You feel good about a skill once!!! And look what happens!!

[yvannairie]

Truly is there anything as bittersweet and discouraging as realising that the advice you're giving boils down to "just get good at the thing I (the person giving the advice) am already good at"?

I've been called some variation of "silvertongue" since I was like fifteen. I'm very good at forming convincing arguments and talking people flat, and I have zero modulation on it at all to the point where people find me the easiest to work with when I'm in Operational Mode: Shut Up And Keep Walking. I've put a lot of work into translating this into good writing, and my standards for my writing are infuriatingly high to the point where I really could benefit from going on a "write your shitty pots" stint again so I stop hitting ctrl+A Del on my posts the moment they don't reach those stupid high standards I somehow have despite being fully aware that the ability to string a fun sentence together athrophies when you aren't actively doing that. I am a good writer. I don't think it's that vain of me to say that.

And yet now when I have my fresh cup of coffee and I'm looking at this thing that I just wrote off the cuff, trying to generalise the lessons I took from a recent instance of people complaining in my vicinity about both sides of a thing that didn't need to be an argument... I genuinely just kind of think that it's bad advice. Well-meaning, but bad. Truly, I would not blame anyone for thinking this is just the hypocrisy of someone with an easy time communicating looking down on everyone who doesn't.

And I really don't mean it like that. I do genuinely think that most of the time when someone says something harsh and bitter, they don't fully mean it with their chest -- because I do it, because I'm constantly fighting the urge to do it, and because I really care about sounding like I'm not taking myself too seriously, delete things that make me sound too much like someone is living rent-free in my head. It's just so much easier to talk about someone else than to talk about yourself. It is very vulnerable to talk about yourself, rather than assume a step-back objective position where you can leave your own feelings as implication.

I guess what I should have written instead was some kind of a reiteration of Patricia Taxxon's commentary on commentary (on Youtube), and how it's very easy and fun to make reply videos because you inherently have a white-goes-first advantage and the ability to control the framing and the context of your own rhetoric when you've got someone else there taking up half of the analytical estate. I think a lot of what people are doing with their complaining-dominant fannish activity is just that. It's really easy to be sloppy with your arguments as long as you've got someone else you can technically be doing better than.