#so much online nowadays is this feeling of hunting for the Inevitable Bad Thing(tm) that someone has done

[circular-bircular]

I think there genuinely is an enormous problem in online spaces, I think in part due to the whole concept of purity culture, where everything people say and do online is scrutinized — not just in the case of “Is this person a good person,” but “Does this person represent the values we wish to see 24/7.”

Nobody is perfect, dear lord, and this place is not the place to seek perfection regardless. This is tumblr, home of the go nuts, show nuts rule; tumblr, which is as invaded by fandom and was originally meant to be a pseudo Facebook. People who use this place didn’t come here originally to be activists. And if you did, I'm a little concerned, genuinely, for your mental health and how well you're distancing yourself from difficult subjects and giving yourself the time you need to decompress.

And yet, we keep holding people up to this frankly impossible standard of representing a movement, regardless of what their blog content originally was for. Suddenly, every system on tumblr has to represent a certain Ideal for System Rights! They have to have the right views on system accountability, endogenic systems, plurality as an umbrella, littles, dormancy, fusion, functional multiplicity, parts language, the ToSD-

This is fucking ridiculous. A laundry list of topics that people have on their shoulders, along with every other laundry list of things that people need to care about. Fuck you if you're oppressed in any single way, you need to form opinions on every single one of those things, and if any opinion is out of place, then You Are Not A True [IDENTITY].

Somewhere along the way, many of us (I’m including myself here for a reason) managed to either convince ourselves or be convinced that we need to be Correct in some way about how this all works. That’s prideful and haughty at best, but typically moreso just… so detrimental to healing. None of us will be perfect… and so, when those of us who aren’t perfect are imperfect publicly, we are often harassed or attacked — or some of us attack others, for whatever reason it may be. And somehow, someway, we accepted that this is just how it works.

It's okay to discuss those things you disagree with online. It's okay to look at someone's take about, say, system accountability, or plurality, or littles, and reblog with your corrections and even anger! But you must be doing this with acknowledgement that people will be in different places, healing in different ways, and that there is nothing wrong with that. They're their own person!

But moreover, that's a whole ass blog. That's not a reflection of a person as a whole -- hell, it's rarely a reflection of the person at all. It's just a blog that they can put anything on. Have we not all heard the stories of people who've "Completely Changed" online, becoming people who others cannot recognize? People lie on the internet, intentionally or not.

Even me. I try my best to be who I am in real life here, and I share a LOT of myself with you all. You know I'm a teacher, and engaged, and have the most perfectest little cat in the world. But do you know me? I recently just got to visit an online friend in person (It was absolutely fucking incredible and I can't wait to do it again), and the entire time, I felt like I was just so awkward; I really struggled to stay present and talk more, which is something I don't struggle with nearly as much online. Believe it or not, I am not this long-winded in real life.

Maybe that's not lying, but it's not who I am. It's me being fundamentally different online than in real life. You all see me entirely through just the blogs you know me through. Maybe it's circie bircie, maybe you know my D&D blog, maybe you know me through positivitycombopack, or maybe this just shows up randomly on your dashboard. Maybe you don't know me at all.

And that goes for every person you see online. Do you actually know them? Do you know their beliefs? What they stand for? Why they believe those beliefs?

Or are you just seeing a blog?