Can you imagine if every time someone online posted normally about their mom I commented with "Wow, you have a normal mom? You've never had a near-death experience because of your mom? Can't relate :/"
Can you imagine if like, it was mother's day weekend, and let's even say that we're friends, and we were grabbing lunch, and you were like "oh yeah I called my mom this morning" and I just went "Wowwww well now I just feel like garbage because you've reminded me that it's mother's day weekend and my mom fucking sucked."
Like there's just no defense of that. That's shitty. I can feel those emotions but like... that's just going to make the other person uncomfortable and make them feel bad for something that's normal. Now imagine that it's mother's day and you're just eating lunch with your mom and then I use walk up to you and you don't even know me and I tell you all about my shitty mom who almost killed me. Isn't that, like, awful? You're not being cold or unsympathetic if you hate that experience. That's not a normal social expectation to have of you that you should just drop whatever you're doing to give all your emotional energy to some random stranger who just starts putting all of that on you.
I know not everyone experiences this, but for me, in my life, with my demographics and online audience etc. I have experiences like that really frequently! And it sucks! And yeah I can "just block people" who do it reactively but when you have a lot of people who read your blog you're never going to like, block all of the people who do it, right? Like I can block everyone who does it but it'll still use keep happening when some new person does it who I haven't blocked yet.
So this is me making it clear that I don't think trauma dumping in the notifications of strangers is socially appropriate behavior and I am going to block you if you do it. This is the warning. This is my empathetic good faith attempt at assuming the best in people that they are simply not thinking about the impact of their actions and would choose to behave differently when given a window into the experiences of the real living human person who they are "shouting into the void" at. You're not shouting into the void, you're shouting at me. The alternative to issuing these warnings is to assume that people doing this know better and are choosing to behave maliciously. Someone behaving maliciously deserves no warning. This is me attempting to communicate the social skill to anyone who hasn't yet learned it.
There are 8 billion people in the world. I have already dedicated myself to a life of public service in my career. The same career skills that make a librarian could be turned towards being a lawyer and earning a fuck ton more money for a lot less PTSD. I simply don't have the emotional capacity to "care about others" when it comes to total strangers dumping their trauma in my notifications on a post about something as banal as aging.
There are some of you who need to read this twice, then again.