from
bumper sticker that reads "i like to have gay sex (in minecraft)
to
try not to feel that the weight of the world is on your shoulders alone. no one person can bear such a burden. remember there are others like you who care and who are trying
this has happened to me a few times and it hit me incredibly hard because i'm already constantly incredibly anxious about if i'm a good person or not, and am terrified of accidentally harming others. it's taken me a while in therapy and talking to loved ones to fully convince myself that those instances weren't deserved.
the thing is: many people on the internet are not very reasonable. they don't actually know you and they bring their own baggage and assign you motivations that you didn't actually have, while not having actual context about your experiences.
let me give a few examples.
- i made a tongue-in-cheek powerpoint for some older coworkers i had in order to explain some of the gen z/millennial slang that i might use. this slide deck then went sort of viral inside the large corporation i was then employed at, which has a large and active internal meme platform. middle aged white people posted some stuff inspired by it that seemed to have a certain disdain for the vocab it presented. then i got contacted by someone higher up in the company's DEI staff who accused me of "deeply hating black people" with the assertion that a lot of the slang was from AAVE (some of it was, some wasn't, but either way it was an accurate and neutral portrayal of slang of people my age, with a few jokes thrown in). she read the tongue-in-cheek writing as making fun of black people in general, and threatened me with getting fired if i didn't take the whole thing down and issue an apology, which i did
- someone on a discord server for online trans writers posted how they wanted to fuck corpses and argued that fucking a dead body is morally equivalent to fucking any other kind of non-living matter. they said, to paraphrase, "i don't need consent to use a dildo, so why would i need consent to use a corpse?" i was somewhat horrified by this and said "hey please don't fuck corpses and please don't say doing so is morally fine". later, after talking to IRL friends, i decided that server was doing a number on my mental health, and posted in the server to tell people i had talked to friends (with some screenshots of those conversations) and had decided to leave. a moment later, i was kicked from the server, after being accused of "talking about people behind their backs". for the next few days, one person kept DMing me the same question "why do you like kinkshaming people" until i ended up just blocking them after they clearly didn't actually care about my responses. really i think people were mad because i described the server to friends as "weird terminally online trans lesbians with boundary issues", which frankly was an accurate description that i stand buy
- i used to have a discord server for patrons who supported my writing on patreon. i ended up leaving that server mostly because of one specific member who kept saying things that i found deeply hurtful. specifically, she kept comparing me to another online trans author and saying their work was better than mine. later, shortly after joining the site, on cohost, i saw someone else talking about how they really liked that author. i was new enough that i didn't know you could muffle tags so i left a comment to let her know that that topic upset me, that that was a new problem, and so i might unfollow her. later i added that i had discovered muffling so i would just do that. in response, to paraphrase, she called my behavior unacceptable and implied it was insane and said she was sorry but that other author just resonated with her more and that it was fucked up that i demanded everyone like me equally
I've met so many accomplished shitposters with similar tragic backstories that every time I meet a new one I'm just like, most folks don't get this far unless they're running from something. Everyone running to something found it many miles ago.
i have low self-esteem, general anxiety issues and moral ocd. i had kind of weird controlling parents (specifically my stepdad) who pretty much dictated what i did in my free time as a kid and what media i was allowed to consume, with a big focus on trying to shape me into a smart and financial successful person.
for a long time as a kid and teen i was incredibly worried about getting good grades because i sought supposedly objective external validation that there was at least one good thing about me - intelligence. this has somewhat transferred to feeling like a failure as an adult because i'm currently unemployed and can't help but feel my parents see me as a failure.
i definitely use humor as a coping mechanism. i probably care way too much about if people like my posts, as yet another way of seeking external validation. when i was younger i made a lot of jokes, but there were often deadpan and involved elaborate puns or somewhat obscure references, and usually no one got any of them. a nice thing about cohost is that people do in fact get a lot of my weird jokes