4:36pm July 6, 2014

I had this idea for myself, and then I thought maybe other people would like it too.

This is in a way a continuation of my previous post, I Have Something To Say. You might want to read it. It’s about the best of what tumblr can do for people. And this post is about consciously trying to take part in the best of what tumblr can do for people.

I have a habit of getting into arguments on tumblr. Even when I don’t actively enter the arguments, my mind enters them and gets twisted up in them and that doesn’t help me or anyone else. Not that getting into arguments is always bad. Getting into arguments can be very important. But there are other important things in the world, too. And if all I do on tumblr is get into arguments, I start to feel really unbalanced, and it comes out in my interactions with other people, and people can end up getting hurt. I can end up getting hurt too. All around, arguments just can’t be the only thing I do on tumblr. They can be one thing I do, and they are important some of the time, but they can’t be the only thing, and they probably can’t be the most important thing.

So I was thinking of setting a guideline for myself. This is a flexible guideline, to acknowledge that it’s not always possible to do these things. Especially since I have a lot of disabilities that affect my ability to do anything, and therefore I can’t just tell myself “I will do the same thing every day” and have it work. I’m sure a lot of other people who would want to put this into practice would be the same. So even though this is a daily guideline for myself, it’s flexible and I refuse to beat myself up if I can’t accomplish it.

So here it is:

Every day that I am on tumblr, actively posting.

I will make at least one post. Big or small.

That centers around making people feel welcomed, making people feel valued, making people feel better about themselves, making people feel protected, making people feel loved, making people feel like someone out there actually cares. That centers around enacting love, compassion, or empathy in a very active way.

And this will be genuine. It will not be some kind of act. I am doing this because I care. I am doing this because there have been times when I’ve desperately needed someone to do these things for me. I am doing this because people have done wonderful things for me.

I am doing this because when I was having a horrible day, I wrote a post about my horrible day, got on a van to go home from physical therapy, and when I got home, another tumblr user had sent me a beautiful picture of myself as a fat floofy brown cat. And I cried, because I needed that so badly, and I barely knew this person, and it was such a beautiful thing to do.

There are times, actually, when doing these things for someone will involve getting into some kind of argument on their behalf. Because sometimes helping someone who is being bullied means standing up to the bullies.

But my rule for myself there is that I have to step back, take stock of everything, figure out if it’s really the right thing to do, and go in calmly with full intention to do what needs to be done. It can’t be just the kind of reactive arguing that got me into this situation in the first place, where I feel like I need to do more on tumblr besides argue with people (either on tumblr or in my head, even doing it in my head counts sometimes). So sometimes doing something important for someone will involve getting in a fight, but it has to be calculated, not reactive, or it will just feed into the patterns that are making me think I need to go back to compassion as my first motive for being here.

And it’s perfectly fine to do more than one tumblr post a day this way.

It’s just, I’d like to do at least one tumblr post a day that’s about acting from compassion and love and caring about people in a very active way. Whether it’s a post like this one, which is about the topic in general, or like I Have Something To Say. Or whether it’s a post that actually enacts compassion, love, welcoming, kindness, empathy, basic human decency, and all those kinds of things towards a particular person or people.

I’d love to think what would happen if lots and lots of people adopted this as their personal policy. But even if nobody else is going to do it, I’m going to try my best to do it. Because it’s the right thing to do, and it makes tumblr a better and more welcoming place for everyone. And no, it’s not about being nice to people on some kind of quota system, it’s just about trying to find ways to remember to be nice to people on a regular basis, when it’s so easy to just descend into the mire of the online bicker-fests that plague so many forums.