social.noyu.me

if there's one feeling i've spent the last year or two or three of my life trying to feel less often, it's the sort of... kind of suspicion that makes the barriers go up in the mind. the wall in the head that appears when someone seems like they might be the Other. i hate it

i assume this must be a common experience but i do not have a name for it, but it's like...

when you see someone make a point you think you agree with

and then you check their profile, and they seem to be of a Different (e.g.) political persuasion

are they... threatening?

if someone seems superficially to have a lot of similarities in what you believe, but you suspect them to Secretly be the Other, does that make them threatening?

by threatening i mean. a kind of discomfort with engaging with what they've written. an unwillingness to interact

but also an unwillingness to even fully understand what they're trying to say, like the content itself is somehow potentially toxic and you're in the same room and aren't wearing a mask

i do not mean threatening in a purely practical sense. if the likes of Ch*ya R*ich*k were to appear in my mentions, i would backpedal as hard and fast out of that as i possibly could, because interacting with them means people are about to send death threats to your house

i also do not mean threatening in the sense of obviously politically hostile. if someone pops up and their entire thing appears to be "i want [the likes of you] dead" then, obviously, i'm not particularly inclined to want to deal with them, even if the conversation is cordial

i don't mean even that the person is tedious, or annoying, or whatever.

i mean something i don't have a straightforward word for: psychologically threatening. a kind of terror that i must not allow their words to reach me.

this also isn't just or even primarily about politics

i think i can only really describe it with one of those visual metaphors. that it is like the doors are closing in the mind and there is an attempt to limit one's vision so one cannot perceive all of the person. i look towards the person like a small and terrified creature.

anyway

this is how i used to be about people from "tpot"

i am not this way about people from "tpot" any more

it extends to other things, too, of which i cannot currently find examples. but removing this fear of the other allowed me to open the mind and experience more things

oh, relatedly: do you experience this fear when you can't tell what group someone falls into? i probably also had that before. i think this is also bad. a healthy mind can't only engage with that which it thinks it already understands

@hikari sometimes, but we try hard to let go of it because... mm

we grew up in a deeply harmful belief system that hurt us a lot, based on deontology and dogmatism. as part of finding our way out of it we learned to recognize all the behaviors we'd been taught that "protected" us from ideas that might lead us to insight. this kind of thing was one of those behaviors.

@ireneista or, well, i had thought about that process, but completely separately; i had not had the thought “the shape of the [scary online people] thing is the same as the shape of the [scary non-religious people] thing”

@hikari ah! yes. yes for sure. we're happy to have drawn the connection for you, then!