agency returns. The body stops carrying the whole case in the jaw and the gut. Hidden information surfaces; you discover you were not the only one. Boundaries get set and sometimes respected. Stress leaves the body in sentences instead of in ulcers. Allies find you. Patterns get documented. Power rebalances: one voice is a spark; ten are a signal; a thousand is policy. Inside small rooms, complaint normalizes dissent so that improvement becomes custom, not scandal. Products, services, classrooms, clinics—all of them sharpen when customers, students, and patients refuse to be flattered into silence. Sometimes a complaint is a lesson for the recipient: you are being trusted with the truth; act like it.
Costs exist, and not only reputational ones. In some countries and contexts, the cost of complaint is retaliation, loss of livelihood, violence. Even where life and limb aren’t threatened, mis-timed or poorly scoped complaints can rupture relationships beyond repair. Chronic complaint without a path corrodes attention; gratitude shrivels; identity collapses into “the one who always has a problem.” After an unskillful complaint comes the emotional hangover: fatigue, embarrassment, powerlessness. None of this is an argument for silence. It is an argument for the right tool and the right aim.
There’s a cultural layer here that deserves honesty, not insult. Communication styles differ. In some cultures, meaning rides on implication and relationship; in others, it rides on explicit words and public accountability. When those styles collide, complaints can seem like betrayal to one side and evasion to the other. I live in the cross-current. My position: learn both grammars. Directness without empathy bruises; implication without clarity confuses. A functioning civic culture needs clear words that care. Newcomers and natives alike benefit from orientation to that standard. It is not about replacing one culture with another. It is about a shared civic practice that lets harm be named and fixed.
What happens on the recipient’s side is not trivial. When handled well, a complaint creates psychological safety: I spoke, you listened, something genuine moved. It invites repair: apology that isn’t cosmetic, change that isn’t performative. When handled poorly, it triggers defensiveness—old shame, ego threat, the fear that competence is on trial. Attachment histories matter. Secure people can tolerate the heat and stay present. Anxious ones escalate to re-secure closeness. Avoidant ones shut down to preserve autonomy. Disorganized ones ping-pong. This isn’t therapy; it’s logistics. If I know the nervous system across from me, I can decide if a private complaint can land at all or if I need a third party or a formal channel.
Specificity is the difference between a case and a vibe. Behavior, dates, impact, request—if I can’t supply these, I’m probably not ready to deliver the complaint, or what I have is disappointment, not a claim. Apologies and visible repair shorten the cycle: “You’re right; here’s what we’re changing this week.” On the other end, compassion fatigue is real; recipients tasked with absorbing endless complaints without resources or authority burn out and get cynical. That cynicism is dangerous; it converts real harms into “just another ticket.” If a system is structured so that most complaints are unsolvable at the level of the recipient, that system invites either revolt or numbness. Neither is an argument against the truth. They are an argument for putting power where the harms actually live.
Because we pretend structure is boring, harms get personalized. We blame the clerk for the policy, the teacher for the district, the nurse for the system, the moderator for the platform. Sometimes they are complicit; sometimes they are the last human buffer between a bad design and a livid public. Systemic complaint is a different animal. It requires patience, coalition, pattern recognition, and the skepticism to resist simple villain stories. A single complaint can expose a seam in that fabric, but the mending takes more than a single thread.
— Transition. With stakes and power on the table, the final movement turns to practice—how complaint travels through channels, how to keep it ethical, and how to end well.
c.f.
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Notes
[^1]: Audre Lorde, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” first delivered 1977; collected in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Crossing Press)
