Kiwifarms musings, recovering from hate
Reading the KiwiFarms forums is incredibly emotionally exhausting these days, and it's not like I can just ignore them anymore when they occasionally target folks close to me, and are known to produce mass shooters.
It's hard to believe that this sort of toxicity is what I used to surround myself with, and that it is so normalized in that sort of discourse. In a lot of ways, they hurt themselves and those close to them by getting involved in this, almost as much as they hurt their victims.
There are some people who I know from a past life in there who genuinely depress me, because they're heading straight towards a total life burnout stage and I can't help but wonder how much happier they'd be if they could just leave the fear and resentment of the other behind. I can tell that they are hiding a lot of things about themselves for fear of being torn apart by their own too.
re: Kiwifarms musings, recovering from hate
I also have similar feelings towards Meowthkip aka Catbountry. It's really sad to see that she's fallen into the mindset that if she isn't tearing down other people, she's going to be on the chopping block herself. This all, thanks to her pathological need to prove, to her KiwiFarms peers, that she is better than the subjects covered.
She used to be such a darling too, and I can't help but feel like she ell into the same trap and pipeline that I did years ago. Only, while I managed to get out of it, she stayed in and festered in the hate.
re: Kiwifarms musings, recovering from hate
Two main patterns I noticed from the folks there are:
a) A resentment towards people who are brave enough to live our authentic selves without compromise, likely because they themselves are stuck in closets of their own.
b) Anti-intellectuals who carry their dialectic with the mentality of "If I can't understand it, it is not real/valid, and I will pretend to understand it."
re: Kiwifarms musings, recovering from hate
One of the saddest cases, though, is Cuddly Zebesian formerly known as Cinox Fellpyre. I remembered when he was a part of another furry imageboard, and was picked on for being sensitive, and for having neglectful parents, which was often a source of his distress.
He later spoke, as a member of Kiwifarms, about how he "got better" by putting a wall around himself made out of thorny briars, so that he would never be made to feel vulnerable ever again.
The problem with this should be obvious. It didn't make him stronger, it made him weaker. In hiding his vulnerabilities and putting a prickly, thorny, and abusive mask, he ended up poisoning his own soul and letting it rot to the point where I don't know if he's capable of love or compassion anymore.
I would have loved to reconnect with him, but not as he is right now, but as he used to be years ago, when he was awkward, but also sweet and friendly.