as small as a world and as large as alone, madeofpatterns: clatterbane: “You don’t need...

5:12pm October 24, 2013

clatterbane:

“You don’t need this junk. You need a cat.”: holy fuck

thesiegeperilous:

youneedacat:

I think I just had a conversation that simultaneously combined a couple of my least favorite things.

1. Telling someone that I have language problems, and then being relentlessly picked apart for my language usage alone and no other topic at all. And also telling someone I have language problems,…

If this is about the dissenters on the “institution” thing, I have been getting REAL hard creep vibes from all those people. They seem to be purposely trying to provoke people into arguments and a lot of the language they’ve been using has potential to be highly abusive. One of them posted something about people “not engaging” them in their fight and how it was cowardly. Just the red flags are flying out of everywhere on all of the people engaged in this(especially about language usage).

Yeah. I just have not had the spoons to jump in on that, particularly since they’re giving off such serious creepy vibes and I think they’re just wanting to bully disabled people. I feel kind of bad for needing to just not engage sometimes online, when jerks are actually hassling my friends, but dealing with people who are not arguing in good faith seems unlikely to do anything but eat up the few spoons available while encouraging even more trollish behavior. :(

The main one is autistic and has a mental illness and a value set that horrifies me. I think he’s an ass, but that doesn’t mean he’s faking his disability.

I would rather that people *didn’t* jump in and engage those people. No good comes of giving them a platform.

I mean, if you want to write stuff explaining institutions, that’s good. But don’t expose yourself and others to toxic institution apologism out of a sense that the honorable thing to do is engage. We don’t owe people like that anything.

I don’t think anyone here is faking their disability, in fact the thought never even occurred to me. That thought practically never occurs to me. And by practically never I mean only a handful of people, ever. And only after giving off serious, extremely specific warning signs a mile wide that practically nobody ever gives off. And by practically nobody I mean, if you have to ask, I don’t mean you.

(I’m nervous saying I believe it of anyone ever, just because the people who aren’t faking are the ones who will freak out and think I mean them. But it does happen in rare instances. And I’ve been burned badly by someone who was faking something. But I honestly think the damage done by people who fake isn’t because they are faking things, it’s because of the sort of people they are outside of any faking going on. Like if they weren’t hurting people through actions surrounding faking disability, they’d be hurting people just as badly some other way. In other words, the fakery is not the main issue and never was, which is why I rarely talk about it and don’t make a big deal out of it. Far more damage is done to people who are truly disabled and accused of faking, than is done by the act of faking. And yes, I know exactly how much damage the latter can be. It still doesn’t hold a candle to the former, either in numbers or in destructiveness.)

So um… that wasn’t even the point of my post, I just got into a long side note there.

The point of my post is… I got really really bad vibes, or whatever you want to call them, from the person I was interacting with. But I felt like I had to interact with them. Not because I thought it was noble or something. But because what if I was wrong about them, what if they weren’t really being as hostile as it felt like they were, what if they weren’t actually the person who was being referenced in madeofpattern’s other posts (I never read the original fight), etc.

And it’s that habit that has gotten me seriously harmed in the past.

Even when they turned on me for the language stuff in an undeniable way.

I sat there puzzling over that one sentence.

“Is there any intention that other people know what you’re saying when you do this?”

I kept reading it over and over like that.

Like, could a person really be that horrible?

And so then I turned to…

I’ve known autistic people who say things like that and don’t mean any harm by them, but are just extremely blunt. And would say something like that out of some kind of misguided curiosity. And etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.

But what I really saw when I read that statement and the rest of the post, was intense scorn.

But then I remembered being accused of having feelings I wasn’t having, by people who read too much into things I wrote.

And yet, second-guessing myself in matters like this has gotten me two separate stalkers, both of whom seem to have sought me out specifically because I give people too much benefit of the doubt when alarm bells should be going off.

Like I still talk to people after they make uncalled-for remarks about my weight.

Because I feel like, “If it were me, I’d want the benefit of the doubt, because I really don’t mean any harm but sometimes say things that get misunderstood as hostile.”

Or “I have a friend who might say something like that totally innocently. If I give up on this conversation it would be like all the people who give up on my friend.”

And endless thoughts of that nature.

So it’s not so much that I think it’s necessary, or noble, to engage with people like this.

And more that I keep playing the “what if…” game, like “What if… they really don’t mean what they’re giving every single indication that they do mean?”

Except this time I stopped myself before I went even further, and that’s progress of some kind.

Because normally I would get caught in an endless cycle of explaining myself to the person. And then they would get more and more hostile or cruel or nasty, and eventually end up really upsetting me in a huge way.

Upsetting isn’t even the word. They actually do damage. Temporary damage, but still, often incapacitating for awhlle. And that’s the real reason I can’t stick around and take it forever.

b /..////////

Notes: