Reactions to Reactions to The Small Dark Movie Of Your Life

[tylik]

So, I'm totally riffing off your post to tell my own story. Apologies, as needed.

I am, however, going to the premiere party/concert for Matt Nathanson's new album on Tuesday night. 

It used to be that I'd had a lot more people close to me die than pretty much anyone more or less around my age I knew.* It's evened out more over the years, I think. And while the overall trend has probably been that I don't get as upset as many people, there's a huge amount of variance, and it's not by some simple formula of how close I was to the person, or how sudden or unfair their death seemed to be. Sometimes I'm devastated. I can't predict it. For me, at least, it's not just that different people react differently... or, it is, but that includes different mes.

Anyhow, the first time I was really devastated, within a day or two their was a Boiled in Lead concert. Which I'd been intending to go to, and I think my friends were kind of trying to keep an eye on me, or keep me moving or something. So we all went, and I danced my heart out.** And, well. Different ways of coping, I guess. Or at least surviving.

* Start with two siblings when I was young, then throw in being a teenager in the gay neighborhood during the mid and late eighties. And a lot of stupid shit.
** And, it turned out, gave myself a stress fracture. Which it took me the better part of week to do anything about, and not because I didn't notice, just because I didn't really care.

[Lioness]

Perhaps at this point we should make a solemn pact to agree to read what everyone else is saying as descriptive rather than prescriptive, and to write comments ourselves that are descriptive rather than prescriptive.

(I haven't seen anything that seemed prescriptive to me, but it looks like many others have. I've seen a lot of people trying to describe a range of valid emotional reactions--their own and others--but I can see how it's easy to take things very much to heart in this context.)

That is a good thing to be doing.

Also, it is very likely a good thing to avoid labeling what other people are doing in a pejorative way. My whole going-up-like-a-skyrocket thing came when I read that other people considered what I was doing to be "cheating" and "denial" -- not just denial of Daphne's death, but of the SUniverse and our investment in it.

I know that certain other people were frustrated and distressed and afraid that other people didn't understand or approve of their reactions. But I got flat-out TOLD that mine were wrong, and that furthermore they were a betrayal of and damaging to others. As far as I know, what they were afraid of was never said to them in so many words, but they sure said it to me. Voila: irony.

I'm still going through the process of calming myself down instead of running far, far away. It was a bad double whammy, being told that not only was I wrong, but that I was hurting people by it.  I don't do hurting people if I can avoid it. So there's still a big part of me that feels like "Well, but, but, but if somebody feels hurt because of how I am, and I can't help being how I am, then in order not to hurt them I really really REALLY need not to be there."

Sorry. It's been a real bad night, and I'm on the raggedy edge a little bit.

I did have one mordant chuckle on a side note, though. It's when I was thinking about how in most genres, some parts of the upset we've been sharing might not happen, because in most genres, writers don't mingle socially with readers. And suddenly I found myself thinking, "Well, and if avoiding the mingling keeps one from being scrutinized and run through the judgement mill about 'are they having an acceptable reaction? are they too upbeat? are they wearing a shirt with too cheerful a color?' then I can totally understand why most genre's writers prefer to keep a nice big moat there. I might even want crocodiles in mine."

I think there are more walls missing in SU fandom than have been acknowledged.   This is a powerful and weird (and weirdly powerful, and powerfully weird) way of storytelling, and I'm figuring we don't understand all the ramifications of how that plays out yet, and what it does to all of us engaged with it and in it, and how it's different from what usually happens.

Hm.

(Edited to clarify where the mordant chuckle was living.)

[eschatonic]

I'm still going through the process of calming myself down instead of running far, far away. It was a bad double whammy, being told that not only was I wrong, but that I was hurting people by it.  I don't do hurting people if I can avoid it. So there's still a big part of me that feels like "Well, but, but, but if somebody feels hurt because of how I am, and I can't help being how I am, then in order not to hurt them I really really REALLY need not to be there."

I apologize in advance if the following represents a Total Empathy Failure on my part. But your reaction as stated above baffles me utterly.

If your being you hurts somebody's feelings, how is that your fault? In my mind there's a giant gaping distance between saying or doing something that hurts somebody's feelings, for which one ought to apologize/atone and try to avoid repeating, and being something that hurts somebody's feelings, for which you owe nobody nothing.

