Lesbian Flower 🌺

are you ever like damn why is literally everyone else scared of openly communicating and being direct and truthful and honest

i'm kind of bored of subliminal messaging or vaguing or being anything but truthful and blunt and forthright. every miscommunication that has ever befallen me is a result of jumping to conclusions or not giving the benefit of the doubt or just not being open to hearing the other side. i am so bored. i just want communication. i want straightforwardness. i want here is why i'm bothered. here are the facts. here's what i think. now tell me your side. let's talk about this. let's start a dialogue. there's no reason for either of us to be guessing. languages were meticulously crafted over the years for a reason. so let's use them! let's talk! let's communicate!

btw you can be straightforward AND kind. i'm not sure why people seem to think it's one way or the other. either way a lot of people need to not only internalize this mentality but practice it bc i feel like so many people are willing to BURN BRIDGES ??? rather than just communicate and be honest. and some people don't communicate and end up fostering resentment and bitterness and dislike for the other person that cause them to snap out of nowhere and the other person is like ?? bc guess what. it was NEVER commuicated

the thing with, "if I stopped showing up/posting/participating in chat/going online, would anyone notice?"

is you have to realize that the only way for you to actually know this information is to ask.

if your goal is to see if anyone is going to reach out, which is not the same as someone noticing your disappearance or being worried about you, you have to be prepared for what happens if nobody reaches out. I am very serious about this. not every friend is going to reach out, and maybe nobody will. maybe they are trying to respect your space and privacy. maybe they think you are mad at them. maybe they are super busy. maybe they were too occupied with their own life to notice. you have literally no way of knowing unless you ask.

what do you plan on doing next if nobody reaches out? because it happened to me. I disappeared for weeks. rough stuff was happening. nobody reached out. I was crushed. I felt so alone. and then I moved on and became a stronger person with a better understanding that feeling bad in silence is the absolute worst way to try to get support from people.

if you want to be reassured by your friends, you have to talk to them. if your friends do not communicate with you in the way you want, you have to talk to them. do not play the disappearing game. nobody is telepathic. nobody can read your mind and guess what you want them to do if you disappear. you have to communicate or everyone fucking loses.

this post pretty much says it all BUT! for people not used to doing this - you have to not only talk to your friends, you have to be direct and clear! you have to say something like, "i need to talk about what's going on with me" or "I'm having a hard time right now and really need (xyz)".

it's crushing to reach out to your friends only to accidentally do it so vaguely or stoically that they don't catch on you're asking them for help. avoid doing that to yourself.

recently i tagged a friend to invite him to an exhibition and he declined, saying he was having a horrific mental health patch and that he was currently too mental to go anywhere & some details about mental health services that i won't go into. so, naturally, i said: hey that sucks ass, i've been there, is there anything i can do that will give you some reprieve? would you like distraction or a sympathetic ear or a box of crockery to smash or what? and he really, really helpfully told me what would be useful, which was distracting conversation when he's alone in the house. so, i thanked him for being able to tell me and for letting me help him.

which i think is the other side of stuff like this. it's not just "you gotta be able to communicate that you're doing bad and need help" it's also you need to be able to work out between you what kind of help you need" and you, the person being reached out to, need to reinforce, positively, that letting you know when shit's fucked is a good, non-burdensome thing for them to do. that you appreciate being reached out to and asked directly for help. it's like, it's a process. you have to keep affirming things. none of us is going to internalise anything from a single incident other than "wow, feels bad man".

asking "wait so what do you think I'm saying" mid-disagreement will replenish years of your life actually

I recently learned to use "What do you mean by this?" because someone I know expresses themselves in very unexpected ways that annoyed me for a while, until I eventually realized it was quite possible I was misinterpreting their intention.

I think everyone should practice saying "you know what, you're right. I'm sorry." it would make a lot of communication easier if that was a ready phrase people were comfortable saying.

Changing people's minds on major things is actually a very long and difficult process for both parties. I didn't actually believe that pedestrian-centric city design would be better for people that drive cars until I spent almost a year living without a car and watched hours of youtube videos explaining the issue to me. Turns out that traffic actually does go down and driving does become more pleasant if you make it harder to drive a car and easier to walk. I just straight-up refused to believe that for years. Because people just talked about it like it was obvious. But it wasn't. Because I had spent my whole life in a car-centric city going around in a car and also I was an English major in college who did not study urban planning. You can't expect me to change my entire mindset around transportation all at once. I did reach a eureka moment like two weeks ago but that was after like three years of getting exposed to these ideas periodically and living without a car for 11 months.

