A friend/acquaintance of mine's Facebook wall is very busy, and they're a kind of liberal or libertine gender-aware person. At least that'll be how I'll define them for the purposes of this post. They made a post commenting on this news article that was unnecessarily focused on gender, challenged the commenters to note where the unnecessary gendering was. Nobody took up the challenge, and at least one person started making these very contrived apologies for why the article could or should mention gender (my favourite reason was that "there's no reason not to"). I quoted and highlighted the silliness, and tried to be less venomous than I usually am with a simple "lol". Nope, not good enough.
The person starts attacking my name, just like
they used to in primary school. Nothing more than twisting and cutting away at my name. It was absurd and wounding, and I lost it. I lost it for the entire evening, in a sense, even if my angry and even violent response stopped the chain. I'm just so tired of bullying and people. I went away for a while, sure to return to a gaggle of people attacking me for having retaliated. The only mercy of that day, I'd argue! I would consider sleep to be the second mercy, but having salmonella sort of messes with your sleeping. At least I think it's salmonella.
I was so sure that I'd be berated for having behaved so badly. That's how it tends to go, the retaliator is treated as the aggressor, even by well-meaning "good" people. It just makes the world seem so bloody bleak, when everyone's kicking you when you're down. I know that's not what ended up happening here, but this wouldn't have been the first time. And even now, I'm kind of uncertain if this post can carry what I felt and thought then and now, if people can pick up the bits I intended for public consumption. Both seem rather impossible.
Alas, I am a poor writer.
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Topic: Things that made you sad today thread. (Read 9781989 times)