We've all had to deal with people who just, you know, rub you the wrong way, the kind of person whose personality makes you want to kick them even though you know they've done you no wrong and are not trying to irritate you. I'm sure there are plenty of people who find me aggravating and insufferable, and I don't feel any obligation to avoid mutual friends or workplaces or internet hangouts to safeguard their feelings from my presence. I expect them to do the same thing I do: try to avoid dealing with them directly, and keep necessary interactions polite and to the point. The world is full of people who have irritating personal preferences that half the world thinks are perfectly fine. People hate your favorite weather, vote for politicians who are transparently wrongheaded, have deep passionate feelings about Star Trek or veganism or breastfeeding, adore Lady Gaga, are absurdly picky eaters, whatever. If we all avoided situations in which our personalities offended someone, we'd never leave the house or post in any public forum.

I say this as an atheist from a family of devout Catholics. It really does hurt Grandma that I don't think God is real. I don't talk about my unbelief with her anymore, because it upsets her. But I am not going to avoid her at holidays or change my mind about the afterlife, either.

I don't want to sound like I'm telling you how you ought to feel. Your reaction to feeling upset and uncomfortable (flee!) makes perfect sense to me. I too avoid situations in which I think I'll feel awkward and anxious. I just totally, completely don't understand why you feel that causing unintentional harm means you have some kind of obligation to leave forever.

[Korvar]

I don't want to sound like I'm telling you how you ought to feel. Your reaction to feeling upset and uncomfortable (flee!) makes perfect sense to me. I too avoid situations in which I think I'll feel awkward and anxious. I just totally, completely don't understand why you feel that causing unintentional harm means you have some kind of obligation to leave forever.

Not speaking for anyone but myself here, but if your presence causes someone to be upset, whether or not it is your "fault", and you don't like making people upset, it follows that you may want to leave.

And it's not always easy to say "I didn't intend it, it's just the way I am, therefore it's not my fault."  Man, that sentence doesn't do what I want it to do.  Anyway, if your presence (or reaction) causes pain, then your absence makes that pain go away, therefore it is your fault if you stay. 

And it's not necessarily even that rational.  Because how could it not be your fault if something you do or say is hurting someone else?  I mean, you may not know what you did, but you must have done something.

[eschatonic]

I don't want to sound like I'm telling you how you ought to feel. Your reaction to feeling upset and uncomfortable (flee!) makes perfect sense to me. I too avoid situations in which I think I'll feel awkward and anxious. I just totally, completely don't understand why you feel that causing unintentional harm means you have some kind of obligation to leave forever.

Not speaking for anyone but myself here, but if your presence causes someone to be upset, whether or not it is your "fault", and you don't like making people upset, it follows that you may want to leave.

And it's not always easy to say "I didn't intend it, it's just the way I am, therefore it's not my fault."  Man, that sentence doesn't do what I want it to do.  Anyway, if your presence (or reaction) causes pain, then your absence makes that pain go away, therefore it is your fault if you stay. 

Hypothetic but not unrealistic scenario:
Anne and Beth are friends. They're both ecstatic about their first pregnancies, but Anne has a baby and Beth has a miscarriage. If she knows that seeing a pregnant lady and subsequent new mother causes Beth pain, how long is Anne obligated to avoid her? Can she still go to the Christmas party their mutual friends invite both of them to?

And it's not necessarily even that rational.  Because how could it not be your fault if something you do or say is hurting someone else?  I mean, you may not know what you did, but you must have done something.

I think words and actions are totally separate from private emotions. You can't control how other people feel. Hell, I can't control how I feel. But if I know that other people will be hurt if they know about it, or if I know that something I said or did hurt someone, even if I don't know what it was, yeah, I should feel responsible for that. If people are hurt by hearing about my reaction to whatever, I should apologize for unintentionally upsetting people, and then stay out of that discussion. Not leave the whole community and erase my history of being a member.

Okay, this maybe hit a nerve? I was standing in a corner talking to myself when they were handing out social skills, so I offend people rather a lot. Mostly unintentionally. Sometimes it takes me a while to figure out what I did wrong, partly because I'm thirty goddamn years old and I still walk away from >50% of all my social interactions unsure if I did it right or not. If I avoided every group of people in which I'd hurt somebody's feelings by being a weirdo with glaring social deficits, I wouldn't have any friends at all.

