irl friend who is really fun and cool sometimes, but who i purposefully keep at a distance because i've heard multiple stories of her absolutely losing it at people out of nowhere, including stories told to me by her herself: "hey hannah, you're good with computer stuff. i was wondering if you could help me track down contact info for my estranged brother"

nope

me: "you don't owe me any explanation or information, but i don't feel comfortable doing something like that without any context, sorry. there are a lot of reasons why estrangement might happen or contact info might be lost, but i don't know him or his situation and don't want to inadvertently bug someone who might not want to be found for some reason"

her: "okay, i understand and respect your decision"

me: "have you tried doing [X] or [Y]? you said once he has a wife that you're still in contact with, right?"

her: "GOD, hannah, of course i tried [X] and [Y]! you really think i'm so stupid that i wouldn't have tried that before asking you?"

"......Yes."

me: "it's fine to tell me if my advice isn't helpful because it's something you've already tried or something that wouldn't work for the situation, but please don't be rude about it; i don't appreciate being spoken to like that"

her: "ACTUALLY, it's YOU who was rude for assuming i was too incompetent to think of those really obvious solutions on my own, and also for assuming that i want to stalk my brother and don't have valid reasons for wanting to find him. you're really showing your true colors and revealing a lot about how you really think of me. this is incredibly hurtful"

me:

DARVO in action. i hope she's an ex friend.

with a side note of "ohhhhhhh my god THIS is what it was like to be a family member dealing with me when was 19 years old"

Jesus. this is why I barely have any friends. some people just are weird like that

ehhhh i think she'd be an ex-friend if i'd been blindsided by this, but i knew she was prone to pulling this kind of behavior. i'm not going to excuse it or put up with it, but at the same time, i feel like i understand it

it feels a little tangentially related to the navel-gazing i was doing in this plurk

if a friend/acquaintance/"""peer""" says "hey i don't like/appreciate thing you did/said, don't do/say that to me", my first impulse is "oh wow okay i had no idea, i certainly didn't mean to come off that way, let's talk about it for three hours straight so that we can fully understand each other's perspectives and prevent this from ever happening again"

(the malcolm bright approach, if you will)

but when family members say "hey don't do the thing", it's an active struggle not to be like "actually, it is YOU that is wrong, let me spend three hours straight trying to convince you that it's ALL YOUR FAULT and i am BLAMELESS"

method #1 isn't always great, method #2 is always shit, but i felt a lot of that coming from her

she's a very casual friend, i have zero investment in making her like or trust me, ultimately i feel like jumping straight to "a-HA, this is PROOF that you secretly think all these awful things about me, you have slipped up and revealed your true self and i have masterfully caught you in the act" has a lot more to do with her own issues than with me

it's incredibly frustrating but at the same time, not upsetting in the way it would be if i were taking it personally; i'm literally going to just sit here and keep typing "i do not think [x thing you say this is proof of] at you. i did not say and i do not think [x way that you're interpreting my words]" until the cows come home

(it's still ongoing, lmao)

no clue if it's going to actually get through to her, but at the same time, i do want those words out there!

the Malcolm.Bright approach I'm ded 😆

literally though

someone calls me out on something i did that upset them: "cool thanks for letting me know, don't mind if i casually obsess about it until we fix it. let's go over it over and over and over and over again"

(again: fully aware that this is not always the appropriate approach, and it's on me to recognize those times and rein it the fuck in)

i call someone else out on something they did and they fucking explode: "oooooh, yo'ure being toxic at me! how fascinating. i want to put you under a microscope and study you like a bug"

(also not always the appropriate approach, often not appreciated when someone is up in their feelings and acting like an ass because of it)

legit tho

it's very "my childhood coping mechanism was obsessively analyzing my emotionally volatile family members, so that i could understand them and therefore predict them"

"obsessively analyzing the behavior of people who are just trying to Exist and deal with their own shit adjacent to you is a shitty and invasive thing to do, but if you're going to come to my doorstep and dump your crap there, then damn straight i'm going to do my thing"

well you come by it honestly then

not my business unless you make it my business, tbh

yep!

