Not to Complain, But…

Actually, yes—to complain. In great detail.

I love hearing people’s complaints, the smaller and more oddly specific, the better.

The other week, a friend texted to tell me she had a minor bout of food poisoning and that it sucked. Later, she apologized—she’d forgotten I was in the middle of intense chemo nausea and worried it might have been annoying to hear her complain. On the contrary, I said. I never want my friends to feel like they can’t complain. There is no hierarchy here. I don’t believe in the suffering Olympics. In fact, I love being trusted with complaints. Maybe because, when I was younger, I didn’t feel I could express them out loud.

Growing up, our household didn’t really do complaints. To complain was to signal helplessness—like staying stuck inside the problem instead of moving through it. It was also, subtly, a form of ingratitude. We were a pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps family. You kept going. You didn’t dwell. You certainly didn’t air your grievances.

But unspoken doesn’t mean nonexistent; the grievances just have nowhere to go.

Which is why today’s guest essay and prompt by my friend Kate Bowler—on a creative way to catalog complaints—felt like being handed a permission slip to get a few things off my chest.

I started the week feeling low, the kind of low where even the most ordinary things—getting out of bed, showering, walking the dogs, facing sunlight—felt inexplicably hard. When I sat down to write, I could feel a long, unwieldy list of grievances hovering: some personal, some existential, many about the state of the world. (Good grief, the state of the world.) The kind of list so ponderous you don’t even want to begin.

So instead, I lowered the stakes. I began writing small, specific, mildly ridiculous complaints—and within minutes I was laughing. I felt lighter. Not because anything had been solved, but because something had been named.

So, before I turn you over to Kate’s essay and prompt, here is my own partial but highly official record of grievances:

I am not here to complain about cancer. I am here to complain about the clipboard with the pen attached by a string that is always exactly two inches too short. I am here to complain about hold music that sounds like someone learning the flute against their will. I am here to complain about the form that asks me to list “all medications” in a space the size of a Post-it. I am here to complain about the phrase “just a quick pinch,” which feels, at best, aspirational. I am here to complain about the scale being placed in a high-traffic area, turning weigh-in into a public performance.

I will not complain about nausea, but I will complain about hospital waiting room TVs permanently tuned to a cooking show where someone is emulsifying something aggressively dairy-based while saying “you can really taste the richness” at 9:14am. I am here to complain about the MyChart notification that says “You have a new message from your care team” and then refuses to load. I am here to complain about the architecture of hospital gowns, which open in the back and behave as if privacy were a group project.

While I’m on a roll: pee pads. Thanks to two extraordinarily small foster dogs, my house is now a museum of pee pads. They are hideous. Surely we can design something better—more discreet, more dignified. Speakerphone calls—specifically, the kind conducted in my immediate vicinity by a man (my husband) who claims headphones hurt his ears. (He would like it noted that his complaint is that I complain about this.) Phone chargers: too many kinds, and somehow never the right one. The fitted sheet that comes off one corner of the bed every night as if it has its own agenda. Autocorrect confidently changing my name to “Sushi” and then acting like I’m the problem.

Writing this list made me wonder: what is the value of a complaint?

A complaint gives shape to something that would otherwise just hover—the feeling you keep circling, the moment that won’t quite settle. Voicing it draws a boundary and says: this belongs somewhere. Ideally not just… inside me, forever. That, on its own, is a kind of self-respect.

It’s also a bid for witness—not necessarily for repair, just for someone, somewhere, to register it. To nod. To say: yes, I get it. Something shifts when that happens—not because the past changes, but because you’re no longer carrying it around like a loose object with sharp edges.

That’s what Kate’s essay and prompt help us see: left alone, certain complaints loop. Especially the bigger grievances, the deeper hurts. They replay, revise, grow slightly more dramatic each time you revisit them, quietly harden into resentment. Naming them doesn’t erase them, but it can give them somewhere to go—a folder, a drawer, a slightly less central location than the inside of your own head.

And as Kate’s essay makes clear, that small act makes room for something else—something lighter, even a little joyful. (See the bottom of today’s newsletter for a few of my small joys.)

P.S. If you want a soundtrack for your journaling today, I suggest Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5.” A complaint disguised as a bop. Filing grievances has never sounded so good.

Library of Congress (1945)

Prompt 379. The Complaints Department of the Universe by Kate Bowler

For many years now, my best friend and I have been filing paperwork with an organization known as “The Complaints Department of the Universe.”

This department does not appear to have a physical address. It has no website (though we suspect the user interface would be terrible). It almost certainly has beige filing cabinets.