[Lioness]

Not speaking for anyone but myself here, but if your presence causes someone to be upset, whether or not it is your "fault", and you don't like making people upset, it follows that you may want to leave.

Thank you. Yeah, that gets close to it, with the slight (major?) tweak of "If I find out that my actions have caused someone to feel awful and are adding to their difficulty in a time that's hard already, and I don't want to be causing or adding to that sort of thing at all, it follows that I definitely want to find a way to not be causing or adding to that stuff, and if I didn't understand how I might be doing that in the first place, going away looks like a drastic but possibly broadly effective choice."

The bit that made me want to run like hell and erase anything was a different bit, though. Next comment for that one.

[miminnehaha]

Oh, I thought we were past this.  Lioness, do not go anywhere.  Your presence enriches this experiment in so many ways.  I remember what made you want to flee.  It might not hurt to examine the reaction again.  Just don't succomb to the urge!

_{**I did too spell "succomb" right, you dingle-fritz  forum program. Dingle-fritz, you can spell, but not succomb? That's driving me nuts!}

[Lioness]

Hypothetic but not unrealistic scenario:
[snipped]

I don't do those, these days. They lead me to trouble, and even if they don't, they don't map well enough to whatever the actual issue on the table is. Also, the framing of them usually drives me crazy; for example, the word "obligated" in yours builds in a whole structure implying assumptions that I do not share, so I pretty much can't answer your question, because I don't use the same starting assumptions at all.

I think words and actions are totally separate from private emotions. You can't control how other people feel. Hell, I can't control how I feel. But if I know that other people will be hurt if they know about it, or if I know that something I said or did hurt someone, even if I don't know what it was, yeah, I should feel responsible for that. If people are hurt by hearing about my reaction to whatever, I should apologize for unintentionally upsetting people, and then stay out of that discussion. Not leave the whole community and erase my history of being a member.

If I am told, "But for those of us who are trying to let the SUverse be as real as it can be, that looks like cheating and like a denial not just of Daphne's death, but of the reality of the SUverse and of our investment in it," then I am being told that what I am doing is cheating (which is a sufficiently intense statement that I know it's pretty important to the person saying it), and that I am denying something (the reality of the SUverse) that's really important to the person saying it, in which they have a substantial investment that they want to protect. The implication I saw, which I might be wrong about but there ya go, is that the way I (and some other folks) participated was actively harmful to the participation of people who (the statement implied) had far more invested in Shadow Unit than I.

If somebody says to me, "Look, I care about this particular thing really really a lot, and you care about it considerably less, and by hanging around in the inner circle of those who care a lot and saying the things you're saying there, you are significantly messing with my ability to be as close as I want to be to a thing I really love," then it's likely that one of my top potential responses is going to be "Oh, shit! I don't want to be doing that, and now that I know this place is for a different kind of interaction, then I should either change how I interact or leave."

But if on top of everything else it feels like I'm suddenly being told that I'm not committed enough to be saying the things I should be saying in a way that does not wound the truly committed, or that I'm in denial, I'm going to have both of the foregoing reactions and then have them swamped by a big rolling wave of "Dude, when I got here, there was no dress code and no requirement of LJ interaction or certain forms of belief or anything like that, so if suddenly we've gone all creedal and nobody told me and now I'm told I'm breaking the rules that I didn't know about, then I am gonna leave this joint and shake the dust off my sandals."  The fact that the first responses said, "But if you delete all your posts, you'll leave big holes in conversations! Please don't!" kind of pointed up the irony to me:  I mean, either I'm part of this place and what it's about, and therefore if I go there will be a hole, or I'm inimical to what it's about and therefore it will be better for the people truly committed to the place if I stop cluttering up the joint with my unhelpful un-committed denial-flavored yatter.

That's the best I can do to explicate the chain of reactions that pretty much went through at light speed. Do you see why a person might want to leave and delete all their posts if they were feeling that way?

As you may notice, I have not done so. It was a near thing, probably because I'm a little hair-trigger due to unrelated stuff from the non-SUverse, but some very good people talked to me, and I'm still here now. Whether that's good or bad probably remains to be seen, but that's true of all of us, I s'pose.

