I feel like I just have to post this because of extreme fears lately. It’ll calm me knowing this text exists for various reasons, one of which is to explain if someone sees the way I speak online and scoffs, thinking I’m a weirdo without understanding the context.
I’m feeling really paranoid about anything I do being a reason for someone becoming angry/doing something rude to me. Nothing’s quite happened *recently* to make me want to say this now, but the feeling’s been really messing with my confidence for ages. I really want it to be known that I have a perpetual fear of this. I’m terrified of being hurt, and I feel like every thing I do or say is going to get me hurt, even in safe spaces within this community, I can’t help it. I acknowledge I appear erratic, defensive, and nervous in daily messaging wherever that may be, I’ve been hurt before, I know I CAN be hurt at any moment, and I don’t want to be! If I accidentally wrong someone in any way, more often than not they’re more powerful, so they have far more liberty to punish me for my mistake. If someone wrongs me, my resistance is seen as an unjustified attack ad hominem, and not as justice for their own wrongdoing. I really am afraid of getting into arguments due to this.
I can think of any reason that someone would berate me and I’d blame myself for it, so just please, make an effort to treat everyone with fairness and love. It’s generally not frequent that someone nervous expresses that they DO feel fearful, I’m positive there are plenty of people in the fandom that feel very similarly, if not exactly how I do, and living like this is a mess for all of us. Be nice to those folks if you can help it, please? Try to think of this fear I have and be nice to people in case they share it. As an empath, nobody should go through this.