If you were to call, you would probably hear something like:

Press 1 for missed opportunities.
Press 2 for unresolved conversations you replay in the shower.
Press 3 if someone really should have apologized but absolutely did not.
Press 4 if you’re calling about extremely bad timing. **Please note that wait times for bad timing are longer—partly because this is our busiest division, partly because the universe enjoys irony above all else.**

Despite its lack of addresses, we know the department exists. We have been submitting complaints for decades. Whenever something happens that is genuinely, spectacularly unfair, one of us sends the other a message:

ADDING THIS TO THE LIST.

It is important to note that not everything qualifies. Someone finishing the good hummus at a party does not merit a formal filing. Neither does a slow line at the grocery store, unless the slow line somehow contains the person who once steamrolled your heart in 2017.

No, the List is reserved for the larger injustices. The List is the official ledger of grievances currently awaiting cosmic review.

The job you nearly got until someone moved the goalposts.
The friendship that dissolved without explanation.
The moment you realized an apology was never coming.

What makes something List-worthy is not simply that it hurts. Life bruises us constantly in small, ordinary ways. What distinguishes a complaint worth filing is that the story never resolves. It simply… stops. No explanation. No closure. Just a loose thread that continues to snag on things for years. And because the human brain dislikes both randomness and pain, we keep retelling the story—to friends, to strangers, to ourselves while brushing our teeth.

These are the sorts of incidents that clearly require documentation.

Eventually we realized we were not trying to punish anyone. We were simply waiting for someone—anyone—to stamp the form and say:

“Yes. That was terrible. Thank you for bringing this to our attention.”

I think this is why the Complaints Department has helped me clear a path for joy. I realized that I had been carrying certain stories around for years—moments that never resolved, conversations that never finished, apologies that never came.

For those of us (all of us!) who have lived long enough for life to rob us, scar us, and make its mark, sometimes we need a bit of emotional decluttering before anything lighter can enter the room. I found that once I allowed myself to be deeply, officially grieved, something shifted inside of me. Maybe the story no longer had to live entirely inside of me—after all, it was recorded in the vast filing cabinet labeled Unresolved Human Matters. And once my ache had somewhere to go, a little room opened up again—for lighter things. Occasionally, even joy.

This is your prompt:

Imagine that the Complaints Department of the Universe has finally sent you the proper form. Write a one-page complaint.

Include:

• Case number: Make one up (the longer and more official-sounding, the better).
• Incident description: What happened? Be specific. Someone didn’t hurt you in general—it was Linda!
• Nature of grievance: What felt unfair, unresolved, or particularly haunting about it?
• Requested action: Acknowledgment, please and thank you.

The past is a locked door. But perhaps, if we can place our stories, for a moment, into the vast administrative archive of human experience, we might imagine that someone, somewhere, is putting down other people’s paperwork to nod and mutter:

“Yes. That one definitely belongs on the List.”

I’d love to hear what this prompt brought up for you—and what journaling to it made space for. Share your grievances and your joys (small or large) in the comments.

Today’s Contributor—

A four-time New York Times bestselling author, award-winning podcast host, and professor at Duke University, Kate Bowler studies the stories we tell about success, suffering, and faith—and how we can all learn to live with more hope and joy when those stories stop working. Her books include Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved, No Cure for Being Human, Have a Beautiful, Terrible Day!, and her latest, Joyful, Anyway. She lives in Durham, North Carolina, with her family and continues to teach do-gooders at Duke Divinity School.

Kate and I recently talked about ambition monsters, spectacular failures, and a whole lot more—you can listen to our conversation here.

After filing my complaints, a few things that brought joy this week—

1. Setting up painting supplies on the dining table. Then being too tired to actually paint, but leaving them there anyway—an open invitation to tomorrow’s version of myself, who has more energy and, hopefully, better follow-through.

2. Nigella Lawson’s chocolate Guinness cake, made for Easter. The only time in recorded history (of my life) where the cake itself rivaled the frosting. A destabilizing experience. Unbelievably delicious. I will be thinking about it for some time.

3. Rewatching a video of two friends who’ve been besties for nearly half a century, telling the story of how they met. My closest girlfriends are my chosen family, and I love to imagine us decades from now—still interrupting each other, still spilling truly premium tea, still laughing at things no one else finds funny. May it look like this.

4. Brainstorming something very fun for this month’s virtual creative hour, which I’ll be hosting with my friend Hrishikesh Hirway—musician, creator of one of my favorite podcasts (Song Exploder), and a truly delightful human. Think: album listening party meets journaling club. It’s happening Sunday, April 19, from 1–2pm ET. You should come. It’s the kind of thing you’ll be glad you said yes to. Save the date.

Our monthly creative hour, aka Journaling Club, is part of the paid subscription—if you’d like to join us, you can upgrade here. We’ll send the Zoom link and everything you need the day before.