And if I'm inimical to somebody's enjoyment of this place, and this place really really matters to them, you bet I'd rather that I go than that they go.


(edited because I screwed up quotage to a truly astonishing degree)

[Lioness]

Oh, I thought we were past this.  Lioness, do not go anywhere.  Your presence enriches this experiment in so many ways.  I remember what made you want to flee.  It might not hurt to examine the reaction again.  Just don't succomb to the urge!

_{**I did too spell "succomb" right, you dingle-fritz  forum program. Dingle-fritz, you can spell, but not succomb? That's driving me nuts!}

I am trying to answer a question.

I will try to do that to the best of my ability.

I am not engaging with the sentence "I thought we were past this," because that sentence is not my friend and it does not get any cake.

[Lioness]

I apologize in advance if the following represents a Total Empathy Failure on my part. But your reaction as stated above baffles me utterly.

If your being you hurts somebody's feelings, how is that your fault?

I am a silly beast and could have answered the whole thing in a lot fewer words if I'd noticed this sooner. Sorry about that!  Here comes the short version, though it's late:

Fault? My concern is not with fault, here. My concern is "Somebody's getting hurt? Hey! Stop, we got a problem!"  And in this case, it was several somebodies, including me, which led to the consideration of a rather extreme application of Step One.

(For those who don't know it, "Step One: remove hand from flame.")

[Emma Bull]

Just so we're absolutely explicitly clear on this: The SU BBS welcomes everyone who is interested in Shadow Unit on any level, and however they choose to interact/not interact with the experience, however they choose to talk about SU, whatever their opinions about it, expressed or implied--those things are welcomed, too. There is no one right way to read or talk about Shadow Unit.

We can't stop members from judging people for their response to SU. But if it happens on the BBS, the judgey monkey will be reminded that different people think, behave, and react differently, and we enjoy that around here.

Harassment of or attacks on other members of the board are not welcome, of course, along with all the legally problematic stuff like libel, copyright infringement, and the like.

Oh, and the spammers with the tentacle pr0n. We don't welcome them, either.

[Lioness]

Just so we're absolutely explicitly clear on this: The SU BBS welcomes everyone who is interested in Shadow Unit on any level, and however they choose to interact/not interact with the experience, however they choose to talk about SU, whatever their opinions about it, expressed or implied--those things are welcomed, too. There is no one right way to read or talk about Shadow Unit.

We can't stop members from judging people for their response to SU. But if it happens on the BBS, the judgey monkey will be reminded that different people think, behave, and react differently, and we enjoy that around here.

Harassment of or attacks on other members of the board are not welcome, of course, along with all the legally problematic stuff like libel, copyright infringement, and the like.

Oh, and the spammers with the tentacle pr0n. We don't welcome them, either.

If I have an unfortunate fit of feeling judgey, can I sit with the monkey on a Judgey Monkey bench until I get over it?

I do not think there is a tentacle pr0n bench. At least, I kinda hope there isn't. Or that if there is, the approach is respectfully screened and clearly marked. I wouldn't want to get my benches mixed up.

[Emma Bull]

Apparently there's plenty of spammers who think we've got a tentacle pr0n bench. And they want to sit on it.

Hand me the shovel, Myrtle, there's another one! 

[nebula]

Apparently there's plenty of spammers who think we've got a tentacle pr0n bench. And they want to sit on it.

Hand me the shovel, Myrtle, there's another one! 

We are the SU Fandom and we will deep-fry your tentacles in batter and munch them. Nom nom nom.

[Elizabeth Bear]

Just so we're absolutely explicitly clear on this: The SU BBS welcomes everyone who is interested in Shadow Unit on any level, and however they choose to interact/not interact with the experience, however they choose to talk about SU, whatever their opinions about it, expressed or implied--those things are welcomed, too. There is no one right way to read or talk about Shadow Unit.

We can't stop members from judging people for their response to SU. But if it happens on the BBS, the judgey monkey will be reminded that different people think, behave, and react differently, and we enjoy that around here.

Harassment of or attacks on other members of the board are not welcome, of course, along with all the legally problematic stuff like libel, copyright infringement, and the like.

Oh, and the spammers with the tentacle pr0n. We don't welcome them, either.

What Emma said.

Also, as far as I'm concerned, Lioness is a major source of richness of experience around here.