Tag: annacaffeina

annacaffeina replied to your post: I’ve been meditating on whether or not to post…

You get hate?!? I don’t understand…

I don’t directly get hate, but I do kind of get hate adjacent if that makes sense? There are the occasional pockets of people who will make a big deal out of things that aren’t a big deal (mostly ships or internet activity) and pretend they know all about people like me or my friends because we don’t meet their standards or are part of a group they dislike. No one has ever come to me and called me names, but they have said nasty things about the groups I am a part of either by choice or genetic happenstance (aro, bi, bipolar) or my friends. 

A week or two ago, two good friends of mine were attacked and called horrible names for their ships. A little before that, there were a few posts (people who I used to follow) shaming authors for writing taboos. And before that I saw a person I used to follow post something that condoned judging and staying away from a person with bipolar because they were abused by someone with bipolar so apparently that’s a good excuse to be prejudicial. Then there are all the posts I see and mostly agree with until the final post is some kind of snippy comment about all the people who won’t reblog a post. 

It just got to me today, honestly, because I cannot stand when people judge others based on what they do and don’t see and I was in a mood. It’s like, for me personally, I am under a lot of pressure to “be” a certain way in public and when I get on tumblr it’s my opportunity to just chill out and screw around, but there’s often an implicit tone of “perform to the community standards or you are terrible and all these nasty things and we can be awful to you” and I hate that. On the internet, I am a loud, out, proud, dork. IRL, I’m quiet, a human rights activist, closeted, struggling with my illnesses, afraid to speak too loudly about politics because of my current living and community situation. 

It’s not so much that I feel bad when people ignore nuance or the fact that people live multifaceted lives, it’s that wonderful people I know are hurt. Nasty people or even generally nice people who don’t think too long about things forget that there are real people on the other end of the computer and that just because they do or don’t do a certain thing doesn’t mean they’re nasty terrible people. They’re just people, trying to live their lives and enjoy them. 

I suppose I was just hoping others would see my post and think about the fact that they don’t know everything about a person based on their blogs.