Leaderboard

So, after a long hiatus (Latin for gap, and not for what it sounds like), I think it's time I resumed using this thing. For a long time, I think I was put off by the fact that I have friends. That is, it felt like writing here was a performance, for people I already knew would approve. Not much challenge in that, and because I wanted them to continue to approve, even some incentive to be circumspect, to include only the good stuff. When approval starts to be an issue, you get dissociation. Some things are okay to talk about, and the things that aren't okay are not only not talked about, they're positively shunned. You get repression. You get denial. You get f**cked. Because it's all you. Or, in this case, to prevent this from getting too general and thereby allowing me to escape its specificity, it's all me. I don't get to not be the parts I don't like. For that matter, it's probably only part of me that doesn't like the parts I don't like. Why does one part get to discriminate against the others, or why would they get to form cliques that exclude the awkward or the innocent? That's just bullying, introjected (taken in as a behavior after being observed in others) to try to keep it from happening in the outside world. I don't have to relate to myself as a bully towards his victims. But the solution I would generally recommend in the real world, kicking the bully's @$$, isn't viable here, either, because it's still me. To work internally, I have to rehabilitate the bully the hard way. I have to find out the reasons why he feels he has to behave that way; I have to make it so that those reasons no longer apply, and then I have to convince him to change the behavior he no longer needs. So, a step along the way: making the conflict visible.