1:05am June 19, 2014

A letter to people that should know better.

On the other side of the screen is always a human being. Not an abstracted category of human being. Not someone you can check off on your mental checklist, whether they have the qualities that are worthy of your caring about them or not. But a human being. That’s all that matters here.

My father is dying. This is nothing special. Lots of people’s fathers are dying. Many of them are not going to write, on their tumblr, that their fathers are dying. They may act a little differently than normal, in any number of ways, but they are not going to say, my father is dying, my mother is dying, my sister is dying, my whole family is dying, these are not things people are always going to say.

And one day it’s going to be you.

And one day, it will be you. And you will be sitting there writing something that pertains to your life. And you will not have the energy or the will to analyze it. You won’t be able to write an academic-style treatise on everyone who experiences similar oppression to you. You’ll just be able to write what you write, so you write it.

But being the kind of person that you are, you know you’ve left holes so wide open people could drive a truck through them. Holes through which you can be ridiculed, attacked, mocked, and treated as if you’re too stupid and irrelevant to be worth listening to anyway. Holes through which people can say that other oppressed people have it worse so your life doesn’t matter at all. Holes through which people can accuse you of saying things you never said, and get away with it.

You know this because you do these things to other people whenever you notice those holes. You do it all the time. You may even believe that what you are doing is righteous in some manner.

But right now, you simply feel vulnerable. You contemplate whether to delete the post. You’re not up for a debate. You just want to start a conversation. This may be new territory for you, considering that normally you’re all about debates and swift rhetoric and mockery, but right now, just this once, you just want to talk. And you know the odds of that are slim.

But someone – someone unfamiliar with you, or they might not even have tried – responds to you by just talking. And someone else responds to them by just talking. And suddenly you’ve got this group of people around you who are just talking about what you have to say. Adding information where information is missing, but with no hostility. Contradicting you occasionally, but still without hostility, and leaving room for you to still be right with regards to your own situation.

And the relief you feel could fill mountains.

And you had no idea this was possible. You had no idea this was what you needed right now. But it was what you needed right now. You’d forgotten what it was like to go into a conversation without needing full battle armor.

Yeah, one or two people come and try the usual tricks, but they get chased away, and they lose interest because everyone is just talking.

And you can’t believe the contrast.

And you can’t believe your gratitude. That right now, when you were vulnerable, nobody did to you what you were so used to doing to other people when they were vulnerable. That nobody took advantage the way you would’ve taken advantage, if you were them. And you start to wonder, just a little, what effect you’ve been having on other people. And whether it’s worth it, to have that effect.

You wonder how many of the people you hurt, were suffering silently in ways that you can’t imagine. You wonder how many had relatives dying. You wonder how many were stressed to the limit by single motherhood and came online as a refuge. You wonder how many were working three jobs and had no time or energy for adversarial bullshit. And you realize that’s what you were doing, adversarial bullshit. Not communication, not conversation, not social justice, just fighting for fighting’s sake.

And you realize it hurts people.

I hope that’s how you realize it hurts people.

I hope you realize it hurts people, by not being hurt, at a time when you very well could have been vulnerable to the same hurt you caused others.

I hope you don’t have to realize it hurts people by having people hurt you the way you hurt others. Because that’s much worse.

But I do hope, sometime, when you’re vulnerable, someone shows you kindness, and that kindness changes your world. And I hope it makes you think twice the next time you’re poised to rip to shreds a vulnerable person whose father is dying and has no time for your bullshit.

Notes: