@“connrrr”#p104282 How weird has this pandemic made you as a person? How much harder is it to get out and go to things with human beings?
literally no change.
Tags: Domestic Abuse and police brutality I guess, I'm just ranting here rather than getting super down and dirty explicit about the worst of the worst
Summary
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To clarify, if you have no trust or affection or desire for approval from humanity and your family raised you with constant psychological and physical abuse and you‘ve never experienced an intimate relationship with someone who didn’t try to rush you into sex to tie you down instead of expressing the normal kind of intimacy and companionship that you need then there was probably zero effect from covid on your day to day life. The closed door simply stays closed.
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I tell you what did happen though, before I could ever leave town and find out if my fiance was dead or alive I got locked down on all the borders and planes and couldn‘t leave my dog behind with any relatives, and effectively slowly bled money to the point that now that I can leave I have to hustle up cash to go anywhere which sucks because I’m profoundly dysfunctional as a person in society for the aforementioned reasons and the physiological damage that comes from having people hammer you in the head (with an actual hammer or baseball bat etc.) or taser you or needle jack you enough times. Like forgetting how to drive. That‘s something that can happen if you borrow a car and call and tell your mom that you did it and she calls the cops on you because there’s no way you would ever do that, and they pit maneuver you into a telephone pole and tase you 3 times simultaneously because you're really tough and get really angry whenever someone draws a weapon on you because of how many times that has happened. I have relearned and forgotten how to drive at least 3 times.
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And now maybe I never will find out what happened to that person, I just have to proceed directly into the void to what might be the kind of closure that erases the last vestiges of hope in my soul.
Thinking of doing some Artistic projects for money or selling all my worldly possessions if that's not significant enough. Welfare bucks is barely enough to live on with such an unclear disability after all.
@“connrrr”#p104282 I feel similar! Things were definitely going pretty well back in February 2020. Now I feel like I don‘t have enough friends and it’s hard to get out and do anything worthwhile. Another thing I‘ve noticed that has made it equally hard, is a lot of the people around me have some bonkers social skills now. People will be talking at me non-stop for like 10 minutes and i’ll be like “Hey that's great, by the way I gotta get going” and they keep talking, and I literally walk backwards with obvious body language that the conversation is ending and they don‘t pick up on it and they just keep talking. It’s like yo, communication is not a one-way street people. Crikey.
Also thought of something else. I've spent a lot of time the last couple years taking care of family stuff and in the process put others ahead of myself. I'm happy with that that's the kind of person I want to be. But in the process I've become pretty boring sometimes! And I'm feeling bad about that. Folks might ask me something like "what music do you listen to?" And I'm like.. whatever youtube citypop playlist that shows up on the right. I can't remember artists and shit right now.
I moved to a new city in a new country about 6 months before covid lockdowns started, so in a lot of ways I haven't ever had an opportunity to develop a new local friends group. I'm fully vaxxed and boosted, but I'm also still trying hard to avoid covid-- I know enough folks who've never fully recovered that I'm still not willing to risk it, and my partner has some respiratory risk factors.
I try pretty hard to interrogate my own situation with regard to my mental health, and I... think I'm okay? I've never been very social, and moving plus lockdowns has led me to become comfortable with being a hardcore introvert. In the end, I always feel nauseous around large groups (going to the airport last October almost killed me), but I don't know that it's so much something new. I still go places to shop and to run errands, masked, but I haven't yet decided to be very social. I'm sure I will someday, because there's a great local queer/gamedev/games adjacent community that I feel mostly comfortable interacting with online, so... we'll see!
@“IncompatibleKaiser”#p104283 I don‘t know what to say, friend. I think I can relate to some of the experiences you’ve been through. Maybe if you‘re speaking your truth then that means you’re reaching out and your brain is fighting and that there is still hope. You might need to hear it from someone who‘s been through worse and kept the faith though if you’re gonna believe it. Everything you‘ve shared sounds dreadful and haunting though, and I’m sorry people have been so pointless cruel to you.
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@“DavidNoo”#p104287 Another thing I’ve noticed that has made it equally hard, is a lot of the people around me have some bonkers social skills now.
I never know how to think about this thing that's supposedly on the rise and become common. I'd have thought the deterioration of other people's social skills would make me feel comparatively cool and savvy, but it hasn't quite done the trick haha. I think maybe exposure to specifically well-rounded people with traits I myself want to embody would have it rub off on me. But now we're all a bad influence on each other!!
