3-5 AM Bear Blog Observations
Had an ok day today but I cant sleep. Looked through the recent Bear Blog entries and also at some of my own older posts. A lot has happened in a year.
Something I've noticed that's unique about the Bear Blog community that doesn't hold true for Twitter and Tumblr, though, is that posts that are purely filled with negativity get essentially no upvotes. To get upvotes, negative posts seem to require some form of grappling with the situation in a way that isn't simply, "I'm subhuman and I should die." Rather, people here much prefer posts that are written as lessons for the reader. Even upvoted posts about personal struggles seem to be packaged neatly with a good thing for the reader to take home and implement in their own life.
Not to knock this type of post since they must be genuinely useful to people if they're getting upvoted, but they don't really appeal to me. A short-ish post that goes, "I used to think XYZ, but I realized that I should give myself room to grow. Let's all remember that," is a bit too simplistic for me. I want to understand the thought process that led here with some scenes from someone's life (or summarized events that lend itself to the conclusion). I want to see a bit more of the struggle, more of the uncertainty. That the promises you make yourself on how you'll treat yourself in the future are actually in a limbo state of intention and hope, and whether they remain to be fulfilled has yet to be seen.
But again, different posts for different folks. I probably am just biased to my own version of writing, which also probably comes off as weird and long-winded to some. Back to the original point:
While the "lessons for the reader" format doesn't interest me,1 I genuinely think it's a good thing that people don't reward posts that have completely given into their own self-hatred. I say that as someone who has definitely written some of those posts on my own blog, and may do so again in the future.
As someone who vented on Tumblr and Twitter and who made other mentally ill friends also stuck in the quagmire, there was always the expectation that you would "like" a post where a friend basically said, "I wish I could just die," because it was a way of showing emotional support. I came to expect the likes myself. A kind of public (or semi-private when it comes to private Twitter accounts) display of, "Look how bad I'm hurting. This means something, maybe means more than anything else I'll say or ever feel because the feeling of pain is all-consuming." People took it as indications of whether anyone cared about them, so others felt pressured to respond to this call. "Please like everything you read from my vent account," were real requests people made as their stickied posts. Honestly, I would just pretend to be offline sometimes so I didn't have to like literally everything I read, because I knew and they knew that the thing that would actually make them feel like they were being paid attention to was having a friend then offer to talk to them one on one. Sometimes I just didn't feel up to it.
I did a dive into papers about the effectiveness of venting on Google Scholar recently, and I keep meaning to write a summary post about what I found and my thoughts about it, but given everything happening in my life rn I just might not. But TL;DR venting to someone who doesn't challenge your thoughts doesn't build resilience for the future. When the stimulus happens again, you feel just as bad as the first time. And if you're primarily using other people's care to act as the band-aid, you might run into the problem where other people don't have the bandwith to apply the bandage and you're left feeling like no one cares, without building that self-compassion resilience muscle. Reading that study honestly blew my mind and reframed everything I thought about venting and my own past behavior.
There was also the other problem of getting consistently liked for self-harming posts: Those posts would then go on to get more likes than any other random thought you might have that might be fun to you but niche and therefore alien to the viewer.
"Guyyys should I KMS i'm so fucking tired of my shit-fucking life"
Friends: [4 likes] [reply: do nawt kermit suiyocide] [reply: you ok? need to talk to someone?]
"when Choco regards Gyubid as more important than her biological parents multiple times in the series and this is just presented as completely normal and fine holyshit.png"
[0 likes] [0 replies]
This taught me over time that my most self-deserting thoughts were more truthful and interesting than my random thoughts about things no one I knew was watching or reading or experiencing. In truth, they're probably of equal measure of inanity, but it's hard to accept that because I'm used to trying to pay attention to other people's pain and assuming other people do the same.
But it turns out that it's not true across the board. I mean, us chronically mentally ill complainers know that there's a lot of people for whom talking about negative things past a certain amount of detail is way too uncomfortable to engage with or wrap their minds around seriously -- just try talking with someone who has never experienced or witnessed parental abuse and see how confused they get. But there's other people, too, who might get it but don't see the point of rewarding self-flagellating behavior.
