I just don't know how to argue with someone that you should care about people, and if you truly care about people, you listen to them.
That's nto to say "listen" as in "follow what they tell you", but like, "This is the pain I go through, I don't think you understand, this is my situation, this is my *life*."
@Ulfra_Wolfe Man, I struggled with that crowd -- and my internal copies of them -- for so fucking long before I finally broke down, did the research, and made the scientific case to myself once and for all that they're full of shit. It was totally worth the trouble and I highly recommend the process, because it feels GREAT to see these people run their mouths off and finally feel nothing but the urge to shake my head. *hug*
@zebratron2084 Awww. *Hugs back!*
I'm actually really interested in being able to do that, really. I lack willpower, though, eventually my wrath takes over, Snarl comes out, and I'm just like "Oh my gosh, you are either VERY dense and I just don't know how to get through that density, or you're being deliberately disingenuous for some reason I can't discern!"
@zebratron2084 The worst part is when I get stuck in that cycle and then start to treat people I can legit trust that way, and then I hurt people that never deserved it.
@Ulfra_Wolfe I was just talking with Peg about this. My geo job has helped a LOT, because I get to deal all day with people who are painfully confused and agonizingly lazy, yet doing their best and not really harming anybody. That, and the remaining guilt from putting Buni off so badly, have given me a REAL strong motive to learn to deal with things at the root level, not "oh my god, how could you think this" but "okay, that's lovely, but here, let me show you what *I* found looking into this."
@Ulfra_Wolfe This does not mean by any stretch that I have yet been reliably successful at applying this in daily life, to things I actually care about _more_ than whether, say, Hanoi counts as both a province and an urban district. ;)
@zebratron2084 Well, maybe there's a door that can bridge the two! For whatever works for your own personal path. I find ways of looking at this material world through the lens of what which shaped me.
@zebratron2084 I mean, I don't know why I'm saying that, you've been doing that with your various sonas.
@Ulfra_Wolfe Yeah I was just grasping for something vaguely intelligent to say in response, and I was thinking of going with something like, "Well, what I'm mostly doing these is giving myself as much aposematic coloring as possible to warn potential debate partners that while I consider myself a Civilized Being, I might still attempt to bite off their heads if they back me into a corner." I'm not necessarily proud of this half-measure of a solution but it works until I actually achieve Zen n.n;
@zebratron2084 I eventually go, "You know, I don't think there's any way we can discuss things, I seem to have ideals on a higher level than yours. I care about the children trampled in your machine."
@Ulfra_Wolfe Rezeya and Enmerkar are both their own special flavors of "this person is not going to be impressed with your bullshit and has a shameful history of eating people they are not impressed with -- but you will not be the first, nor the last, of them who richly deserved it. And they'd really rather NOT eat you, because damn, that's just proven so inconvenient in the past." n.n;
vore kink
@zebratron2084 See, just alter that a little bit and change things around like size difference, and I'm suddenly wanting to take a fragment of that into a more pleasant fantasy. But then the eating is just temporary.
vore kink
@zebratron2084 See, just alter that a little bit and change things around like size difference, and I'm suddenly wanting to take a fragment of that into a more pleasant fantasy. But then the eating is just temporary.
vore kink
@Ulfra_Wolfe That's kinda the thing, though, I'm not into vore, and neither are... well, OK, Rezeya just likes to eat things and doesn't really necessarily care if they're alive or not after they've crossed a certain threshold of annoying her. :) Enmerkar just sees physical sustenance as an annoying distraction from reading, muttering over the things he's reading, and making unflattering marginal notes/mild but effective occult curses about the authors of things he's reading.
vore kink
@Ulfra_Wolfe And yet, I realize that only makes this better kinkbait for some people, and I am absolutely copacetic with that. :D I'm not into vore-kink but I'm into kink-kink, meta-kink, and kink-enabling-kink. :D
vore kink
@zebratron2084 I mean, yeah. Nothing about that enticed less, haha. But I'm always afraid of crossing over someone's boundaries & making them uncomfy.
vore kink
@Ulfra_Wolfe Mine are generally pretty hard to cross. It's hard to get me excited or involved these days, but it's also really hard to get me offended by ANYTHING whatsoever that happens explicitly in a fictional playspace. :)
vore kink
@Ulfra_Wolfe (Rez is from MARS, FFS. MY Mars. Before that she hung out in PUZZLEBOX. In BOTTOMWARP, which was THEIR equivalent of Burning Man!)