And yeah this post is about my big dumb animal brain accepting the science behind narrow roads and the evils of certain types of zoning laws, but it's also about stuff in general. If you don't know why someone isn't changing their mind on something, it's probably because the information they're getting hasn't reached a critical mass in their monkey brain yet. Whenever you hear stories about people changing their minds on things or leaving a certain ideology the story never goes "A person on the internet did a slam dunk on me and then I changed my mind."

It's usually a long process that happens over the course of months or years. Seeds planted here and there that coalesce eventually into a new thought or ideology over the course of years or snap together or send someone down a new path after a certain event. Same with me about pedestrian-centric cities. For me the tipping point was finding this video, which isn't necessarily super special or the best and the guy who runs the channel, in my opinion, isn't the most qualified or the most sympathetic towards every city in every situation, but it was the feather that tipped the scales in my brain to "Oh, wait. Maybe everything I thought I knew about how cities work is wrong actually." But that video alone didn't change my mind. With the amount of stuff and people that have gradually and gently been giving me information over the past couple years, something else was bound to eventually change my mind.

People on Tumblr yelling about abolishing the car, if anything, slowed down me changing my mind. Every time I saw a person saying that driving cars is stupid and that cars are bad I took a step back into my old way of thinking in defense. Because I grew up only ever using a car to get around. Rhetoric like that felt like a direct attack on my family, who I know to be loving people who care about other human beings and who drive cars literally everywhere.

And you might say, posts and videos like that aren't actually an attack on people that drive or have to drive. Okay then. Why are they phrased like that? Because that makes you feel good? Because you're angry? Alright, your anger at how it's currently impossible to get around if you don't own a car and how people who don't actually want to drive are being forced to drive is reasonable. And now I understand why it exists. I'm kind of angry too now that I get how this stuff works. However, is calling the people you're trying to convince stupid to their face and immediately bombarding them with your most radical ideas that might be completely detached from their reality and how they understand the world really the most productive way to channel your anger?

What about a guy with a knee problem that lives in rural Appalachia? Do you think he is gonna be convinced by your angry rants about bike lanes? No. He lives on a mountain that he can't climb or bike up because he's disabled and has only ever known getting around in a car. What about a person who overheats easily living in a suburb in the middle of the desert? Do you think she is inspired by your green lush pictures of trolleys running through parks in The Netherlands? No. If she leaves her house for too long without ice water she could literally die and you're going on about getting rid of, in her mind, the only thing that lets her go to the grocery store and not faint.

And again, this post is about my inability to comprehend walkable cities, but it's also about everything else you might ever want to convince someone of. The way you talk about things with your in-group that knows exactly what you're talking about should not be the same way you talk about that thing with people that you're genuinely trying to convince of something.

The way you talk about things with your in-group that knows exactly what you're talking about should not be the same way you talk about that thing with people that you're genuinely trying to convince of something.

hey, i've done a few courses in science communication, which basically just teaches you how to emotionally manipulate people into believing science, and OP is spot on here!! a few extra summary points i want to highlight because people tend to overlook them but they’re so, so important when you’re discussing things like this:

so how do you change a belief? here are a couple of tips! for proof of concept, i once used this method to convince my uncle climate change was real.

(terrifyingly, this is also exactly how QAnon works - they tell you to “do your own research” and then flood search engines with fake anecdotes. if someone’s trying to reset your beliefs, always check where the resources they’re giving you come from.)

that’s literally it. be kind to people, tell them stories, and give them a book or a video to go on with. don’t get impatient, and don’t get mad if it doesn’t work. the fact that  no one on the left knows how to do this is why we’re such a fucking trainwreck 99% of the time. also case in point why cancel culture literally creates bigots.

when you refuse to or are unable to articulate your own boundaries or communicate when you're upset, you basically outsource that work onto the people around you. the people around you now have two options: to walk on eggshells during their interactions with you in case they accidentally break a boundary they don't know is there and be extra attentive of your reactions so they can try and figure out what not to say or do. or to interact with you like normal and knowingly run the risk of upsetting you and having no way of knowing for sure or resolving the issue. both of these options suck

there is a third option, of course: people can stop talking to you. they can break up with you. they can seek companionship from other people who won't make interaction an exhausting guessing game they can never win. if you don't want that to happen, "no" and "can we do something else instead" and "i don't like when you call me that" and similar phrases need to become well-used members of your vernacular

would you believe i've already been accused of misogyny for this post

You can be direct in your communication and still be kind. I find a lot of people think it’s one or the other. It’s not. And direct communication is so much better for the long term health of your relationships.

If you tell someone directly "that behavior makes me uncomfortable, please stop doing that to/around me" and the person keeps doing it and anyone tries to excuse it with "they're autistic, they can't help that they're bad at social clues", know that it's bullshit. Once you have verbally articulated a boundary directly to someone's face it is no longer a complex social clue, it's a direct request. And you don't get to ignore direct communication of boundaries because you're autistic.

