Robots

[rebeccmeister]

The thing is, if someone thinks you're a robot, can you actually convince them otherwise?

Comments

[rebeccmeister.livejournal.com]

It's interesting to hear how this resonates, and comforting to know I am not alone in my reaction. I wasn't called a robot per se, but wanted to think about things from that angle.

A friend whose friendship I eventually had to push away used to say she had no soul, which seems related somehow. For how she wished to live her life and who she wished to be, I guess that was okay for her, but I hit an abrupt point where I couldn't trust her anymore, which was very hard.

[tylik.livejournal.com]

I find your example of the friend who identified as having no soul interesting. (I don't have a strong opinion on the existence of souls - or even the definition thereof - but I find the identity and mythology questions pretty fascinating.) I'm not clear how the identity of no soul played into your pulling back - I mean, it sounds like there had to be a lot more going on.

But it seems to point towards two fracture points -

1) There are people who are essentially incompatible.

2) My previous statement about being asked to apologize for who I am is poorly bounded, because what is who I am vs. some I can choose not to be?

...and I only have a few heuristics. Mostly, arguments of the form "I am fairly normal, and you are a freak, so we should work from my expectations / context / whatever," are just incredibly problematic. (Though there's a counter example around words. Dear gods, people who have their own personal definitions of all kinds of words and use this as an argument winning technique are hopelessly tedious.) And people who think that I'm feeling the wrong thing and should be feeling something else... yeah, that's kind of a non starter. I mean, in fact, I can, over time, change a lot about what I feel, but that doesn't mean random folks get to post scores on the propriety of my feelings.

[ivy]

Well, or demand that you SHOULD change just because you *can*. That's everyone's individual decision, and I've occasionally found a failure condition where being the more plastic of the people in a partnership meant that I was increasingly expected to accommodate their unreasonable demands, because it was easier for me to change me than it was for them to stop demanding. Nooooope! (And that's a big fight right there, where you say "sure, I could, but I don't want to". To them it's "you could help me but you won't, what kind of a heartless monster are you", to me it was "stop demanding that I give up pieces of myself and shape the direction of my self-determination in a direction pleasing to you, that is powerfully my choice and not yours". Ugh.)

[tylik.livejournal.com]

And yet, I am reminded of actual conversations in which it was posited that because I am better skilled at every piece of housework, and home and land maintenance then I should just do it because it's easier for me and I do it better. (Nope.)

Except for all the aggravation of the above, that's a relatively superficial matter.

(It is not helped, in either example, that I get off on being strong and competent, and don't generally think it appropriate to go throwing fits about asymmetries as long as it seems like everyone is making an effort. Which means these things can get kind of entrenched.)

[rebeccmeister.livejournal.com]

I have to give the soulless friend at least some credit for being up-front about that aspect of who she is. While we were friends, she started dating my housemate but wasn't willing to be up front about the matter, and I had an inappropriate crush* on him at the time. I stopped feeling like I could trust either of them at that point, especially after I tried to have a, "What gives?" conversation with her and she couldn't say anything. I struggled for a long while (years?) with having to push both of them away so hard and so fast, wanting to figure out how forgiveness fit into that picture, but to a great extent I had to let go of the situation and seek friendships that felt more affirming of who I wanted to be. I got mighty irritated with the part of my personality that kept latching onto those inappropriate crushes, so it was time to let go of that and focus on being myself and bouncing around in the world.


*This is a thing my emotions do, where they latch onto someone that my rational side can say, "Oh honey, that's clearly never going to work even if it somehow gets off the ground," but my emotional side gets off on endlessly mooning around.

[tylik.livejournal.com]

That sounds painfully complicated.

I value straightforwardness pretty highly. It's generally my term of favor in place of honesty because I am utterly sick of people rules lawyering about honesty (not in the least because at some level that makes sense to me, and that's just no where I want to be.) Though I have often spent long periods of time waiting to figure out whether there was some kind of cultural aspect I was missing, or if the person was just dicking with me. (Sometimes followed by deciding that I didn't care, the situation was dicking with me and I was removing myself to more healthy climes, fuck it.) I really like to understand these things. Sometimes that's not really where answers lie.