Nisha Susan: ‘Sherlocking’ your way out of people pleasing habits
A woman’s online Threads saga of refusing to lift a finger for a party became the battle cry for every former people pleaser
Last week my friend Leena and I had that aging moment we, as millennials, have had over and over again since we were 25. We were talking about a tech platform that millions of younger people are on but we have no energy to be on—Discord, this time. Millennials have had built-in obsolescence chasing our heels since our prefrontal cortexes were still in the jelly stage. We sighed and exchanged the five facts we knew about Discord and then moved on. Many hours later, I remembered that I have a new short story coming out soon, parts of which has action set on this particular platform. If ever there was a sign that the prefrontal and the rest of my cortex was lost in fog! Leena was unfazed though. As I said, as millennials, our response to new platforms is: been there, deleted that.
This being the case, I will not hold it against you if you say “what is a Threads?" It is, for the record, a Meta platform that everyone who was on Instagram was plugged into by default in 2023. Today, it is a kind of low-fat, low-sugar version of Twitter, full of people who are grateful that it is not Twitter, missing the old, highly functional, chronological timeline of Twitter but not enough to go back to Twitter. On Threads, I skulk and enjoy the local news from my new hometown and the occasional hijinks that might come my way. And in a clear indication of the universe serving those who want low-fat, low-sugar hijinks, last week brought us the phenomena called Sherlocked.
A Threads user, i_am_sherlocked, had thousands of others at the edge of their seats with live updates of her very low-key family drama. So much so that the essence of her action has since been replicated and claimed by hundreds of others who have named it their own “sherlocked" moment. It is particularly funny that this incident has repurposed the name of a character who would not have known people pleasing if it bit him in the pipe or the Persian slipper.
Here is a short version of what she did. Ms. Sherlocked’s husband’s brother and brother’s wife (I know, I know, doesn’t it already sound great?) wanted their daughter’s birthday to be held at Sherlocked’s house, on a weekday, no less. Sherlocked was not asked about it. She was told it was happening in two days. Based on previous records, Sherlocked knew that the family would expect her to be overcome by anxiety and obligation to do everything to make this inconvenient gathering at her house a success.
Normally, without ever being asked, she would have baked the cake, cooked the meal and organised the decorations. This time she wasn’t sure. What would you do in this context, she asked. Don’t do anything, replied many women. And soon after, she announced that she was somehow really going to do nothing.
This in itself, women know, is a near-insurmountable challenge. To take this challenge to a higher level, Sherlocked had decided to also say nothing. She was going to go through the days before the party and the party without lifting a finger but also not offer any explanation. And then, as half of Threads watched, she proceeded to do that.
Before the party, she responded to any hints or indirect demands that she pitch in, with vague pleasantness. But no actual work. At the party, she played with her niece and the other children but did no other work. After the party, she did no clean-up! To understand the kind of determined detachment she exercised, just read this one line— “as for party start time, no one has actually confirmed it, and I refuse to ask again."
An hour or so before the party, she said, “Everyone thinking I am calm, I may seem it in my interactions with the kids/husband but I am absolutely not calm. My eye is twitching, my heart is pounding and there is a lot of deep breathing techniques happening behind the scenes."
Sherlocked resisted all indirect suggestions that she labour at this party she had foisted on her. At one point, her sister-in-law, the mother of the birthday girl, said to her, “I don’t know how to cut cake." Sherlocked responded, she says, by “slow blinking with a polite smile." When the exasperated sister-in-law demanded directly that she cut it, she says she “walked off to admire the walls." This last phrase has since become the mantra of a newly formed cult of reformed/currently reforming people-pleasers on Threads. At last count, 24,900 users had liked that line and presumably emblazoned it across their hearts.
The low-stakes plot of the unwanted party duty was sure to delight jittery, nervy, former dopamine junkies. A big attraction also lay in the fact that Ms Sherlocked was brave despite her terror and had adopted passive resistance to protect herself. Confrontation and the adoption of you-go-girl slogans were not in her immediate future, she realised. In her passivity, she mirrored to the family their refusal to humble themselves by asking for her consent. Instead this was the kind of fight displayed in folk tales by the third son who everyone thought was foolish. This was the kind of manoeuvre characterised by comedian Prashasti Singh as “saralta aur chaturai"—simplicity and cleverness.
In the days that followed, Threads has been thronged by users claiming Sherlocked moments in their lives or those posting situations in which they wanted moral support to Sherlock their entitled near and dear ones.
If you too are a recovering people pleaser or if you have just realised that you would have felt obliged to cook for a party you had no say in, this is the moment to plan your own Sherlocking. Diwali is over and Christmas is approaching.
Nisha Susan is the author of The Women Who Forgot To Invent Facebook And Other Stories. She posts @chasingiamb.
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