it's been a minute since I wrote that last post. Yesterday was the 1 year anniversary of me officially burning a bridge, and it's more than a little relief to be on the other side of it. Now we enter year 2, a year when I'm just used to things being this way.
Here's the thing: I realize now that in some way, I directly, expressly went against what I wrote in my last post.
That post was intended to be: hey, if you want to change minds on something, start within your own circle and expand over time. It was also intended to be: hey, don't be a condescending asshole and assume you're better than everyone when you have that conversation. It was also intended to be: usually with the issues in question, things are sensitive and people hold them close to their heart, and you have to respect that when you talk to people about this.
I did not do these things.
I could blame the alcohol, and in a way I do. I haven't been that drunk since and I have no intentions of being that drunk again. The impulse I had after it happened was that I needed to become sober now. I don't know if that's still true, but I do know I won't turn into the party-hardy version of myself again. For the sake of my own reputation, quite literally, I can't, and I'm not being dramatic when I say that. But you know what the funny ha ha hilarious thing is? Right before I staggered onto my ex-friend's back deck and initiated and then had the worst conversation I've ever had in my life, I was having a very similar conversation with a different friend in the living room. We were disagreeing but finding common ground. We were finding holes in each other's arguments. It was a contentious, or at least semi-contentious subject. I feel now that may have filled me with hubris, that the first conversation was me building my wings, and then I flew through the kitchen, out the door, and straight into the sun. And crashed and burned.
Does it excuse the way they treated me? No. and every time I make these posts I type out some new narrative of what happened that I think will get people to side with me this time, and every time I erase two or three paragraphs of text because it doesn't fucking matter. I know what happened and I know what I think of it in this moment. It wasn't fair and it wasn't right and some of it was my fault and some of it wasn't. All of it is in the past now, though.
But the thing I'm most ashamed of is that I had been having conversations about this subject with these friends for years. I had been careful. I had avoided buzzwords or things that I knew would tip them off. I asked reasonable questions and always looked for common ground. I don't know if it was that I was drunk, or that one friend found her way deeper into a viewpoint and ideology I disagree with and find incredibly damaging despite the fact that I used to believe it myself. I don't know why it happened. I may never know. My brain, traumatized now, will always be looking for reasons. I feel like that's a subroutine running in the background now that I just don't get to turn off. Brains are wired for survival, they look for patterns, even when there isn't one.
It makes it harder to talk about this topic in the future. It does. It also made me reflect on the way I treat a lot of other people who disagree with me on things that I think should be so obvious. It made me a bit disgusted with some of the things people I agree with were suggesting should be done with people I disagree with. It made me horrified. I don't agree with saying that. I don't think this is a war that needs winning, I think it's a hard discussion that needs having, at a million dinner tables or coffee dates the world over, between two people who love each other and want to work it out. Who respect each other enough to treat people they disagree with like human beings.
As always, none of this applies to people who are talking to people in their oppressive group. I do not, for example, think that it is my job as a woman to convince men of my humanity or to talk to incels. I think other men need to be doing that. I do think it's a job to call out my mother when she says things that are vaguely racist. I do think it's my job to point out how my grandma might misuse statistics to support her racist beliefs. And so on and so forth. They're willing to listen to me, and I want to maintain those relationships, but that doesn't mean I let them say what they want around me. I'm not going to pretend this always works, either, sometimes it just means they stop talking to me about it. But they're usually not the only person in my life who has that belief. It also doesn't mean I haven't planted a seed that gets them to reconsider some small tiny thing.
Anyway. I'm not perfect, is all I'm saying. I fucked up. And I think that's part of why I believe what I do even more strongly now, why I try to have those conversations more. I failed at that responsibility once and lost all opportunity. I don't want that to happen again.
