update I am SO bored

 i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored i am so bored LITERALLY WHAT DO I DO WITH MYSELF? My actual work? UGH

journaling shows me that i truly have never changed

 so like. i am a messy journal-er. as a kid i had 5 journals going all at once since people were like "she likes to write, get her a notebook I guess" and that happened 5 times in quick succession. sometimes things like this actually annoy me since it means i don't get to choose the thing i want, but i digress. topic for another day. but once i finished all of them i started focusing on just having one and have gone through about 3 in my adult life thus far. i have notion as well, i've typed journal-y things on there, i've put them on here and on my other blog, and i use the "note to self" feature on signal quite often (something about the notes app is too cliche and does not appeal to me). so what this all sums up to say is: there are a lot of different thoughts scattered everywhere and every now and then I go back and read through them all. and apparently in march 2021 i was doing a very similar thing to right now. something about the end of february and beginning of march has me wanting to quit social media, i guess. My guess is that it follows this pattern of really going ham on things over christmas break, then having trouble moderating them in january and february (complete with a pattern of saying oh fuck it i'm addicted in the beginning of february, i suspect) and then by march I am so done. Not to mention march is the second worst month of the year (after november) and thus i think a time just replete with frustration. 

so here I am, on my annual social media cleanse or whatever. social media absence. break. vacation. i dunno. It's producing some new feelings, though, confirmed by the journal entries I've read from last year. Chief among these feelings is a sense of freedom. Free from notifications, from pressure to interact, from the fucking self-discipline required in me to not start arguments every time someone Is Controversial Online. Just free from it all. 

I've also noticed that the way I approach it has changed. only recently have i even bothered to ask myself what i used to do before all of this (and lord how grateful I am to have existed with a memory before this was all a thing). But when I go down that rabbit hole it reveals that my time online has always been consuming. there was the membase era, the old time spent watching skits and pop song parodies on youtube (though back then I used to return to the same video often), the msn instant messenger era (now THAT was a time), and even before that there was the barbie and pollypocket online websites with lots of flash games. back then i had to at least ask to use the family computer. But there was also a lot of time spent deep in microsoft word, writing. there was a lot of time spent on books. and when I was at school, smartphones really weren't a thing until I got to high school, and even the old ones weren't the same as they are now. i didn't even have a cell phone of my own until high school, and then for years it was a blackberry (yes, i have rich parents). i spent a lot of time doodling, actually studying, and spending so long working on backwards alphabet code that at one point i could write and read it semi-fluently (ivzo lmvh pmld dszg r nvzm) (bvh, r szw gl dirgv gsrh xlwv lfg ztzrm gl (kzrmhgzprmtob) dirgv gsrh) so that nobody could read my secret notes about my crush or my feelings or whatever. of course back then school was mostly paying attention to an activity or having quiet reading time and i didn't have to entertain myself so much or plan my own schedule like i do now, and even if i wanted to spend hours scrolling through little videos, i couldn't. there wasn't a place to do that.

what I'm saying is that I suspect i will have to lean more on those things. unfortunately flash no longer works and i don't really want to have people peering over my shoulder at school to catch me on barbie.com anyway, but really i know i can't literally go back. nobody can. so many things don't exist or have better alternatives now that mean it really doesn't make sense to go back to something objectively worse (take, for example, the point and shoot digital camera, when now everyone has one on their phone that is fairly good quality unless you are a professional, in which case a point and shoot was never the answer anyway). but i can go back to the spirit of those things. the spirit of wasting time. heck, i even spent time in this very lab in high school, phoneless and doing time wast-y things. of course now i have like, actual work to do, but when i'm waiting for something it feels better even to play a little game on my phone than to scroll social media. at least i know the world of the game is fake. the world of instagram and tiktok feels real enough that i can lose myself in it.

and this time, i'm getting back to writing. when i read 'are you actually going to write a novel or just talk about it' (or at least the first part, since i haven't fulfilled the challenge of the first bit yet) i had this idea that i'd publish a post on my other blog once a week, but then shit got busy and i was spending 8 hours a day on cell culture work (which is very much equivalent to the physical and mental stress of driving for all that time) and just did not have the time to craft the kind of thoughtful post I wanted to put up over there, nor did I want to work on this novel I've been writing for well over 10 years that I can't seem to figure out. I barely wanted to do anything because i came home so exhausted. and this is where i think something like this blog may come in handy. because i have no rules for myself here except that i want to post every day in march. you may notice i don't even follow every grammatical rule. 

once again, here's to this.

