-, vague
It’s been several years now, and I still don’t know how I should have handled The Falling Out. I also still don’t know what I could have done better, other than to have cut and run sooner and more quietly, instead of trying to save friendships with people I care about.
I wish I hadn’t had to flee my community to prevent it from fracturing. I wish I hadn’t been a target. And I wish people understood how damn hard that is, when it seemed best to keep people happy.
-, vague
Most of all, I don’t think this should have been my sacrifice to bear. The fact it was and still is is why I’ve pulled back so hard from communities I care about, and I’m still struggling with the damage that’s done to me.
The cost of community harmony should not be annihilation and exile. I know I tried to be stoic in the face of all that, but I still feel and hurt and bleed like anyone else.
Be better, and be good to one another, okay? Don’t do this to anyone else. Please.
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@Goldkin *sending you hugs re: this* >.<
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@zetasyanthis Thank you so much. ;..;
-, vague
@Goldkin I've been going through similar, over a breakup. The community I was supporting is not the space I thought it was. That was a hard lesson to learn, but one I needed to learn eventually. It isn't anyone else's fault, to be sure, but the mismatch between expected and actual caught me short.
I take it as a personal lesson more than cause for exhortation of others. Just one more note for the frontispiece of the Tome.
-, vague
@orrery I guess, for me, I wish it wasn’t a constant struggle against cynicism at how people act in groups. I know that most of community crashes are elaborate games of telephone by primarily good faith actors, but it still surprises me how single actors acting in bad faith can erode and destroy community.
I know the best answer isn’t to pull back and be cynical, but I’ve been struggling for a better answer. Especially considering the long tail of harm that followed.
-, vague
@Goldkin The closest I've ever come to an answer is "figure out where in the communication chain people are willing to put their feet down and say 'I agree this is bad-faith communication and I don't support it.'" Then I detach from anyone who won't or can't talk about what is or isn't negotiation in good faith.
This is the point at which I think all rule-based societies break down; there's just now way to prove what is or isn't negotiation in good faith. We must rely on character.
-, vague
@orrery Thanks, that’s a very helpful way of looking at it.
-, vague
@orrery I guess I don’t see that as an indictment against groups, or even specific ones I fell out of.
More: there is a need to sort bad faith from miscommunication, and to weight that as more severe than the need to retain community harmony. It’s a good problem to have, because it means one has a relatively healthy community to begin with.
And I guess that’s a very old open question in humanity that has no easy answer, either. But it wants for trying, albeit imperfectly.
-, vague
@Goldkin To be sure, I'm not saying "groups are bad" or even "this group is bad." I expected more people to be open to doing the sorting work than have been.
Complicating this, my ex seems to have concluded that _all_ my miscommunications were bad-faith. My ex seems to have taken her worldview as objective, and mine as DARVO any time it differed from hers. In our last conversation before shit fell completely apart, she said "There you go CONTEXTUALIZING again."
-, vague
@Goldkin I get that doing the kind of work picking out what's honest miscommunication from what's deception is _hard_ and _subjective_. I understand that it's made harder by the fact that am bird now and I talk funny relative to my allistic peers because of it. I would have thought that more people I knew would have been open to the challenge as a matter of community support, because I've had to volunteer to do a lot of that work as a matter of responsibly managing my autism.
-, vague
@Goldkin All of that said, I can't reasonably expect someone who responded to "would you like to go on a date" with "romance is an excuse to humiliate people who won't engage in performative emotional labor for others" to even know where or how to start doing that work. And I can't reasonably expect anyone who wants to remain close to someone who genuinely thinks that way to be open to doing it on their behalf.
So, walking away becomes the safer option.
-, vague
And to be clear: I’m not going anywhere. I just need that out of my system, which is I guess a normal thing for me now.
I’m otherwise doing okay, but I wish I didn’t still have this in my headspace. And I wish it weren’t my brain’s self-preservation instincts keeping it lodged there.