Beyond Selidor

Hello you are me -- I really can't deal with even friendly debate, or people who enjoy debate but don't mean anything personal by it. It's not a trigger exactly but it ups my anxiety exponentially. I also tend to think not a lot of minds actually get changed by vehement arguing.

I log into Facebook every couple of years or so. I use Tumblr on and off and also post on Instagram, and both of those are fun but I also have no idea how to make friends native to those platforms and I'm not interested in marketing my brand or whatever. I OCCASIONALLY check reddit for discussions about stuff like the Locked Tomb or Magicians books or comics or cooking. I think Metafilter (I hung out there in the 90s-early 00s) has a fannish scene now but it's also very very political and boy, do the people there love to argue.

Twitter: has been the biggest challenge of all. For much of the past eighteen months, my only solution has been to simply not use it at all, because it made me have endless panic attacks. I haven't looked at it for over a month, and before that I think I went for about three months without using it. My problem with Twitter is that I started using it at the point where the rhetoric in my online social circles was very much a) Twitter is the best way to keep yourself informed of current affairs and b) if you're not feeling upset and angry and challenged by the online company you keep, you've created a privileged bubble for yourself and are actively contributing to oppression. (I now kind of think both of these things are nonsense: there are better ways to remain informed of current affairs than Twitter, and there are certainly better ways to fight for social justice than to listen to a lot of people screaming in despair on Twitter.)

Yyyyyeah. Just....yeah. I do feel like a lot of news is happening there -- it's like an international live global news feed -- but a lot of it's also distorted and commercialized, and I cannot DEAL with all the horrible racist sexist comments, and it also freaks me out for ADHD reasons in terms of focus and....idk, feeling like I always have to race to keep up? Like it'll never be finished? Trumpty is a total creation of Twitter. (And reality TV.) What you say about feeling compelled to keep checking in with how awful everything is and chime in with comments about yes, it is awful! is really very well-put.