Well, here's to this

just learned all of 5 minutes ago that the app I use to track my self-harm progress (I Am Sober) has way more social features than I realized. Unfortunately that seems completely antithetical to the entire point to me, especially as all the social features are overrun with teenagers and I just ... really cannot relate to the self harm struggles of a 16 year old (nor can they mine, we are in different worlds with different struggles). made it to 1 month today, which is lovely but so frustrating as I gave up a 2 year streak. the slow and monotonous work of just continuing to live life at normal speed while wanting that streak back is ... well. slow and monotonous. surprise, surprise.

the reason i noticed this is that I deleted all my social media apps today, and am starting 1 month of trying to be free of it. I put a little notice on my instagram bio, not because I think I am very popular and important but because I sort of feel like friends will just message me on there and if I stop answering it will look very cryptic. I'm just tired of wasting time on that, i'd like to enjoy wasting time on other things, like this. at least writing this counts as writing, as an act of creation. it also does not contain behavioral algorithms, which is a plus.

I thought maybe I'd pair my 31 days of no social media with 31 days of writing on this blog. i am strongly considering a writing career after graduation but am badly out of practice. Hence: low-stakes, low stress, but consistent blogging on my personal blog that is whatever the opposite of search-engine-optimized is. search-engine antagonized. i want to not be found. don't come looking.

i jest, of course, if you have been brought here through the hands of fate, then welcome, enjoy. 

my goal for the whole no social media thing is actually just what I say it is, which is that I don't really enjoy the fact that I am getting sucked up into the world of whatever app I use. I find myself becoming a very angry, unpleasant, irritating person and honestly, I would like to test a hypothesis that this is because of the apps themselves, and personally I would like to be a happy, pleasant, normal person who is only, like, a government-rationed amount of irritating. I've been taking more than my fair share for far too long.

That was actually a thought I had the other day as I pondered my many enemies on the long and arduous walk downhill from my car to the building at my university where i work. It still seems odd to me that I have never had any trouble getting along with others in any capacity my entire life and have always made friends easily and yet still there are about 4 people in the world who bitterly hate me. In each scenario with each person I can see where I went wrong and why they were angry, but I cut them all off for very specific reasons having to do with not wanting to be treated like garbage after making mistakes. But still. I am only 27. I feel like I have a much higher enemy-to-years-of-life ratio than most people I know, perhaps more than is wise. Looking at that ratio with no context, one may assume I was a bully in high school. That's not really the kind of reputation I want. But it occurred to me, as I pondered about self-awareness (which I heard about through an NIH seminar series about mental health and wellbeing for biomedical researchers, concisely abbreviated as MHWBBMR in my google calendar), and considered that I may actually just kind of be an offensive person.

It's not like that was a huge surprise- people have been telling me I'm opinionated and argumentative for much of my life, I even got "feisty" once- but it really did shift the way I think about myself. I didn't have this narrative of myself as an innocent lamb who is at the evil whims of others, but a person who is generally inoffensive probably has a lower enemy count. I'm not totally sure what to do with the information except to consider that it may be something that hinders me professionally (and I suspect it already has) and that I may want to... I dunno. work on that? or something? I think it ties into my generally open nature- I am very predictable, I wear my heart on my sleeve, I don't hide my opinions, that sort of thing. Perhaps it is better to be a bit closed-off some of the time. Be a little mysterious. That sort of thing. I just sort of hate that because I think anyone who deals with me knows what they are getting, and I like to know that about others, but alas, I am still unable to control the behavior of others.

Anyway. I think I've wasted enough time, I still have an experiment to start (and I even already dealt with the shitty part of measuring out cisplatin and my trust issues with the scale that is never constant, so I'm not even putting that off) and some work to do at my second job, and some sleep deprivation to catch up on, so like. I guess if you're really excited about this you can wait until tomorrow and there will be more. maybe. Bye.

does this even count as burnout or am i just lazy

 I know, I know, laziness doesn't exist, I literally read the book on this (you can google it, it's a real book, I really enjoyed it). here's the thing though. I just don't feel like i have a right to be this tired.

