#ixia-reignited

[cruelfeline]

To @cruelfeline // Cc @ladybinary because some of this pertains to my interactions with you. (It is very surprising that you two have not blocked me yet as far as I can tell, but I’m going to take advantage of that to try to do something reasonable instead of something bad). I was the one who repeatedly sent the creepy anonymous asks regarding Horde Prime (or at least, most of them) and I wanted to apologize for my horrible behavior towards you. It was very immature of me to not respect your boundaries. I understand that you will not forgive me, but I wanted to tell you anyway. Also, I didn’t want to hide my behavior behind the idea of being anonymous anymore, so I didn’t. You can ignore this, or publish this and comment on it, or publish this and comment on it but specifically crop my name away, or read this and send me a reply through private messaging, and send it to ladybinary later. I won’t be upset by any of the options you pick, the power should be in your hands. I guess I would prefer the last option, but it is up to you. I’m sort of expecting you to ignore me and block me though, since given my behavior, you probably don’t want to hear anything from me ever again. Tumblr wouldn’t let me do a cut, but…  **more under the cut and It Gets Worse** Basically, I enjoyed some of your posts and something about your writing style made it entertaining(?) for me to upset you for my own amusement. So, along the lines of why I suspect most people who do a specific kind of online harassment do what they do. But here’s where things get very interesting and horrible in a way that you may not expect: I had/have this tendency to do something mean or immature, and then somehow rationalize it as being “not me”. I don’t mean this in a straightforward sense of not wanting to take responsibility for my own actions—although it certainly is that! I don’t even mean it in a sense of thinking that the bad action was done by someone else, or the fault of someone else. I mean it in a sense of… I would do something, and then decide that it doesn’t “count”(?) towards who I am, because it doesn’t match my beliefs or internal concept of myself. And then I would willfully(?) forget that I had done it until I felt like doing it again. Like, I had a certain idea of who I wanted to be, but instead of actually striving for it, I would just… as a starting point, decide that this is who I am, and that any behavior that fell outside of that wasn’t reflective of who I actually was “on the inside”. I wasn’t consciously aware that I was doing this, and by the very nature of itself, it is a tricky thing to catch yourself doing. Now obviously, this is cheating, so to speak. This is not how assessing someone’s moral character works, so I can’t… apply it to myself and no one else. Instead, your moral character can be assessed through observing your actions, both good and bad. I think this is reasonable, but I don’t want to get caught up in a rant about moral philosophy right now. I just want to apologize for something I did that was not good by literally any reasonable definition ever. So the solution, then, instead of defending my mental image of myself, or splitting myself into pieces so that I can keep doing bad behavior with no consequences, is to… try and actually behave in a way that makes sense to what I believe, both about myself, and about the way people should behave in general. If I think that online harassment is bad, then I shouldn’t do it. And it sounds so obvious when you say it like that! There’s a second part to this, too, which is slightly less horrible, but still worth discussing. So, on some level, I knew what I was doing was… not who I wanted to be, but I had not quite worked out that it was a reflection of who I was, just as much as everything else I did… and so, I silently decreased and then got rid of the horrible behavior in situations where it was obviously, obviously not wanted. But here’s the thing: even when I am not intending to do online harassment, I can end up doing it anyway by being really, really bad at assessing what the other person is thinking, or not understanding the norms of the group, what people’s boundaries even are so I can respect them. If I don’t know that they don’t want me to screech about Horde Prime or whatever else I feel like screeching about at that moment, then I will do it. But the effect is the same, and it is completely understandable if I get blocked or banned for that reason. I only recently figured out that I could be in the wrong about this. This is partially because of the “my behavior somehow doesn’t reflect who I am” bullshit from earlier, but it is also because… I had some unpleasant interactions on Discord, and in real life, where people just dislike me (or even harassed me as I have harassed you) for being too weird or too intense by some arbitrary standard. When you add strong emotions and black-and-white thinking to that, it becomes, “well, literally any time someone doesn’t like something I’m doing online, they’re being close-minded and that’s their problem!” and I can see now that that’s not true. Sometimes, if someone doesn’t like something I’m doing online, that really is their problem, but… well, sometimes, it’s mine. It is a nuanced thing. It depends on what I am doing, and the context in which I’m doing it. Writing a post on your own site is different than sending an ask, and behavior that is directed at someone personally, for them to see, needs to be held to a higher standard than just talking to yourself/your audience on the internet. I also want to tell you what made me change my mind regarding my behavior towards you. Or, not change my mind about the behavior itself, because I suspect that I always knew it was bad, and that it was the “my behavior somehow doesn’t reflect who I am” bullshit which stopped me from actually changing it. One of the things was assessing a real person and then a fictional character who did something worse than me with an uncomfortably similar psychological process. I like to think about fictional characters, and sometimes it causes me to learn about myself, if they are like me in some way. Sometimes, that knowledge is comforting. Other times, it is uncomfortable, but still necessary or helpful in some way. The other was being held accountable for my actions by getting blocked/having certain people get upset at me. This is really important. It isn’t just that people who get bullied or harassed don’t have to forgive, and are allowed to be upset in terms of just… themselves and their right to be upset. It’s also that, if the person who did something bad in the first place is actually interested in becoming a better person, then they will accept that there are consequences sometimes. It is not… horrible to them, and they are the victim now somehow. Rather, it is morally similar to splashing cold water on your face so that you can feel more awake. It’s unpleasant but very effective if you know what I mean. I want to be clear, this entire under-the-cut section is not to guilt-trip either of you into forgiving me, it is to explain how someone who spent a rather long time doing and saying things that were terrible and honestly just… gross… could decide that they are going to stop behaving that way, by coming to a realization of how their own moral character should be assessed. In fact, I actively expect that you are not going to forgive me, or even believe that I am being sincere, but given how I behaved… that’s honestly just what happens. As for what I’ll do in the future, aside from stopping this one specific obnoxious behavior… I will err on the side of caution when directly interacting with people online. If it is any of my own sites or a private piece of writing, I will go wild and if people don’t like that then they can block me, but in terms of behavior directed at specific individuals, I will use more caution. The other thing I will do is understand that my bad actions reflect my moral character, just like my good actions reflect my moral character, or other people’s bad actions reflect their moral character. Unfortunately, I cannot literally just say that I’m going to be a good person now, because that would most likely be a lie. Because even now, when I am like, “Okay, our actions reflect our character, and we will be careful to behave in a way that makes sense to what we believe…” My moral compass is very, very, very messed up for reasons outside the scope of this post. I will obtain a better moral compass by educating myself on social issues and continuing to think carefully about the things I read. I will also think some more about my previous bad actions outside of harassing you. That was a really unsatisfying conclusion and really just not the best thing I’ve ever written in general, but oh well.

Dude. If you think I’m going to actually read whatever self-involved monologue you’ve vomited into my inbox, you’ve got another thing coming. I do not care about the mental gymnastics you indulged in to further those perverse, gross asks you sent me. All I care about is that I finally have your username so I can easily block you without ruining anon for everyone else. And that you sent this publicly so other people can block you as well, if they so choose.

Don’t talk to me.