(Rez has seen some things. Rez could make Roy Batty's eyes bug out. Rez SPREAD HER LEGS for the C-beams at Tannenhauser Gate and still gets Tinder follow-ups from them.)
vore kink
@Ulfra_Wolfe (*cough* Rez used to measure the quality of her days at the Tavern on Tapestries by number of chairs broken...)
vore kink
@zebratron2084 For me, a lot of stuff is new! Very new soul, haha. I was ouside looking in a lot, and so what a lot of people take for granted I'm just dipping my feet into.
Even stuff that've been my kink for over a decade, I'm finding new ways of considering on different levels.
vore kink
@Ulfra_Wolfe I think I'm what happens when you come out the other end of that process if you're not careful. :) I've burnt out on EVERYTHING and it's just finally starting to reseed...
@zebratron2084 There's a lot to be said for seeing old things in a new light! Different perspectives, different levels.
It Is Complicated (depression, conveying feelings)
It's hard to describe the experience of depression because it's not the same for everyone. If you're trying to inform people what it's like (as opposed to just getting them to sympathise with your immediate, direct, right-now feelings or lack thereof), I think it isn't wise to TRY to describe the details. I think it's better to call it really vague things and not define it with specific emotions or attitudes. Even if you have to resort to characterising it as "a really unokay level of feeling bad", that vagueness is an important part of what it is.
Because naming specifics ends up defining, in people's minds, this overly-specific set of feelings, and then the actual experience is unrecognizable. The general descriptions floating around *from most depressed people* of how it makes you feel do not match my own experience at all, which is why mine went unrecognized and untreated for over a decade. I had been told "depression isn't bad feelings, it's a lack of feeling" so many times that I kept trying to explain to my friends, "I'm not depressed, I just wish I hadn't been born because it hurts too much."
"I can't be depressed," I told myself, "because depressed people don't care about anything and have no energy and don't want to do anything. Therefore," I reasoned, "if I'm in a state of acute emotional anguish 24/7, I'm feeling something different, and it's probably real and correct and inescapable. And I don't mind getting out of bed and going through the motions, because it doesn't matter if I do or not, and it's easier to not resist and just do what I'm expected to do. So this doesn't look like... and then this doesn't either... and then I react to that differently..."
I've spoken with probably hundreds of people who have been depressed, and only two or three of them had an experience that was *recognizable* as the same experience I had. (It seems to occur in Highly Specific Circumstances.) It doesn't even share many things in common with the "typical case" except sadness, futility, helplessness-- some very unspecific feelings that manifested, and were dealt with, by me in ways drastically and unrecognizably different from most people's descriptions.
I think that if you start getting into things like "no, depression is this feeling/attitude/etc" maybe they will gain a superficial understanding that you feel crummy when you have those feelings. But it won't help them deeply understand you, and won't even be accurate, and could result in them running over future depressions (theirs or someone else's) with "no, that's not what depression is, so you must be fine (and all your bad feelings must be objectively correct)"... And all you'll accomplish is this very superficial understanding that you are going through a mysterious "bad time" that they are unable to feel as akin to what they know of lived experience, but that they should probably tiptoe around when they can figure out HOW, for which they have no guide but some unrelatable reactions you've described to them that they can only TRY to identify on sight, unfamiliar as they are.
And really, is this narrow misimpression even a good tradeoff for immediate sympathy? I suspect possibly not, because their understanding of how you feel has been funneled into shallower impressions than what is really bad about them. Maybe your friend now thinks, "Okay, you have X symptom and for some reason, some intuitive leap that I don't share, this is acutely distressing to you." Then they're viewing it as an alien curiosity they don't understand. But you could describe it both more vaguely and more intensely if you back up into things that are general.
