Re:Bail – Get out of your plans, guilt free
by danShumway on Monday February 10, 2020 @03:38PM
(#22293006)
> because I can relate to wanting to use an app like this.
Sure, you can relate from the perspective of someone who's said they had crippling anxiety that needed to be dealt with. With respect, you are not the best person to evaluate whether everyone else's anxieties are in the same league as yours. You are coming at this from the perspective that social anxiety is a problem that needs to be solved. In some cases, I agree. In other cases, I don't.
The part of this that you don't understand is not what it feels like to be anxious. The part you don't understand is what it feels like to feel OK about feeling anxious -- that there are people in this position that don't want or need to be changed. You don't understand their perspective.
In your very first comment, you write:
> I can't imagine being friends with someone who is this incapable of communicating.
That sentence is your bubble. I can trivially imagine being friends with someone like that. And more to the point, I can imagine enjoying being friends with that person. I have intimate experience with being friends with people in this category, and I like nearly all of them.
Your take on my email example emphasizes one specific part of friendship: being vulnerable. But in your focus on that particular element, you are missing the broader principle that makes me value this particular friendship so much: that my friend and I genuinely like each other's personalities, warts and all. When we built systems to accommodate each other, we were not sharing our fears -- we were expressing to each other that we were worth accommodating.
Of course, I try to improve my personality when possible. But my relationship with myself is not hostile. There are vulnerabilities and fears I have that I am OK with having, because they are the natural consequences of parts of my personality that I consider to be strengths. When my friends accommodate them, it doesn't make me feel robotic or weaken those relationships. It just makes me feel like my friends care about me.
Sure, you can relate from the perspective of someone who's said they had crippling anxiety that needed to be dealt with. With respect, you are not the best person to evaluate whether everyone else's anxieties are in the same league as yours. You are coming at this from the perspective that social anxiety is a problem that needs to be solved. In some cases, I agree. In other cases, I don't.
The part of this that you don't understand is not what it feels like to be anxious. The part you don't understand is what it feels like to feel OK about feeling anxious -- that there are people in this position that don't want or need to be changed. You don't understand their perspective.
In your very first comment, you write:
> I can't imagine being friends with someone who is this incapable of communicating.
That sentence is your bubble. I can trivially imagine being friends with someone like that. And more to the point, I can imagine enjoying being friends with that person. I have intimate experience with being friends with people in this category, and I like nearly all of them.
Your take on my email example emphasizes one specific part of friendship: being vulnerable. But in your focus on that particular element, you are missing the broader principle that makes me value this particular friendship so much: that my friend and I genuinely like each other's personalities, warts and all. When we built systems to accommodate each other, we were not sharing our fears -- we were expressing to each other that we were worth accommodating.
Of course, I try to improve my personality when possible. But my relationship with myself is not hostile. There are vulnerabilities and fears I have that I am OK with having, because they are the natural consequences of parts of my personality that I consider to be strengths. When my friends accommodate them, it doesn't make me feel robotic or weaken those relationships. It just makes me feel like my friends care about me.