#the inherent neurodivergence/queerness/otherness to this game has so much potential

[walkingbomb]

have any of my ttrpg playing followers played/read up on Changeling The Dreaming??

i wanna run a game soooo bad, and i wanna see other people's OCs

[arihi]

NaNoWriMo #15: Othering

I am, if I had to be honest, feeling a bit uncharitable today - which means that I probably shouldn’t be writing this post, but I have a boatload of errands today and I’m taking this break to write this, so it’ll be shorter anyway. Let’s talk about how people, most often in online communities, step over the line that is celebrating one anothers’ differences and land in ‘invalidate others’ experiences because we don’t know how to distinguish pride in our own identities from a sense of superiority over others because we have the emotional maturity of a 12 year old’ territory. And how, at heart, everybody has the potential to be a bully.

We are all individuals and therefore focus more on our lives and what impacts us more than we sometimes do on the people around us, never mind people that we don’t see or know about. This is okay! This is good. You need to focus on yourself. If you avoid your issues by compulsively fixing other peoples’ problems or begin to define your self-worth by how you can serve others, that’s not great! I know somebody who has a lot of problems but avoids it by love-bombing and bending over backwards for acquaintances that they were not nearly as close to as they thought they were, and it was very off-putting to the people around them. Then they would loudly, passively aggressively talk about how all they did was try to help them and how ungrateful others could be and didn’t they know that they had problems too?? And that they were pushing those problems aside to be a GOOD FRIEND? Note: Nobody asked them to make those ‘sacrifices’. Being a good friend is more than trying to lavish others with praise and gifts. They viewed themselves as a martyr and never stopped to think about self-growth because the thought that they were in the wrong was inconceivable. It was extremely unflattering.

But, I digress, and that’s not even what I’m annoyed with today! And I am trying to choose my words carefully, because it can be a sensitive subject, and I’m not very good at thinking thoughts through so I don’t want to give off the wrong impression. Queer spaces, kinky spaces, neurodivergent spaces that are not the neurotypical cisheteronormative culture and society that we know and criticize? Have a problem. The problem is sometimes we come to these spaces online and we are invigorated. Queer folk, kinky folk, neurodivergent folk - we’ve all got something about us that isn’t the “standard” (and I know that’s not a great word, but something has gotta be short for the ‘neurotypical cisheteronormative culture and society that we live in’). it is unfortunately more common for people ‘outside’ the norm to not have experienced great things in life due to their differences. So when we are around communities built around these differences, and we see, maybe for the first time, a variety of others who are similar? Who have gone through these problems? When we see queer folk who have been cast aside by their blood families and made their own found families? When we see kinky nerds who are into the same weird things we are? When we see others who suffer from invisible illnesses and talk about struggles that we’ve also experienced?

God, we are EXCITED.

And this is why I’ll always say that for all the negativity social media brings, it’s still always going to be a net positive for me. It provides these opportunities to bring others together, to empathize with people you wouldn’t have otherwise known about, and on and on, you know the drill. These communities bring life to people. These communities have kept people alive. They’re great. We celebrate our different identities and begin to feel this warmth that maybe we didn’t have previously.

But then that sometimes swings too far to the other side and people who should rightly accept and take pride in themselves start to, how to put it...be giant raging dicks! They take their experiences, their hardships, and yeah - they’ve gone through a lot. But it becomes a sort of ‘I’ve been through a LOT and therefore things that I experience are more RAW, more PURE than you who has experienced NOTHING!’. Does that make sense? Let’s rephrase it. It comes out as “polygamy is inherently more loving and better that monogamy”. It comes out as “my 24/7 D/s relationship is deeper and we are more connected to one another than your vanilla relationship”. It comes out as queer spaces for some reason EATING themselves alive and fighting over ace/aro identities. Sometimes it comes out as people using neurodivergency as an excuse for their actions and blaming others for not understanding them, ignoring the fact that the people who have condemned their actions are ALSO neurodivergent. Your identity truly honestly does not get to justify every single one of your shitty actions, y’all. I’d say ‘be an adult’ here, but people, once again, have the emotional maturity of 12 year olds so apparently you can’t!!

I have this thought in my head that I still don’t think I can quite put into words. But it’s this feeling that you have pride in yourself and it’s okay to be proud of yourself - but that maybe for a long time, you did not have this pride. And maybe previously when you were kicked and pushed down by society, you developed a sense that what happened to you was wrong. And it was wrong. But now that you are proud of yourself, for the first time maybe ever, and you feel good about yourself - you start to conflate feeling good with being right. And you start to weirdly hold yourself as this rubric to which others should adhere to, and if they don’t well...it’s okay, but they’re not really experiencing life as well as you do. At least, that’s what I’m assuming people who do that shit are going through. You see it a lot - I’ll use the example here of nerd gamer boys. They may have been bullied as children, and that wasn’t great. But they start to take pride in their identity and now THEY’RE the ones on top, and now a lot of them whine about girls on streams or queer representation in games because it’s too political, or whatever the new controversy of the week is. What it really boils down to is that once there’s the opportunity to be in the in-group when so long you were not, so many people TAKE it and PLAY INTO it by becoming the bullies. By making more and more in-groups and excluding others because it feels weirdly nice to belong to a small group that judges all the others. Because that power and sense of belonging can be intoxicating.

This has already gotten a lot longer than I meant to. I guess it has really been weighing on my mind. And honestly I could write so much more about this. But this is a NaNoWriMo and I’m not in the habit of making this terribly long about a tiresome topic to talk about. So I’ll try to wrap up.

Just, you know. It’s weird. It’s weird that queer twitter can be SUCH a shithole and that lesbians have to mute the word ‘lesbians’ because there is so much dumb discourse on it, and it’s weird that queer communities get so wrapped up in their online spaces and their warped version of purity culture that they eat themselves alive, somehow oblivious to the fact that ‘standard’ society in real life only BENEFITS from these seeds of discord. It’s weird that kinky spaces talk about consent and how your kink is not my kink and that’s okay, and then turn around and judge other kinks because they have different risk profiles, or because those kinks are ‘too light’. It’s weird that neurodivergent spaces sometimes gatekeep one another with outdated definitions and diagnoses (that are ALSO outdated and are often only accurate to a white male patient!!!!!) and sometimes use their neurodivergency as hotkey excuses for their behaviors and never try to grow as individuals.

I’m someone who often says that I love individuals, but people are EXHAUSTING. And sometimes I feel that most days than others. But that’s also maybe my own version of othering those that I do not know personally and assigning them to the easy definition that is ‘a group that I do not want to get to know any more beyond pleasantries’ because it’s easier to group people into easy categories. And that might be on me.

But, god. People are SO, SO fucking exhausting.