I mean maybe today it's because I was up 3 hours later than normal trying to get grading done. There is so much more grading than i thought there would be. I'm used to grading one section's worth of lab reports, not an entire classes' worth of an exam. It is never ending. my wrist and arm hurts. the grades are not good, no matter how generous I try to be.

i just sort of feel like i don't care anymore, except i do. I care about doing a good job. I care about maintaining my performance. I care that they get good feedback. I care that I don't dump more work on the overworked instructor. I also care that he makes more money than me. I'm getting $428.41 a month to do this work, which coincidentally is less than I could make for spending a grand total of 8 hours (2 hours one night a week) cleaning my dad's clinic. I've already blown past 8 hours of marking and I'm not even halfway done, but then again, once this finishes I won't have anything else to do until the final exam.

but ugh. the thought of sitting down and doing more. and then there's the review paper I'm supposed to help edit but the undergrad writing it, while clearly very intelligent, is just NOT a good writer, and each draft just keeps... staying the same. i'll be last author but I don't know that I want my name on something this poorly composed. It makes it more obvious to me that my writing skill- mediocre as it may be in the writing world- is stellar and extraordinary in my science world.

and god i have to keep coming into the lab. i have to keep packing lunches when i don't control the groceries or the dishes and i keep making overnight oats and then not having time to eat them until lunch and that's not even because i'm busy, it's because i spent half an hour on tiktok this morning. 

i debated doing a social media break next month, like, a full scale one. like no facebook, instagram, snapchat, or tiktok, or reddit (which I barely use anyway). Just to see what it's like. But i know in my heart that when it's 6pm on a saturday and I have to wait 5 minutes for the centrifuge there is nothing i will want to do more than spend 7 minutes browsing little videos online. what would i do in that time that is truly more valuable? it's like i realized recently: in high school, when i didn't have social media, when i had to wait half an hour or more for my dad to pick me up after school, what did I do? I couldn't stay in the building because they kicked us out. i sat outside and there was nowhere to sit that i could use to do homework, and it was always windy, so i sat under a tree and sang to myself. i'm not even good at singing, it's never been something i pursued even as a hobby, but all i had was my blackberry and fucking brickbreaker and waiting for my dad. there was nothing else to do. my backpack was too full to fit even one more book just for fun and i probably would have continued to forget it at home anyways.

sometimes i still think about that backpack. it was white with light blue and light green accents, not pastel but not neon. it had little pouches on the side for water bottles that were blue mesh. i tried to wear it once in undergrad and my shoulders hurt so fast. it's the kind of backpack you can only wear when you're 15.

it also occurs to me that i could honestly have walked home in the time i was waiting some days. it would have been such a sketchy walk though. I'm talking highway underpass sketchy.

so what is the point of really taking that break if I'm not going to fill that time with more useful activities? if I'm going to be just as wasteful of my time? heck, i remember being in this lab in high school. when i'd be waiting for western blots and there was nothing to do, i'd find all the coloured sharpies i could and take a piece of filter paper and see how the colour would spread if I just pressed down. I kept a tally of all the songs that played on the french pop hits radio station that my favourite lab tech insisted on having on because there were genuinely only about 15 different songs they played all summer (anything that was popular in the summer of 2015 I absolutely cannot stand to this day).

and yet like here i am, writing this. feeling lighter. it's like there was a weight on my eyelids and now there is purpose holding them open. hear ye, hear ye, @ myself: the problem was always that you need to be writing.

I'd like to try posting on this blog every day for a while and seeing what happens but i know more likely than not i will wake up tomorrow and not want to do it. 

let's not even get started on the job search. I do not have it in me at this time to be the perky Hi My Name is FirstName LastName and I'm So Passionate To Work In This Field Because thing. the networking the keep me in mind the actually reaching out thing. the job search thing. i'm so fucking tired all the time and the last time i felt like I had any goddamn energy was christmas break when i did nothing for 10 straight days. i read, i ate, i played games with my family, i did stupid things on my phone, i sewed, i crocheted. maybe i get to do that if i am unemployed post grad? I know i know i know i know i need to be looking for jobs and writing my thesis right now but i am at the point where i can barely do my Second Job (scanning charts and cleaning my dad's clinic, which he IS paying me to do, and quite a bit more than I make here) so where is the energy supposed to come from.