@“Karasu”#p104289 I went to an anime convention last month, the first day with a friend and we had great time just soaking up the weeb atmosphere. The second day I went by myself, got immediately misgendered at the bag check while I stood tripped up trying to figure out if I had to check my bag (leave it with them) or if they had to check my bag (look at what's in it). (It was the second one.) I tried walking around for a bit, found I was probably having a panic attack, and then went home after I calmed myself down in the bathroom. Oh well, I had a shitty overpriced poutine afterward to congratulate myself for even getting out there!!
@“connrrr”#p104294 I was more suggesting that if I actually told you you would either have to be mortified or call me a liar. Either way it's like being an FBI profiler or NSA agent or a Vet or a Pediatric Surgeon or someone who works with Animal Abuse cases, gaze not long into the abyss or the abyss will grow inside of you.
So anyways I was too late for the Women and girls' skate tonight, but still went to check the place out (foolishly forgot that they had an outdoor rink I could have brought my ice skates to!!!). Caught this sign on the way back.
It's as simple as that, folks. Shut the thread down!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Also sorry if this is an overly weird or forward thing to say but I like seeing you around here @Hyper-Guts-Shooter. You‘re obviously not shy about having experienced a lot of pain and that you experience a lot of struggles, so, I suppose it’s not forward of me to respond to that. Mostly though, I respect that you put it the fuck out there and make other people deal with the (comparatively microscopically minor) burden of knowing about it.
I guess one way I feel about this sort of thing and also a part of why I felt compelled to make this thread was because I find it frustrating that there this titanic amount of pressure in most of the English speaking world that I know of to minimize and conceal pain or suffering or struggle in most social environments. The gaslight-y disingenuous reasoning behind this particular social more is that we want to respect people's privacy and to let them share only what they want to share, but, like, I think we all know that is fucking bullshit. You really _can't_ actually share who you really are or what you're actually going through or have gone through in 99.99% of social situations, not even because it will just harsh the vibes, but like, people will actually go out of their way to retaliate against you or punish you for being honest or for needing help, and that's barely an exaggeration. It's like the stock English speaking world's reaction to being confronted with someone else's pain is blaming how uncomfortable that interaction is on the person who expressed how they actually feel, or like their reflex to learning someone is in need is to give the bootstraps speech, like just ordering you to accept you are not in fact experiencing some kind of lack is as good as helping you. I get that most of us have very little to give and the problems society tends to cause aren't able to be solved by any old random individual (and if it is caused by or solvable by a single individual they tend to not give a fuck) but, shit, if shit was that simple and we all had access to the resources we need and the freedom to choose what we wanted to do, maybe it _would_ be that simple. But in this society where people fucking die _routinely_ from getting a tooth abscess or rationing insulin (a drug whose patent was sold for $1 a fucking _century ago),_ you'd think there'd be a wider understanding of just how humiliating it is to be a person who feels they need to break social taboos and _critique_ society due to it having harmed them immeasurably.
Like, fuck, there are a whole lot of people out there who maybe really should have to confront more often that the people they are physically next to in real time are people who have been profoundly harmed by individuals in their personal life or the state or a institution go about their day every day knowing the remedies they need cost more than they make in a year and the justice they deserve is such a remote possibility it might as well be impossible. But, yeah, I guess the weather _is_ nice today! And I guess all of that gets harder and harder as the world descends more into shit and there is this enormous cognitive dissonance about it all, cause, fuck, we all know why it's raining in February at about 10 degrees of latitude south of the Arctic Circle!!
...at any rate, I hope being forward and open about it is helpful for you in some way and that we can collectively continue to foster an environment where you can hang out in. This is in many ways an unlikely community and I hope you weren't afraid to be vulnerable within it because it seemed like a place where there might be people who could relate and would listen and be accepting. No community is perfect but I think what we got here is enough people who are willing to do the work to be accepting and open minded and accommodating. Because it _is_ work, too many so-called inclusive spaces talk a big game about this kind of shit but when shit hits the fan no one is willing to wade into the _work_ of maintaining community. And I'll put it out there too that I don't think it's _hard_ work once you get used to doing it, but it's work that is literally neverending since no individual is the same, which makes it a monumental responsibility.
