i have been having a busy couple weeks cause my brothers been visiting and ive been trying to balance hangout time and drawing and oh!! thats hard!!!
it's weird because i've been thinking about the nature of social media and the kind of impersonal connections it fosters, and how my best relationships with people are all in group chat and 1 on 1 chat settings. what's the point of social media? the connections are so flimsy... but they're not that way to everyone? maybe it's that I'm not in a position where I feel comfortable getting close via social media? too much vulnerability in the open? i dunno
i think it might be that i have a hard time trusting that people I'm engaging with on social media have any idea how to manage their own emotions, after getting burned multiple times because of someone's anxiety that manifested as blaming everyone around them for any interpersonal conflict where their anxiety caused a problem? I don't really understand how to engage with mystery problems that strangers MIGHT be coming at me with
and I think this ends up being something that people with a higher audience-engagement deal with more. people who bring their personal problems TO YOU because you're visible and they want to engage with someone visible, because they want to be seen, and regard you as such. and so it's easy for me to interact with a group of 50-100 on an intimate and familiar level, but engaging with 1000s of strangers in public is draining as fuck
there's also the pedestal-placing that people do of anyone whose work they form a personal connection with, and this is hard. people don't know how to separate negative feelings about an action a person might take (with a context they don't have!), from the work they love and enjoy. so any perceived fault of the author often makes it really hard for people not to feel angry that their "trust" has been "betrayed", you know?