I guess immediately seeing the worst come out saved you some time

verified your initial idea was correct

yeah, i've only known her for a couple months and knew of her for a couple years; she was "friend-of-a-friend who i never actually met but who multiple people had alarming stories about" for a while

the first time i met her in person, it was prefaced with "okay so she's been doing better lately, but just so you know, [X] who's going to be at this party is that [X]"

she's also genuinely fun and great to be around when she isn't [gestures at everything above], but tbh that always seems to be the case with the (thankfully very few) people i've known who are like this

but man, it's tough, because she's also the sort of person who has a million and one stories about all the people throughout her life who have viciously harmed and insulted and abused and betrayed her

and like

it feels so shitty to disbelieve that in any way; i do not want to be the sort of person who hears a story of pain and goes "hmmm, sounds sus"

and i absolutely believe that she has been badly hurt by people in her life; i don't think anyone gets like this through anything but bone-deep emotional trauma

but. if you have a very small or insular circle, and "everyone in my life" essentially means your culty church group or your codependent family or your gossipy small town or your toxic friend group

then yeah, "everyone in my life has hurt me" makes sense

but if you're socially widespread and gregarious and you have a billion work friend groups from multiple past jobs + your childhood friend group + your college friends + your gaming friends + your neighborhood friends + your internet friends + your drinking buddy friends, all fairly separate and disparate

and all of these people all "massively and cruelly betray you out of nowhere"

HMMMMM, SOUNDS SUS

i don't think she's lying and making shit up wholecloth, i think she has a rock-bottom definition of "massive personal betrayal" that apparently includes speaking up against her words or behavior in any way (or at least speaking up against her words and behavior when she's upset and emotional)

idfk i'm just spitballing, but i do appreciate the venting space

you know what they say tho: you run into an asshole in the morning and you ran into an asshole. You run into assholes all day and you're the asshole. And there are nicer ways to say it but that's the thing.

mmmmmmmmhm

it just feels (likely by design, either consciously or unconsciously) so much harder to say/think that when the language is "they hurt me and abused me" instead of "they were assholes"

Yeah and I agree that the choice of language is for that purpose.

So it feels unseemly to put it back on her.

Because she was ~abused~. By (likely) their dissenting opinion.

I mean, like you said, there probably WAS something bad at some point.

But not. Like. From EVERYONE.

i don't think she's incapable of self-reflection or self-criticism (as in clear-eyed self-criticism, not emotional self-harm/self-hatred), and i've heard her say things that i thought showed genuine insight into her past behavior and a desire for self-improvement

but man is it ever easier to be like that when everything's good and neutral than when you're already upset and on a hair-trigger

(source: personal experience )

magicom SORRY internet keeps cutting out and plurk isn't updatiing - yeah, exactly

it's such loaded language to use, because of fucking course we should believe abuse victims

dismissing or disbelieving someone who confides to you about abuse is sickening. the thought of being disbelieved if you're vulnerable to someone in that way is sickening

but if you say "[x] gravely insulted me out of nowhere and for no reason, i was incredibly hurt, they were terrible to me", and then two weeks later i say "please don't talk like that to me, it's uncalled for" and your response is "you have gravely insulted me out of nowhere, for no reason, and i'm incredibly hurt that you're being so terrible to me".......

of course i'm going to wonder if maybe all [x] did was ask you not to be rude, or ask you a question you thought was insultingly obvious, or something else similarly minor

Exactly; it becomes a pattern of behaviour.

and like, i don't think she's an awful terrible badwrong person. i don't feel abused or even particularly wronged by her. being mildly rude and then being over-the-top reactive when told "please don't be rude to me over this, i don't deserve that" is not the worst sin in the world, and of all the stories i've heard about her treating people poorly, it's

never been anything more than lashing out in anger; to my knowledge, she's never threatened anyone, physically assaulted anyone, or attempted to screw over any aspect of a person's life

Still Sucks Tho

Still Not Good Behavior

Yeah man a person can have some toxic behaviours and not be a terribad awful person but it's still not great.

It sounds like a good way to be....a pretty unhappy and lonely person, a lot of the time.

I have known people like that, oof.

I sent this Monday night, she went radio silent for all of yesterday, and then today she texted me totally amicably about something completely different; I'm going to be an optimist and decide to take that as a good sign

greatest hits of the misassigned motives were me saying "we've talked about mental health before" after i'd previously also said "we've talked about psychology a lot before"

(we've talked about both)

and she said "i'm guessing you made the switch from saying 'psychology' to 'mental health' as a way to imply that you think i'm crazy, but it's not mentally ill of me to call out your poor treatment of me or to tell you i'm hurt that you think i'm stupiid" etc etc etc

that whole conversation was a ride

??????????? holy shit

.......

like i can see the logic if you're used to having to deduce the secret motives behind people's words

my aunt is the exact same way because she grew up with the most passive-aggressive person alive as a mother, and it's both very nervewracking for her and also exhausting for anyone who's just trying to be straightforward with her (aka most people)

currently having a completely normal text conversation (initiated by her) about biking jackets. i think we're... good...???