GAH!

[hummingwolf]

A few days ago, I was feeling frustrated by the impossibility of communication with certain people in my life, and felt the need to vent a bit. So I wrote this post, with, by my count, six basically positive comments, two negative, and one neutral. Of the two negative comments, one was in reference to food left out by a housemate to rot--not sure which housemate, which frustrated me because I would have loved to have spoken with them directly. To the best of my knowledge, none of the housemates has a LiveJournal. Which leaves one and only one negative comment anyone on LJ could possibly even think was in reference to them.

Look--if you are my friend, if you know that I have a high opinion of you, why would you read

"You think nobody notices what your real obsession is? Dream on, honey. People become what they focus on, and what you're focusing on isn't pretty. You haven't yet become the thing you hate, but you are closer to it now than you were a year ago."

and think it applied to you? I can understand having a paranoid attitude, and having as your first reaction to a negative the thought that it was a negative reference to you. I can understand that a first reaction is something over which you have little to no control. I get that. But afterwards, when you have time to think, anything you believe after that is your choice. Why would you choose to believe negative things about yourself?

The post was never meant as "One of those posts about people on my friends list--let's see if they can guess who I mean, ha ha!" It's not about you at all. It was a journal post. This is my only journal, and I had a really desperate need to say a few things I could not, for one reason or another, actually say to the people I wanted to talk to. Even the positive things aren't always things you can say directly to people, or at least they're not things I could say directly to the people I wanted most to speak to that morning. I felt if I couldn't say them to someone, somewhere, I would explode.

It wasn't about you. It was only a page in somebody's diary.


All this reminds me that pronoia really needs to get more active.

Comments

[sophy.livejournal.com]

Hmm, wanted to reply to a reply of yours but it was screened, so will just pop it down here. If that's not cool, I'll understand if you screen or delete it.

Whoah, no. I don't believe anyone is responsible for anyone else's emotions. We are all responsible for our own.
What I'm saying is that we do all affect one another's emotions, and being sensitive to that is a good thing.

So, I'm not saying I (or anyone else) felt anxious by your post, and therefore that's your fault and you have to make us feel better. Not at all.
It was more like "hey, that post seemed to make a lot of people feel anxious, so maybe if you do something similar in the future you could do this one small thing to ease that discomfort?" Which was a request or a suggestion - not a demand. And you have every right to discard that, and I know it, and that's fine.

I really feel like a lot of this has been blown out of proportion, which is definately partially on me for the way I misunderstood your post above.

The initial comment in the initial post was really meant as a humrous statement expressing a brief twinge of anxiety and nothing more.
It was just after I felt as though you were angry with me for expressing my feeling that I got upset and said more.

Gah, I hope this all makes sense.

[hummingwolf.livejournal.com]

What I'm saying is that we do all affect one another's emotions, and being sensitive to that is a good thing.

We do affect each other's emotions by being a part of each other's environments, but the effects aren't always predictable. If I wrote a post today about the death of my mother from lung cancer, someone who is totally pissed off because people keep telling them not to smoke when they want to would react differently from someone who's dealing with their own loved one's recent death. They would see the same post, but read different things into it based on their own recent experiences.

Yes, if I write something here which I know is likely to upset a group of people in a predictable way, I do tend to give a little warning. If I'm linking to something that's heavily biased politically, I will say so so that people can be warned to expect things that may piss them off. I also appreciate it when links are marked with information about whether it's image-heavy or a video so I know if it's worth my time as a dial-up user to click the link. I'm not totally against disclaimers in cases where reactions are predictable. But I don't believe that every page in my diary needs to be marked as "This is a page in my diary and is about my life, not yours." I think that is kinda obvious.

this one small thing to ease that discomfort?

Y'know, of the three people who told me that they had an initial feeling of anxiety when they read the first post, you are the third one to tell me that you didn't really think I was attacking you after you thought about it. Every one of you eased your own discomfort. And I do the same thing--when I heard something that someone else said today and felt angry about it in reaction, I stopped and thought about whether my anger made sense, and then I realized that my reaction was related to my own problems and not to what the person meant when they were talking to me. Or going back to your first comment to this post, when you said it was cruel, I could have taken it as an insult--you were suddenly thinking that I was a horrible, horrible person--possibly on the level of George W. Bush! But I thought about it and realized that you probably didn't mean to insult me at all; and even if you did, I didn't have to react to the insult as if it were an excuse to invade Iraq.

I guess my thing here is that I don't see the need to do something for someone which I know they are going to do for themselves.

[sophy.livejournal.com]

We do affect each other's emotions by being a part of each other's environments, but the effects aren't always predictable.
And I suppose what I've been trying to get through to you is that now you know that making a post with a bunch of statements towards people without clarifying that they aren't about the people who can read them is something that you can predictably expect to upset a large amount of people. And you know that because some people, myself included, said so.

[hummingwolf.livejournal.com]

And again, I don't mean to sound condescending or anything like that in any of my comments. It's just that I wasted a lot of energy over the years on certain mistakes, and I don't want anyone else to go through the things I went through, especially someone who shares some of the same problems with lack of energy that I have.

I wasn't angry with you for expressing your feeling. I wasn't angry with you at all. I was worried.

And yeah, this has been blown out of proportion, but it's led to some interesting discussions!

[sophy.livejournal.com]

I have to admit that, yes, I have found some of the comments from you and your friends to be condescending and patronizing.
I understand that you're working through things in a certain way that's been incredibly important and helpful to you. But it's not something that I feel I need to have pushed on me right now. We all come to things in our own time and space, and I understand that you feel you're trying to help me. But it feels more like you're trying to justify doing things that hurt other people by saying that you're not responsible for their feelings.
And I'm not saying that to mean that you were intentionally being mean, or even that you were mean unintentionally.
But what I've gotten from all of these comments is a pressure to not feel my own feelings at all because somehow they must be invalid if they aren't the feelings you expect or want me to have.
I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with feeling anxiety or fear or sadness or anger. They're all valid feelings that need to be expressed. And sometimes they're founded on misunderstandings, and discussing them with the people who you're having them about can be really helpful.
But being told that I'm responsible for my own feelings and then that discussing my feelings is somehow unhealthy - just did not feel helpful to me.
I know I'm responsible for my own feelings. But I also know that things that other people do and say can trigger certain feelings in me. And sometimes that means that they need to apologize and maybe modify their behavior, and sometimes means I have to apologize and modify my behavior - but I think it usually means that everyone involved needs to own up to their own feelings, accept the feelings of the other people, and think hard about what behaviors they might need to modify.

[hummingwolf.livejournal.com]

Okay, previous comment was harsh and I have deleted it. However, you do need to be aware that your recent comments can be seen as insulting as well.

[sophy.livejournal.com]

And if you felt insulted by them, then I am sorry.

And I must say, I'm really confused by some of the things you said in the comment you deleted. If you would like to discuss them further, I'm open to doing that. I don't want there to be a lot of hurt feelings between us.