you know what else is a kicker? they have all this imagery around showers when your health is deteriorating, right? when you see blood running down the drain or pull your hand away from your head and realize your hair is falling out and it's connected to like, you realizing your health problems are really bad. well last night when i was in the shower at 2 am I realized I was losing less hair than I used to. That's right. My physical health is improving and i still feel like this.

i mean do you think it's burnout when i wish i was on bedrest? when i wish i would be told no you have to stay in bed or on the couch and be very low energy for a while? does that mean i need some variant of that? am i just tired because i am sleep deprived from last night? or is it just that my whole body knows that this fucking lab is not where i belong and hasn't felt that way since i started here and it used to be the big lunch table conversations being entirely in another language that i don't speak, even when i sat down, and now it's people stealing my pipette tips and not replacing them, and slowly encroaching on my fridge and freezer space, and everyone in the lab having good buddy happy time conversations with other people in the lab except for me. maybe that's a self fulfilling prophecy because i like to work from home but this workplace is a lonely one. so i don't stay. which makes it lonelier. 

you say you need to be writing but then you treat writing like it's going to be a vacation you put in all your days but really it is more like brushing your teeth every night. you do that routine not because it fills you with unbridled joy but because it makes your life less heavy. 

lighten the load, kid.

i gotta call myself out for that one

 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.

if you want to change minds

 This is a loose collection of thoughts about how cancel culture intersects with how we handle when the people closest to us have views we really don't agree with. It's borne out of the current "freedom convoy" that's taking place in Canada right now- not just in Ottawa but in my home province too. Because the common thing to do if you are a "good person" is to just flat out refuse to associate with anyone with "bad person" views.

We all know how hollow that is- that to them, we seem like the "bad people"- but that's most often how people will think of it. The issue for most people from what I have been reading is that the convoy was partly organized by people with histories of ties to white supremacist and neo-nazi organizations, so anyone who supports it is implicitly condoning those actions. The protestors have also been said to have been hurling slurs and other nasty shouts at POC in Ottawa. They notably have not been arrested or brutalized by the RCMP or local police. 

But putting aside whether or not the convoy has racist elements (it does)- the point is that you may find yourself in a situation where a family member or (close) friend admits either to you or to everyone that they support this. For the rest of this post, I am writing to my fellow white Canadians who find themselves in this situation. The thing to do is to cut them off, right? I read an article in the CBC today about how people are doing just that. The line that was quoted in the article that stood out to me was how someone said "I don't want to be associated with white supremacy."

The language of that is interesting to me. I understand it- I don't want to be associated with that either. But is that the goal? The end goal of your activism is just to not be associated with people holding oppressive viewpoints? I doubt that- I'm guessing your goal is to eliminate those viewpoints, to prevent them from being seen as a viable thing to think for anyone. My question to you then is- do you think cutting off your friends and family is in service of that goal?

I'd like to ask you to use your empathy muscles for a moment. Imagine you hold a belief that is widely considered to be "bad." You don't think it's bad, of course- to you it makes perfect sense. It explains everything. I'm going to need you to let go of some of your ego here- you are just as capable of falling in with cults and damaging belief systems as anyone else is. You are just as likely to go along with whatever viewpoint is popular at the moment solely because it markets itself well, and not because it actually has anything to stand on. But imagine- you have this view. It really matters to you. You spend a lot of time thinking and reading about it to learn more. And you know that the popular conception of this view is not good. People think that people with these views are bad people. But you KNOW you're not bad- right? If only they would listen, it might make sense.

Perhaps finally you grow tired of waiting for the tide to change and decide it's not worth keeping this part of yourself a secret anymore. You tell people. Maybe you just start with your siblings or parents, or your close friends, maybe you announce it on facebook and start talking about it at work and school. I don't know. Predictably, you get a negative backlash. People start cutting you off after you tell them. They block your number and profiles, they stop speaking to you in public, they don't answer your calls. What are you feeling now?

Are you thinking "oof, gosh, you know what, maybe they have a point. I should probably reconsider." I highly doubt it, and I speak from personal experience because this DID happen to me. More likely, you think "well, fuck them and good riddance. I'm part of this other community now and I don't need them. They didn't want to listen to me and see reason, it's their loss." If those people hurled nasty words at you before you cut them off- if they told you you were unacceptable, compared you to other people in their lives with different beliefs you also find offensive, if they issued ultimatums about staying in their life- what would you think? Would you be threatened into silence? Would you back down? Would you think these are reasonable, compassionate people who just want what's best for you?

