I’m writing this to clear the air about some things. Feel free to ignore if random vague fandom drama is not your thing.
At this moment, I’m not even sure if, or how much, anyone else is even thinking about these issues.
I do not know if, or how much, I may have inadvertently hurt others with the way I was doing things…
[[MORE]]Basically…
I’m in a situation where I feel there’ s been a conflict with some people. But none of the usual ways of trying to open communication with them feel… right, to me. It would be either DMing without consent, or addressing a post to them in public, and at the moment I don’t feel they would be comfortable with either.
(This vagueposting approach is also… not good.)
(But it feels like the least bad option at this point. It won’t force anyone to read these thoughts who’s already decided they don’t want contact with me. But I’ll feel a bit more peace of mind knowing these thoughts are, sort of, in the open.)
Anyway.
…Until recently, this is what I had in the “About Me” post on my Tumblr blog:
DNI if: you don’t wanna interact. (if I got any problem with the interaction I’ll handle it, I’m a mature program with a block button)
I will block you:
I’ve taken those words down and am considering something new to replace them. Because… I am trying to make some changes in how I handle these things.
I have enacted this “block people whose boundaries I don’t understand” protocol. A couple of times, I think. Once that I remember clearly. Very early in my time on this tumblr account. It was somebody who had liked and reblogged several of my posts, and when I went to their blog, I saw “NSFW blogs DNI” prominently displayed.
This, of course, confused me. I freely admit to being a NSFW blog– or at least, that I post pretty often about sexual attraction and sexual acts. If this person wanted to interact with me, why did they have a prominent post saying they didn’t want interaction with blogs like mine? (And if they just hadn’t seen the “NSFW” on my own blog before interacting, why would they expect others to check and see the “NSFW DNI” their blog before interacting with them?)
For the time being, I just… chose not to follow them, and not to go out of my way to interact. It was all I could think of to do.
But the status quo went on for a while: continuing to receive occasional likes and RBs from this stranger, and feeling increasingly uncomfortable about it… anxious that I might accidentally overstep a boundary.
Because… what even were this person’s boundaries? How did they define NSFW, and in what circumstances did it actually bother them?
They had no problem sharing my tamer posts, so clearly their taboo didn’t include “non-sexual interaction with a blog that sometimes posts about sexual topics.” I felt pretty sure they’d be uncomfortable if I tagged them in any of those sexual posts or sent them a sex-related ask, which of course I had no plans to do… But their boundary must be somewhere in between, and it bothered me not to know where.
Eventually, I found it. A mutual of mine (someone else whose blog also openly admits to posting on NSFW topics) had reblogged a post from them.
It was a fandom post, an observation about a fictional character. My mutual had added commentary, but nothing sexually suggestive. I reblogged… and I made the mistake of putting something suggestive in my own additions.
The original poster– in a move that somehow managed to take me by surprise– reblogged it back from me, commenting something to the effect of “Don’t add horny things to my posts.”
And then I …well, I essentially panicked. And made the further mistake (at least, I now feel it was a mistake) of letting my panic response express itself with the block button.
At the time this made sense to me, for the reasons described in the About Me post that I quoted above. I had always agreed with those posts that sometimes go around, saying that it’s perfectly valid to block others for your own mental health; that your online experience is there to be pleasant and relaxing, and there’s no guilt in cutting off people who don’t contribute to those feelings for you.
But later on (as things do sometimes go, over the course of gaining online social experience) I had an occasion to experience this from the other side. And it changed my feelings somewhat.
It wasn’t an exact mirroring from the other side of what I’d done. The situation was different in a few big ways. But it did involve a person who blocked me without explanation.
Not a stranger or recent acquaintance. Someone who, up to that moment, had been treating me like one of their best friends– including me in their private Discord server, replying to nearly everything I said, showing constant enthusiasm for every fan project I was working on. So, the sudden loss of contact felt to me like a totally unexpected double blow. Losing a close friend, and at the same time being implicitly accused of something, with no hint as to what.
What had I done? How had I hurt this person, badly enough to go overnight from friendship to complete non-interaction? What had I done that was so terrible that I was blocked from every avenue of even being able to reach out and ask this person what I’d done?
Since then, through conversations with others, I’ve been able to glean a general idea that this friend was experiencing a sort of crisis in their attempts to maintain an online social life that was beyond what they could deal with. It seemed they’d cut contact with a number of people, just for being part of certain social circles they no longer had the capacity to handle.
The patterns to which people they’d blocked were a bit confusing to me, but I imagine that my own… sometimes-overly-overt sexuality… might have contributed to why I was among them.
Unlike the stranger I’d blocked before, this person didn’t have “NSFW DNI” on their blog; they were okay with talking about sexual topics in some circumstances. But not in all circumstances. And that boundary was never quite clear, to me or to several others who’d been in Discord servers and chats with them.
It’s entirely possible that my own discussions of NSFW topics had overstepped the boundary and made this person uncomfortable, and that had been part of the reason for the block. It could also have been some other aspect of how I post (I do post about a pretty vast range of things, from silly and smutty to dark and depressing). Understandable, I guess, that anyone with certain mental health needs would need distance from that.
So… even though this all hurt a whole lot, I have been trying to understand or at least accept these other perspectives. I’ve been giving a lot more thought to how different people can have different ideas of what’s a reasonable boundary to set.
And while there are some practical constraints on what one can realistically expect strangers on a huge online platform to adhere to… that doesn’t change how individual people personally feel about their own boundaries, or whether I personally can feel some sympathy and some willingness to try and meet them where they are.
I’ve also been thinking about some things (which I discussed in the March followup to my February KOSA post) …some thoughts about communities that are built for mutual support in survival situations, and how their standards will differ when it comes to what’s a dealbreaker for friendship. And how much effort people will put into trying to resolve conflicts when a group is smaller, less replaceable, and more necessary to one’s life.
I mean, I’m not actually in that type of survival situation at the moment. But I’m becoming increasingly aware of how important communities are. And the community I’ve joined most recently through shared fandom interest is… a small, cult-classic sort of fandom, so the rareness and preciousness of good friends is kind of being hammered home to me at the moment.
And I have become more motivated to make some effort to heal what is broken, whenever I can.
I’ve never been good with conflict. Often my reflexive reaction to it is to isolate myself, to cut off interaction so I don’t have to face what may have been wrong with it.
But I am trying to fight that response, because it’s not healthy.
I’ve unblocked some people I blocked during those early conflict-phobic moments of panic. But of course I don’t expect or feel entitled to be unblocked by anyone who has blocked me. As I’ve tried to express here, their reasons are their own… and while I may try my best to understand them, I acknowledge that I can’t fully, and only the people who made the choices truly can. So I won’t judge or expect anything in particular; only try to be open to whatever happens.
And I’m writing this post… not to try and argue against anyone, or convince anyone to do anything, but just to try and make clear what has happened from my end, and how I feel about it.
Like I said before, I don’t know if others are even thinking or talking about any of this.
But my anxieties sometimes fear that they are, and that there may be people out there forming opinions about me, entirely from the other viewpoint in these conflicts.
And the only thing that eases that anxiety a little is… for me to communicate what I can, so that my viewpoint on what happened is at least out there.
Again, I know this was all vague… but, well, it’s more info than was out there before, and I feel it would be wrong to go into much more detail. So, do with this information what you will. It’s just me trying to make things a little less vague than real life seems to have made them.