I have good reason to be proud of a lot of people in my life.
I have parents who do meaningful work in the world. I have younger siblings who regularly blow my mind with what they’re able to achieve in their personal and professional lives. I have friends who encourage me to be a better human almost every day. I have a husband who is smart and ambitious and also hilarious and kind.
For most of my life, I had no reservations about telling all of these people how proud I was of all they were doing and being. As a committed card writer, I was particularly prone to sharing my pride with them in writing—not only on the big occasion of a graduation or a wedding, but in “just because” cards or notes written in honor of unremarkable birthdays. I was proud, proud, proud of them and they knew it because I told, told, told them.
Until I stopped.
To be clear, I am not an advocate of under-communicating. Far from it! If anything, I could probably benefit from learning to streamline the verbiage used in most parts of my life. My cards and verbal overtures didn’t necessarily get any shorter when I cut the “I’m proud of you” business from my vocabulary—I just found new things to say. I had to find new things to say and alternate language for the immense, well, pride I took in my loved ones and the amazing things they were doing—and continue to do—in the world.
Here’s why I stopped telling people I was proud of them: I can’t remember exactly where I saw, heard, or read the interview or even who it was with—which seems ridiculous given how much it’s clearly stuck with me—but it really was a single interview that got me (re)thinking. The expert being interviewed was a therapist or psychologist of some sort, and as I remember it, much of the problematic nature of the “I’m proud of you” phrasing comes down to semantics. I’m a big language girl, so I’m happy to geek out on this. Let’s just take a minute to break it down…
I’m proud of you.
My choice of italics isn’t especially subtle here. It underscores the whole point, which is that when we use this exact arrangement of words to express how impressed we are with someone’s behavior or accomplishments, we make ourselves the subject. Gen Z would correctly identify this as serious main character energy.
I don’t know that there’s anything inherently wrong with using these particular four words in this particular arrangement—and I’m sure nothing terrible will happen if you continue to do so! But when I heard this interview, I found myself reflecting on the specific ways in which I internalized the phrase over the years, especially during my childhood. Maybe my reaction was an overreaction or overcorrection, but I decided then and there that I didn’t really want to roll the dice on whether or not the people I love might similarly internalize my well-intentioned words for them.
Currently Reading: The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride
I’ve been working on this one for a while, and you’re probably a little sick and tired of hearing about it. It is taking me a while to read—and I think that’s telling. I wish I was loving it, but I continue to struggle with what feels like a lot of tangential information. I was worried that sticking to it was putting me at risk of getting into a reading rut, so I decided that I would also pick up…
… and Come and Get It by Kiley Reid
Such a Fun Age is one of my favorites, and I was lucky enough to have Kiley as my mentor and adviser in grad school. So far, her new book is everything I hoped it might be… and possibly more. It’s especially fun to read it having spent time in the author’s classroom and knowing extra context about what she might be trying to do on the page. I can’t wait to keep reading!
The thing about “I’m proud of you”—beyond, of course, the semantics that we’ve now parsed—is that it centers the person doing the talking instead of the person who’s actually done the thing to be proud of. In my cumulative experience on the receiving end of these words, this also has the effect of suggesting that the speaker is in some way taking credit for the receiver’s efforts because the impressive fruits of those efforts are a direct reflection of the former. It gives the proud person bragging rights as though they are the one who did the thing. A highly sensitive person—hi, it’s me!—might alchemize all of these little interpersonal cues into an ultimately false belief that they are personally responsible for someone else’s ego and self-worth. Let the people=pleasing begin!
If this sounds like a stretch to you, all I can say is that I envy the way you process the world. Never change. Seriously.
Then again, I’m not the only person making a case to quit “I’m proud of you.” Plenty of smarter, savvier people are out there with a similar call to scrub the phrase from regular use.
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