What a world (Bad Art Friend discourse post)

[yvannairie]

I can't look away from the bad art friend saga.

Initially I thought it must just be the sympathetic cringe -- I have been in Dorland's shoes so often, I am kind of notorious for messy parasocial relationships with people who truly have nothing against me but also absolutely nothing to say to me, and the visceral mockery appealed to the part of me that recognizes that while I didn't deserve to be bullied as a kid, I did bring it on myself for having a truly epic amounts of cringe weirdo energy. It's cathartic in a painful way to see that I probably won't ever be able to convince the people who find my bluntness and earnestness off putting to feel differently about me -- that no matter how obvious the pain I am in is to outsiders it'll never be enough. The more I hear about how Dorland is a spectacle out of her free will rather than obliviously, the more cathartic it feels. It's almost like an out-of-body experience.

But on the one, far more self-congratulatory hand, I'm also currently wrapping up a parasocial conflict of my one -- one where I've done the bare minimum arguing for myself from my perspective and one where I actively felt hounded and harassed over someone taking personally something and never clarifying what, how, and where they had gotten the idea that I would be interested in triggering a personal conflict with them. Seeing all that's coming out in the private chats makes me understand, far more immediately than I have before, that paranoia over people talking behind your back isn't just me being a mess, it's making me confront how I never quite believed it when people told me that was what someone did, no matter how many things it explained.

And yet more, I recognize that I don't actually care about this. Even my sympathetic cringe towards Dorland is not because I'm invested in her as a person as much as I'm interested in the developing narrative about how easy it is to victimize the socially unacceptable ie. the source of the recognition and subsequent out-of-body experience. All of these people are writers and yet there's such a blindness to narrative all around. The one person who seems to be selective in their wording and conduct is the one painted as utterly unselfaware and the ones most furious in their rhetoric don't seem to realize that by their nature as writers that reveals as much about their attitudes as their actions.

This is such a horror show and I wouldn't wish this on anyone. This should not be public, this should not be a spectacle. I can't believe that the dismissal of this as "everyone sucks here" misses the point so hard.

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

I don't know you in real life, and I don't know you at the age you are discussing, but I think you are being very hard on yourself.

Whether the victims of bullying have a "type" I do not know, because my experience is quite limited. I was bullied by mean girls in the fifth grade--only verbally. My son was bullied by mean boys in the second grade and it extended to physical assault.

I clearly remember some horrific bullying of developmentally disabled children in my elementary school -- a totally different category.

My son and I were totally different personality types at those ages, so I have very little data here.

But victims of bullies never bring it on themselves. Never. I don't care how annoying and "bad vibe-y" they are. Bullying is a choice made by the bullies. How hard would it be to just ignore or leave alone the kids you don't like? Not hard at all.

[yvannairie]

Fair, but I think I'm hard on myself for a reason. Like, me being bullied did actively turn me into an abuser for a hot minute there, and I don't like shying away from it. Yes, it was me, I was fucking awful, I don't get to talk around that even now when I've improved as a person. The harm I did isn't mine to handwave away, especially not because I haven't talked to my victims in years and don't know how they're coping.

But it's important for me to see that what I became was, on some level, my failure. It wasn't because I had an easily victimisable set of traits, because other people with similar easily victimisable traits hadn't turned out fucked-up like I did, and didn't deserve their bullying and abuse despite those easily victimisable traits.

[princessofgeeks]

Yeah, we've all done things we regret and made mistakes. And hurt people in some way.

Good for you for being willing to own up to them.