#ive felt the need a lot lately to apologize for harmless things but things i see as flaws

[good-beans]

The wording is kind of off but I can't control the mantras my brain latches onto -- just that people aren't counting on the traits you specifically haven't shown, what they care about is who you already are <3

[orchidbreezefc]

hey so honestly this is something i want people to think about because ive been seeing this around and i want us to think more critically in these situations

so lately i’ve been seeing people corrected or called out for things that are like... as far as i can tell relatively harmless? and then they are held really hardcore accountable for these slip-ups. and the thing about it is that they are really nice people and their response has been ‘sure absolutely i’ll stop doing that, thank you for telling me’ and i’m left over here wondering why what they did was even wrong in the first place.

it just feels like not a lot of thought goes into the whole process. somebody sees something harmless that they’re reading too much into and have deigned problematic, then they tell the person involved who doesn’t question the information they’re getting and just takes the offending posts down. i wish instead of having the kneejerk response of ‘somebody has a problem with this, time to get rid of the posts in question’ the moment we get criticism, we would stop and say ‘hey wait, why are you saying this is wrong?’

i just feel like the sj community, in an effort to be responsible for the stuff we put out into the world, tends to overcorrect and tie ourselves to the problem. i saw somebody who made an apology post for a problematic au they did, which is great, but now it’s in their sidebar as a link and the first thing in their sidebar is to check out that apology.

this person definitely comes off to me as a minor, and i’m wondering why people are so determined that this person owns up to a thoughtless mistake that they have to make this part of their online identity. i’ve done shitty things before and answered for them as a kid, i’ve apologized when i did something wrong, but i’ve never felt the need to do this kind of self-punishing bullshit because i made a mistake.

i’m the last person to condemn ‘callout culture’ or whatever, but we need to be careful about encouraging an atmosphere where sj bloggers 1. would rather take someone’s word for it that they’ve made a mistake than actually take a moment to understand what they did wrong, and 2. have to be tied to their mistakes forever in an effort to be accountable.