When Your Family Is Indifferent, You Need Some Super Fans

Living Happy Extra

Me looking like a dork. There are basically ten or less photos of me as a kid. This is possibly because of my ultra wavy bangs.

Yesterday, I took a shower, pulled out the body lotion, and it was sort of clogged. I didn’t unclog it like a logical human, I squeezed and squirted lemon rosemary right into my eye.

This wouldn’t be a big deal if it hadn’t been right before a live video podcast.

It wouldn’t have been a big deal if my step-sister hadn’t died yesterday. Her name was Carrie, too, only it was spelled Kerri, and when I was little, I thought she was kind of amazing. She had kids my age; she swore; she winked. She welcomed me as a little sister with open arms.

And she was gone.

That damn moisturizer? It felt like the object that expressed exactly how I was feeling: stuck and then exploding out in all the wrong places, clogged and under pressure and not sure how I was supposed to work.

I’m not a tube of lemon-rosemary body lotion. I’m a human, but damn if I didn’t feel like a clogged lotion tube right then, laughing at the absurdity of it or the amazing aim of it that it landed in my one good eye.

I quit a board yesterday. I was the co-president. And the CEO of the organization didn’t even respond. I hate resigning from things, but damn if I didn’t think after a few hours passed, “Yeah, that was a pretty good choice.”

One of the major reasons that I left was a lack of response and indifference. It’s hard to put your energy and limited time into a place where people ignore you when you ask for information, and forget to cc you on emails.

I’m going to jump around a tiny bit here, and I hope you don’t mind.

SUPER FANS

In advertising and life there are these things call superfans. These are people who get ecstatic about the things you do; they are fully immersed in your story; they cheer for you. They are impassioned about you.

In my biological family, I only had three superfans: my mom, Uncle Dick, and Aunt Maxine, and when they were dead I was anchorless, lost. My brother and sister are not my super fans. I never fit with them. That doesn’t make them bad. It just is what it is and we are nothing alike.

When people are immersed in story, their brains produce oxytocin, which is measurable, and you can tell how immersed they are by measuring that. Superfans who are fully immersed in a commercial or telling stories about a beloved brand or product have surges of oxytocin. When they talk about the brand or the product, they use a ton of emotional language. In a way, their brains drug them into loving something: a brand, a book series, a Netflix show, an actor, Harry Styles, whatever.

We do this too with the people that we love.

Super fan people tend to have tons of friends. A little more than half are female. They love and they love and they are loyal. And that love can be nurtured.

That’s what didn’t happen in my family with my much older brother and sister. No love was nurtured. Our relationships are like that lemon-rosemary lotion, clogged up and unused.

In his book, Immersion, (Sept 13 release), Paul Zak talks about this in terms of advertising and science, but it’s true about family and friendship, too, right?

People become a part of the Disney family. They are Trekkies. It goes on and on.

Zak quotes Elie Wiesel in his book as having said, “The opposite of love is not hate; it is indifference.”

And that is how my family is with me. But my step family? They were enthusiastic and loving and thought my weirdness was adorable, my good grades were something to applaud, my goofy glasses and slurred s’s just amazing quirks.

I love them for that.

When Zak and his team were studying health insurance commercials in California go figure out why the commercials weren’t working, his team found out that none of the viewers were immersed in the commercials. That was because there was no narrative structure; no conflict, nobody cared about the people in the commercials, most of them were faceless and faces, he writes, are how we see other people’s emotions.

How does this come back to living happy and super fans?

Here’s the thing: We have to be unafraid to share our stories, our ups and our downs, our vulnerabilities, our truths, the suck of squirting lotion in our eyes and the joy of finally getting a kind comment, the pain of quitting a board or losing a step-sister to death or a real sister or brother to indifference.

We can’t be each other’s superfans unless we’re real with each other, unless we’re brave and vulnerable with each other. So, let’s all be brave together, okay?

We can do this. One tiny step at a time.