same. no doubt.

Apparently comments aren't coming to my inbox these days so I'm nearly two weeks late in responding to this. Sorry! "Do they know they are hating me?" I honestly don't think so. I think maybe it's a matter of liking you and then trying to get you into a box that works for them. I've discovered over the years that listening without confronting, disagreeing, or offering a different opinion is heard as: you agree with me, you are 'like' me in ways that work for me. I don't think that's a selfish thing so much as self-preservation, which doesn't mean it needs to be tolerated. Someone I used to be close with told me I wasn't really a Yankee, not really a New Yorker. She said I was from the Midwest. While it's true that some of my sensibilities are from my family in the Midwest, that only identifies some of my roots. It doesn't make me who I am and it surely does not lessen the truth that I am from and of New England and also, by way of circumstances, New York. (I didn't live in NY at the time, but the crossover is easy from Fairfield County) In sticking me in that box she allowed herself to continue to hate the North which was apparently pretty important to her sense of self. Eventually it got to be too much. I listen to understand what is outside of me. I think this is really important. However, I'm human and eventually the toxicity is too much, regardless of intent. I lost another last year because over a ten year period I vanished. I don't believe for a minute she meant for that to happen but I couldn't make myself understood either. She may never understand, but that's not on me. In the end we can either look at our results from a place of accountability or we can be victims. That's a horrible feeling. Somebody I really love unfriended me. I believed it was a mistake or I never would have gone looking for him. He said he meant to unfollow and unfriended instead - was too embarrassed to tell me. Now, I can choose to look at that two ways. I can tell myself it's a lie and he really did mean to go, or I can tell myself it's the truth and then think about why. I decided right away that it was the truth. That gave me the space to look at why he might have needed to unfollow me and what I might be able to do about it. Maybe nothing, but I think it would be pretty damned hypocritical not to look at it. Deciding it was the truth also opened a door that I didn't know had been closed. **** I don't know how to have a conversation with people who've got themselves in so many knots they've lost a good part of their humanity. I don't know if I talked about the mostly mask-less woman at the fabric store but what I realized later was that whatever was going on for her wiped out everything else. I think the raging of the Left at the Right is just as bad, if not worse right now. I think it could be deadly. If I want social change, I have to be able to talk to people with priorities other than my own. It just can't stay binary. Well, that was a long one! And same here, not you. Most assuredly, not you.