This is why we have vague and extreme words. This is why we have language like "hopeless" and "feels unending" and "trapped". They're not specific reactions to stimuli that your friends might either relate to or find bizarre/counterintuitive. They're descriptions that convey why the reactions are a PROBLEM for you, which others may be better able to relate to a time when something (potentially the complete opposite situation!) was a PROBLEM for them. Or, if they don't relate, if they've never been depressed, then it indicates the seriousness of the matter. Don't be afraid to use this extreme language, okay, because this is what extreme language is really *for*.
We have clinicised depression and the like so much, maybe in order to make it easier for people to accept a diagnosis without thinking that it is too extreme to be really true of them. We have made it easier for people to accept it as a common illness they might actually turn out to have, rather than something that "doesn't happen to real people they know". But in so doing, we've watered it to the point where people possibly just think it's no big deal. It's like if we had to warn about a tuberculosis epidemic, but instead of "oh shit, some of my friends have tuberculosis and that's seriously unokay", we produced this attitude of "tuberculosis? That's just like a cold, right?" They are not going to face the fact that something is serious and scary AND also very real and present around them. The more serious they believe it is, the harder it is for them to reconcile that with their mental picture of the world not being that ~extreme~.
But if you outright use the language that marks it as extreme, if you prevent them from turning the idea of depression into "not as big of a deal as I thought it was", then ... not only would they have to stop shrinking your experience into smaller conceptions (because you can't shrink "enormous" into "not that big"), but also quit labelling very specific symptoms that are just the way an illness is being reacted to, rather than what it is.
To define "depression" as a condition that "makes you feel like X" is like describing "falling in love" as a condition that "makes you want to dance and sing." It might. It might not. Dancing and singing might mean a different thing to your listener. They may not understand at all. But while they're forced to shove that "symptom" into whatever it means, or can mean, in their own experience, they have to take a super extreme description like "unbearably excited/intense abt this person" at face value, whether they have ever felt what that experience means or not.
Granted, it might be an awkward time/place to explain such serious conditions to people. In which case it's really not going to be solved by overdefining the condition anyway, because if they did understand how the symptom makes you feel then it's too much for the time/place, and if they don't they won't feel sympathy because they don't get it. So... if you want this person to sympathise, you may just have to resort to saying things that sound emo and dramatic... even if they sound emo and dramatic... because what you're trying to tell them is, in actual fact, emo and dramatic. Nobody can or should expect you to tell serious news in a way that allows it to sound unserious.
"how to convince people that they should care"
The logical argument goes like, "These people have experienced things you haven't, so they have firsthand knowledge of all this inside information you don't know. They are the experts on their own experience, and you are the layperson who has this chance to learn about it, but only if you let them tell you.
"If you deny the existence of their situation just because you can't understand how it works that way, you'll continue to be wrong, and you'll just keep feeling bad about that while trying to convince yourself that you're right, which will leave you weak and uneasy because you're not fooling yourself. Doubling down and repeating that you're right doesn't help, because you're still wrong. The only way to be not wrong is to be receptive to correction by those experts who have been through the real experience itself.
"Instead of feeling bad about how wrong you are, realise that 'being informed by an expert' could instead mean, not 'oops being wrong oh no disaster', but rather 'getting to learn something specialised that not everyone knows'. If you look at this as a chance to learn about their differences from their personal expertise, you can become less ignorant in fact."
Possibly with a huge side helping of, "Other people might have had contradictory experiences, and that doesn't mean either of them are wrong. Remember, Situation A doesn't disappear just because Situation B is going in the opposite direction."
Although if the situation is focused more directly on "I don't care how they feel" (as opposed to "I think they're wrong") then that's a different kettle of fish and better addressed with the appeal to building a better society for everyone through cooperation and mutual aid. (Or maybe just, "I'm sorry your life must be emotionally boring.")
So many are willing to say "Oh, I had a small experience I can say was like yours" Like, "I felt bad once, you just get over it" to someone with chronic depression. How do you even respond? It's like, "I appreciate that you felt bad, and I'm sure that was hard for you, but this is *REALLY* hard for me, and I don't have the mental energy to argue for you understanding that, I'm actually a little desperate for self care and this is my free time."