Friendship is complicated · 10:25pm Aug 26th, 2015
So. I know i'm not much of a poster here. I'm more of a reader and lurker. But I appreciate the conversations and stories I find here. One of those I follow here is Applejinx who recently wrote a blog post about friendship and the process of it which resonated. It had to do with the site feature of being able to follow people and how it shows your network in the site. As someone who is more of a lurker it mostly shows that people will follow me back when I follow them.
It also doesn't help that lately something has gone screwy in that I've been unable to post comments on stories. It's not been a hassle enough to complain to management but it does mean i'm even more under the radar than before.
I'm also quiet online because I know that it is even easier to misunderstand comments online than even in person. Which is troublesome for me anyhow because of being on the autism spectrum. I know this is (supposedly) a community based on the concept of friendship is magic but in a Banal world it is often an ideal unreached, Withered under the blazing sun of societal expectations of conformity (gendered, racial, classist).
I think one of the things I appreciate about the stories I can find here is that I can step into them and find a world different from our own where there is friendship fettered by different social issues that are important but less painful to the core of me. Where there is hope that even the strange ones can find people to friend and forgive. Where even when the issues are the same that the slight distance can allow me to process them and learn social dance steps that I had only ever seen done at such distance as to render them un-learnable.
It is also nice that I can read many of the comment sections on the stories without fear of triggers. That i need not (for the most part) fear reading peoples thoughts on the stories because there will not be those who use my reality as a slur, who do not degenerate those with differing opinions using my gender.
Well enough of my rambling.
tell them the problem