Or would you just dive deeper into the view that caused the rift in the first place? Would you just become more convinced of your own view of yourself as a persecuted minority? Would you be an easier target from your community to become emboldened to take actual action in person?

Now let's imagine a different route you could take. Imagine someone from your family shares that they disagree, but they're curious about where you're coming from. They want to know what you have to say. Eagerly, you tell them everything, thinking you've convinced them, but they don't necessarily jump on board. They may agree with you on some things, but not others. You go harder. Things become personal. They acknowledge that the things you have been through or are going through are difficult. They say they understand. How do you feel now? Is this a reasonable compassionate person?

You might feel curious about what they think. You might ask them questions in return, and they would answer them honestly. You see how they have struggled too. You might gain empathy for them, the same kind of empathy they showed you in the first place. In this scenario, you might begin to think they have a point about some things. That maybe this group you're part of isn't totally right. You might have doubts, you might start to think more critically. You might change your mind entirely- or you might distance yourself from the more extreme aspects of whatever you believed in. If you did change your mind, there is no gloating told-you-so, only a "I'm glad to see we agree on more. I'm happy to talk about this whenever you want." You feel connected, appreciative. Challenged, loved. 

Now go back to reality. You're still you. You don't have any unpopular opinions, at least not any that really go against the grain. You're still staring at that message or post or person saying that they don't believe x, or they believe y instead. What are you going to do this time, if your goal is really to change minds?

I don't say this to imply that this will always work this way, I'm not naive. It might be that in the alternate universe scenario, the other person sees that you have a point and changes their mind. You might meet in some hypothetical middle. In reality, talking to people might just end with them doubling down and becoming mean or abusive. This isn't always going to work out this way, and it doesn't have to. If it goes bad, you are always allowed to cut them off.

That's the thing. This post isn't telling you you're wrong for cutting off people with unsavory beliefs or beliefs you personally find abhorrent. There is a time and a place for removing people from your life, and you may find yourself removed at one point or another. That's not morally bad, and that isn't the argument I'm trying to make here. Sometimes the goal is just to keep yourself sane, and in that case, cutting someone off might be your only option. If the person in question has beliefs that are responsible for your actual oppression, I am especially not obligating you to talk to people.

But in this real-life case, where white people who want to be good allies are cutting off their white friends and family who hold racist views because they don't want to be thought of as racist, I'm going to go against the grain and say you are a little obligated to have these conversations. You're obligated to try. Those beliefs don't personally oppress you. That system they support doesn't negatively affect your life. You don't suffer from that particular kind of oppression- meaning you have far more energy to tackle it from the inside than anyone who does suffer from it. When you cut off your racist friends and family because you can, you're inadvertently shifting the responsibility of bringing people into anti-racism work onto people who are actually impacted by racism. I don't think that makes you a good ally. 

Your racist friends and family are far more likely to listen to you- not just because you're white, but because you're a friend or family member. You have trust with them, perhaps a trust where they shared this with you in a moment of vulnerability. What I mean by this is: people are far more likely to change their minds when the mind-changing information comes from somewhere- or someone- they already trust. 

And let me be clear: if you agree with me, when you have these conversations the one thing you absolutely cannot do is sit on your high horse. You need to empathize, you need to ask from a place of genuine curiosity, and you need to remember you aren't better than them. The second you talk down to them, dismiss them, condescend to them- you have lost them. Nobody wants to be spoken that way. Everybody wants to be taken seriously. 

This hasn't even yet touched on how white supremacy and incel groups in particular tend to prey on people in those privileged groups (white people and men, respectively) who are going through a hard time. You know what's a hard time? Having friends and family desert you. Having them explicitly say you are a bad person and they won't be supporting you anymore. Feeling alone and friendless, with no one to turn to. Humans are social creatures, and when desperate, they will run to the first group that will accept them. If it's not going to be you, it's going to be them. 

