***Please read through all of what follows before responding, it isn't going where you might think, based on how it starts out***
When I first showed up here in 2005, there were many people here who are no longer active participants. - and a lot of people who are here now, the majority, I think, weren't here then; some were taking a break, some weren't here yet.
I was just becoming able to articulate the pain I had carried within for decades. I was repeatedly encouraged to speak here, to tell my story, yet I found that when I did -
almost nobody responded; or
the next response following mine was either some casual reference to an unemotional topic preceding me; or
the next response following mine was a total change of subject, to something casual again; or [worst of all]
someone attacked me for making them "feel bad!"
I can think of few things in my adult life that have hurt me as much as this did.
I was well aware that, in realspace, my perceptiveness and articulateness threatened people, but it was a real jolt at the time to find people essentially turning their backs on me here, when I was doing exactly what people were supposedly here to do - in theory - and people had been encouraging me to do it.
I did not respond well to it; and I was castigated for the quality of my response... there was no taking of responsibility for the ignoring, the baiting me to disclose and then refusing to engage me when I did.
That's how it felt to me; as though I had been lured into revealing terrible pain, so that I could be ignored and left alone with it, exactly as I always had been. There is a quality of meanness in that that is undescribable. I'm not saying that is how it actually was. I am saying that is how it looked to me, and I think, given the evidence I had and my vulnerability at the time, it would have looked the same way to anyone in my shoes.
Now: after a time, when I was able to express this without screaming at the tops of my lungs, I was told that what I shared was so devastating that people were stunned and couldn't reply at once.
I made a simple, simple, simple suggestion then - and I would like to recommend it now, because I think there may be others in the future who might feel the way I did in the past, and there is a very easy way to prevent that, and it doesn't cost a thing.
What you do is type the person's name in a set of parentheses. That is all you have to do. You give them a hug. You sit with them in silence, as Job's friends did after he lost everything. It is what we would do for a person in realspace, if we care about them. If words fail us, we hug, or we sit with, or we pat on the shoulder, or we pat on the arm, or we bring a cup of tea.
All it costs is a few seconds' thought and a few taps on the keyboard. Nothing more.
And what it would have done for me, if in 2005 people had cared enough to think enough to do that simple, simple thing, would have been nothing short of miraculous.
Sorry if anyone here feels blamed by this. It's intended to inform, not to blame. In my case it's history now, but I haven't forgotten it - how could I? and it's important to share because I'm not seeing a lot of input here from people who have been on the receiving end of this, and stuck around anyway to work through it.
And obviously it changed, or I wouldn't be here now.
But I was not to blame for it when it happened, and I know that too.
