sushispook — Mon, 26 Sep 2022 16:55:24 GMT

[Manually x-posted from - https://sushispook.dreamwidth.org/3165337.html - please comment there!]

O HAI DREAMWIDTHS & LIVEJOURNALS

I think any one of us reading this has been alive long enough to understand exactly how difficult it can be to practice and maintain kindness in a world that's increasingly designed for exactly the opposite. I know that I came to it especially late, having to un-knot learned reactions of being cruel and caustic for so many reasons - coping mechanisms, social clout, deflection, personal identity/branding... the list goes on... and it's just a gradual process that doesn't yield big immediate and easily-measured results.

Every so often when you get one of those moments out of the blue of remembering a moment of being shitty when you didn't know better or how to be better, it's difficult to be able to say "I've traveled this many miles from being that person".

The other day I was reading some customer service horror story, remembering just... how much I could not stand dealing with the public when I was younger, and how much of that was a coping mechanism of me framing everyone as fuckin' stupid so I didn't have to closely examine myself and my own unhappiness, terror, and awkwardness*... and I remembered one site that I just thought was the fucking best, the funniest, the greatest dunk on the big stupid public: Acts of Gord.

2002 me thought this was great. Like, I just delighted in the tales of telling off customers, framing anyone without a clue as some sort of sub-human shithead, and just gushed over how he stuck it to people with a I-don't-give-a-fuck attitude. It was just righteous revenge all the way down, and I could not see anything problematic about it whatsoever.

Holy shit it's gross. The absolute sneering down the nose cruelty of it. The unearned superiority of it. The total okayness of hyperbolicly using genocidal terminology (remember gene-pool related stuff and how how it escalated for some into xenophobic attitudes and actions?). Just the absolute miserable-bastardness of it all, how unpleasant that sort of thing is to be around, and how much I just embraced it as an ideal. Just... playful hostility as default, that left unchecked, was congealing into the real thing.

Sometimes, you see both the work you've done and how far it's taken you. It's an ongoing journey, but I'm better for it.

[*that is not to say that there wasn't a large percentage of entitled and unempathetic assholes out there, oh there are stories to be sure, but man did I ever take it to a reactionary and awful place]

sushispook — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 02:59:13 GMT

Friends only, y'all.

\\▼