My current thought is that the best thing anyone can learn is to have faith in their ability to make small changes towards a process of existing that minimizes pain and regret.2 It's not something I necessarily have but am trying to build. In my teen and early adult years,3 I was in this loop of "Worthless -> Too worthless to change -> Forever worthless -> Should die then -> Too worthless to kill myself ->" and I didn't really want to commit to finding a therapist that could actually help me.4 It took a friend patiently pushing back against my logic and me scrambling to prove them wrong for hours before I realized I really didn't like the way I was acting. This friend wasn't the first friend to do this song and dance with me, but something clicked that time. Maybe it was the fact that this was the 3rd or 4th person in the past few months. Maybe it was the fact that they were someone I never even really suspected of judging me at all, so I started feeling pity for them for having to argue against a stubborn stone wall. Whatever it was, I walked away from that conversation thinking, "I can't go on like this. I have to try something new."
This is all just a long-winded way to say that I think it's better to reward people for actively trying not to go off the edge of a cliff than it is to reward people for teetering on the edge without even considering what it would take to move off it. To enable the process of healing rather than suffering.5 And I'm glad people here do that.
...And now this post has maybe become another type of post that seems to get upvoted on Bear Blog that I don't really care for either: the post that comments on how Bear Blog is better than social media. But I wanted this on my blog because it will be useful for me in the future to feel grateful for this difference, so it is what it is. Granted, this post is super long anyway, so that will probably save it from being upvoted too much.
Ironically, I'm more likely to click post titles that align with this theme because they seem like they might be more immediately useful.↩
Disclaimer: This represents my fallible opinion at this point in time, and I may end up tripping over myself and landing face-first in the mud about this later. I reserve the right to say, "That was way too lofty of an opinion, and actually I think this other thing is more important (to me) right now," later.↩
And occasionally on really bad days now. I'm not free of this thinking entirely yet. Feels really easy to just fall back on it some days.↩
I had tried some that cost less per session, but they didn't really get me, and I didn't get how to spend my time in therapy in a way that would help me despite being very in tune with my thought processes and emotions. Rather, since I understood myself so well, I thought therapy was pretty useless. The CBT and DBT worksheets didn't do squat for me because my own ironclad negativity logic could easily disprove anything they suggested. It's weird thinking about this because, while I did know myself, I was somehow still missing major pieces due to various ideas I was treating as permanent truths rather than lessons I had learned from instances where people had ignored me or treated me badly. Ideas like, "I have to play a role or there's no point of me," were defended with an internal moral universe that could let me outargue anyone because I would point to things like, "Someone who saves the lives of thousands of people is more useful and a better human being than the average person. Most people agree on this or we wouldn't have historical activists we look up to. Now, I'm actually worse than the average person because I can't join any cause due to social anxiety. Of course, people who are unable to do something shouldn't be expected to, but in my experience I know that I have had occasions where I managed to act as if I didn't have social anxiety. Therefore, I only have social anxiety because I'm not trying hard enough to get better, but I don't want to get better because the process scares me. So I am absolutely shirking my duty. I don't know what other people's circumstances are so I'm not going to judge them. The guilt is eating me alive, but I don't want to get better because it hurts, but other people do things that hurt them all the time and come out stronger for it, so I'm just wrong. I know I should try harder but I won't."↩
When someone is stuck in the mode of suffering, return agency to sender. What do they want to do about it? Do they want anything to change? If the answer is no, they should sit with the discomfort of realizing that's their answer. But this has to be something they come to understand themself, and you should never put words into someone else's mouth. A lot of times people will say something like I did: "I want to change, but I can't." This is a dead end answer, but it holds a lot of assumptions that the speaker has made that is an unconscious defensive mechanism to relieve them of the work of change. "Why not?" and "That's really hard. What do you think you'll do about it?" can go pretty far. Even if the answer is "Nothing," recognizing it as a current choice might lead them to recognize their own agency and therefore capacity for change in the future. Laziness Does Not Exist by Devon Price has a good section of questions to ask yourself and a person you're helping emotionally. Also, this isn't to say we should go around blaming people for not changing fast enough. I'm just speaking on what I've learned as the most useful for myself and other people I've seen in the long run. Other people's timelines are utterly unpredictable, and it's good to know when to call it quits on the role you're playing in it.↩