IDK my friends, maybe I‘m saying that as a person who has met a lot of fucked up people just incidentally but is routinely in social environments where there is a silent shared understanding that everyone there has been profoundly fucked up on some level, the only main differences being how explicit vs. implicit or direct vs. indirect it was for them. Definitely not excluding myself either, and I can even feel that I am fortunate that it’s almost all implicit and indirect for me. But, like, damn! It changes you to know everything about your existence is defined by being the target of an ongoing genocide, everything bad in your life is almost certain to be rooted in that somehow, and everything good in your life is in spite of it. But it‘s also pretty liberating to know when I’m sitting in a room and everyone else made it to that room despite that too.
Even better like today when I can be in one of those rooms and hear our language and struggle to speak and understand it, and being taught how to say "I love myself," and people talking about how it is extremely important that we teach our children how to say and mean that. And how this one little baby who has been coming to the class keeps going up to the water cooler and taking out the spill tray and giving it to people. I hope she will say "nizaagi'idiz" as soon as she is able.
@“Gaagaagiins”#p104332 I mean, you can try being sincere but people will still think you‘re lying. They’re more likely to install spyware on their network and try and get you to jump on their wifi “just bein a good host ;)” or skim through your private messages after getting you drunk than have a real conversation or take your word for anything.
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Actually I once had a gf who literally never talked to me in person in anything more than perfunctory greetings and tiny particle interactions and instead just continuously tried to maneuver me into revealing some sort of hidden social life or personality online by using her obviously bugged computer without realizing that was impossible because I had simply lied to and isolated everyone from my home town from ever knowing the real me and never included myself in any social group for fear of exposing them to the danger and other than her I had no real friends and if she wasn‘t going to talk to me I was just never going to have anyone to talk to.
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Eventually I just became so depressed I typed random nonsense into notepad and she outed me to everyone in her own social group as being some sort of weird gay hentai because I was trying to provoke a response out of her.
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But of course she didn’t respond or ever have any conversation or real intimacy with me. She, like an iron door, like a stone wall, like a glass bottle without any opening, never let anyone in.
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This probably already sounds familiar to someone.
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I still talk to her because I still have no other friends, either because I can‘t tell anyone else anything true, or because they would be exposed as a vulnerability in my own heart and become the target of violence. Unless that’s just a bot server she set up before she died and I‘m talking to no one, which is something I think in the dark of night before I drift off to the permanent nightmare hellscape that is my dreams now.
@“IncompatibleKaiser”#p104336 isn’t it fun to learn more about me?
I wouldn't say _fun_, but I guess I'll reiterate that I think it's some kind of a sign of a positive or constructive thing if the environment or community or person is trusted with sensitive information, and that those environments/communities/persons exist for people who want or feel a need to share.
Also why is it everytime you tell someone you‘ve been raped (you know what word it is and if you don’t don't click it) the immediate response is in exact order:
TW: SA
>!You‘re lying>They wouldn’t do that>Even if they did you wouldn‘t tell anyone>You’re not supposed to tell anyone that idiot>Nobody who that actually happened to would go around telling people that happened OR Complete dead silence and inability to comprehend or cope with the information!<
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>!There are people who that never happens to and if you say that word it just breaks something in their brain. They literally cannot speak or formulate emotions.!<
It's like someone watching you drown to death in freezing water because they're not sure what they can do.
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>!Actually I once told an elder what happened and they straight up just died in front of me. Actually that happened twice.!<
I could fill an entire book with this stuff! wow! I wouldn't feel any better even if I did!
@“Gaagaagiins”#p104338 You know what they say famalam, once you‘re on the very edge, once you’re there, you really have nothing to lose! that means you're invincible. Kill me bro!
@“IncompatibleKaiser”#p104340 You know what they say famalam, once you’re on the very edge, once you’re there, you really have nothing to lose! that means you’re invincible. Kill me bro!
/me makes you a nice hot chocolate instead... owned
@“IncompatibleKaiser”#p104339 It’s like someone watching you drown to death in freezing water because they’re not sure what they can do.
The contradiction between just how widespread _that_ really is and how we basically have a centuries long epidemic of _that,_ & just how common it is for people to almost never have to confront it and have no idea what to do if someone who has experienced it is in front of them, is a staggering contradiction to understand.
How can so many people go about their day reading that shit in headlines while still not understanding how the social fabric of our species has been reduced to tatters?
@“Gaagaagiins”#p104342 its almost like the people who have all the money and influence and political connections are old money turbo capitalist scumbags who stay powerful by being willing to do whatever they have to and whatever they can get away with because they can get away with it, and then they just control and violate smaller, weaker people who are willing to betray their own as a hobby