At the end of the day, I can't tell you what to do, and I won't. I am speaking simply as someone who was cut off- after a barrage of insults and abuse and gaslighting and projection- from a friend group for thinking the "wrong" things. If my friends wanted to change my mind, they did a fucking terrible job. I no longer think of them as intelligent, compassionate people. I think of them as well-meaning women sucked into a terribly sexist belief system because they care so deeply about being "nice" that they've never thought critically about what they were spouting for one moment. I think they were all too eager to be good little allies and make sure I knew I belonged in the dirt for what I thought, despite the fact that none of my thoughts are hateful or malevolent. I challenged their worldviews and I can see that- they thought only bad people could believe these things and thought themselves too smart and kind to befriend a bad person. I had hoped that four years of friendship and trust might get them to see that I wasn't a bad person and therefore maybe people with my beliefs are not all bad people, but instead they chose something far easier- that I had simply been a bad person all along and tricked them for years. This simple fact meant I was deserving of the very worst of them, and that is what they gave me. I got it all- being told I was unacceptable, comparisons to their racist, homophobic, and abusive relatives, demands to apologize for things that were not objectively wrong, insistences that I had no "right" to be hurt, gaslighting about a million other completely unrelated aspects of my behavior, condescension from someone trying to help me "see the light," and insistences that I believed things I made clear I did not. It felt very much like the physical equivalent (since this mostly happened over text) of being told they wanted to hear me out while standing around me with clubs in their hands and malice in their eyes. 

I don't like to talk about what exactly the issue was because it still isn't popular. I don't feel safe talking about it, especially after what happened to me. I'd like to highlight a different scenario: that of my fiancee. He and I had had the same fight about the same issue a few years prior. Instead of insisting I was a bad person, instead of deciding I deserved to be verbally abused and abandoned, he heard me out. There was anger, for sure, but there wasn't condescension. He spoke to me like I was intelligent, he asked questions from a place of genuine curiosity and offered counter arguments in a non-offensive way. We continued talking about this over the years. Eventually it grew into a dynamic where we both felt safe to say things we might not feel safe saying out in public. I had more trouble with this than he did; I often jumped to worst case accusations that put him on the defensive. This did make him learn to word things differently and think about what conclusions I might jump to, and it's lead to a deeper understanding. When my friends did what they did, he was there for me through it all, despite the fact that he doesn't share all my beliefs on the subject and challenges me on them regularly. 

That is where I am coming from. Two very, very different experiences, the latter strengthening our relationship and our intelligence, the former deeply traumatizing for me in a way that I still think about it every day 4 months after it ended. The latter is something my therapist often remarks upon positively, the former is something she has had to help me grieve because I have been unable to do it on my own.

Next time you want to cut someone off, try talking to them first. It might not work, but other people have far more to lose if you don't say anything.

different person

 i don't know if it's possible but i feel more like myself than i have in a long time. i don't think of you as much anymore as i used to. you were always so far away.

i can see now how much i was trying to force it. i can see now how much better i have become since you discarded me. i know i wasn't always a good friend to you, i can see how i tried to force things to be what they weren't, force myself into a shape i never was.

maybe that's because i'm here and you're there. maybe it's because all of your contribution to my world was in the palm of my hand at all times, sometimes on my screen, sometimes in my arms but so rarely. 

the chapter is over and every day that settles into me with more finality. you were never meant to be here forever. i don't cry anymore when i think about how it happened. that chapter of my life ended long before this one did and now that entire segment is well and truly gone. i can't go back to it. 

i think so many people say they are lonely because they only have a few friends. hearing so many people say that makes me feel normal. now i too only have a few friends, and i don't even see them often. and because my relationship with them is different than my relationship with you, i've had to change.

you know how badly i needed reassurance and now there is no one left to give it to me but myself. no one else's reassurance works the way yours did except for mine. since i have been thrown into the deep end on my own i have learned to swim in record time. now i can float on my back and enjoy the silence.

i can't even be mad about it. i used to be the girl with lots of friends, the popular girl, and now i am just a person doing her best. i've lost a lot of interest in interacting with people through screens and acting like it's a real connection. most of my days are spent alone or in the company of a few people i know i can trust now and it feels good.

i've read 11 books since you left. i haven't read like this in so long. 

not being able to rely on you is a gift i never knew i needed. i wondered for so long how to listen to myself and be who i wanted and the answer was to stop listening to other people. turns out when you have no other choice, it happens fast.

i know you probably hate me. i know you probably never read the last message i sent before i blocked you. i know you are probably telling lots of people horrible nasty things about me. i know there are places in that city i can never return to, and others that i can't return to alone.

but i wanted you to know i'm doing really well without you. i never needed you, i only ever wanted you, even when i should have let you go.