Important addition: There absolutely are autistic people who genuinely can't understand verbal communication/follow requests/participate in most social settings. But these autistics are usually not the ones walking around crossing people's boundaries repeatedly just to then explain that unfortunately they can't help doing that because they're autistic. So what I'm saying is that IF someone's social skills are good enough for them to interact verbally with people in normal social settings without assistance, they should ALSO be able to respect a clearly communicated boundary

"Actually the autistic way of communication is the superior one and allistics are so stupid for expecting me to-" No guys I'm sorry, but the road to effective communication is to actually listen, communicate, accommodate to the best of your ability and try to find a middle ground, not to develop separate superiority complexes

Being on the spectrum and also a technical writer is a special kind of aggravating because like 50% of all discussions and thinkpieces by neurodivergent authors about What Neurotypicals Really Mean begin with the unexamined assumption that there exists a single objectively correct interpretation of any given communicative act, which can be derived independently of the act's context and unmediated by any cultural lens, and that communication difficulties arise because some people are inherently capable of perceiving this meaning and some people inherently are not. Like, buddy, pal, my dude, I implore you to think carefully about what it would imply if this were actually true.

And assuming that any given interaction will always have a consistent and clearly delineated meaning that we're just not in on is a big part of like... why we have trouble in social situations anyway. Doubling down doesn't help!

To be fair, much of the time the conclusion points in the opposite direction and lands on the idea that it's neurodivergent people who have inherent access to this Platonic layer of objective meaning, and neurotypical people who are just dumb and crazy, which is a perfectly workable hypothesis as long as you carefully refuse to acknowledge that there exists more than one neurodivergent communication style.

(Taken to its natural conclusion, this of course leads to the idea that the neurotypical majority are right to treat people like shit for failing to perform the "correct" communication style, they're merely mistaken about which particular communication style that is. This is where the fun truly begins.)

I have thoughts about the whole feminist anti-interrupting thing. Like I agree, men do talk over people and it is disrespectful, but I also think there are cultures, specifically Jews, where talking over each other is actually a sign of being engaged in the conversation. It’s something I really struggle with in the south, because up in New York, even non-Jews participated in this cooperative conversation style, but down here, whenever I do it by accident, the whole convo stops and it gets called out and it’s a whole thing. Idk idk I feel like there’s different types of interruptive like there’s constructive interrupting where you add on to whatever is being said - helpful interrupting, and then there’s like interrupting where you just start saying something unrelated because you were done listening. I have ADHD so I’ve def done the latter too by accident, but I’m talking about being more accepting of the former.

I think a lot of the social mores leftists enforce around communication tend to be very white. Like Jews are not the only group of people that have distinct communication styles. Like the enforcement of turn-based communication, not raising your voice (not just in anger but also in humor or excitement), etc. it’s always interesting that the most pushback I get about how I communicate come from white people (mostly women actually, white men just give me patronizing looks because they don’t feel like they can call me out in same way). Like I’ve been teaching these workshops, and a few of them have been primarily black people, and I’ve noticed black people will also engage in cooperative interrupting (and I love it!). This isn’t a developed thought and I welcome feedback. Idk I think there should be space in leftist organizing for more diverse communication styles.

Here’s a source:

As a linguist: overlapping talk is not the same thing as an interruption!

An interruption is specifically intended to stop another person from speaking so you can take over. Other reasons that talk might overlap:

The norms around these kinds of overlaps vary -- by context (we all use more audible backchannel on the phone; an interview is not a sermon is not a casual chat), by culture, and yes, by gender, which is why it’s a feminist issue. But gender doesn’t exist in a vaccuum! Some reasons overlaps might be mis-interpreted as interruptions when they’re not intended to be:

Norms around conversation tend to be super white/Western/male/NT; even among linguists, the way we talk about analyzing talk usually presupposes discrete turns, with one person who “has the floor” and everyone else listening. It even gets coded into our technology -- I thing the account’s gone private, but someone recently tweeted, “For the sake of my wife’s family, Zoom needs to incorporate an ‘ashkenazi jewish’ checkbox” because the platform is programmed to try to identify a “main speaker” and auto-mute everyone else. Most of the progress on this front in linguistics has been pushed by Black women and Jewish women, or else we’d probably still be acting like Robert’s Rules represent the natural expression of human instincts.

And it’s very White Feminism to recognize how conversations styles have disparate impacts across gender lines without also recognizing other axes along which conversation styles vary, once that empower us as well as oppress us. Just because I feel interrupted doesn’t mean I am interrupted, and it definitely doesn’t mean I have the right to scream “EVERYBODY SHUT UP!!” until I’m the only one talking.

I don’t ... have a great way to end this? Just that it’s good to recognize competing needs in communication, and have some humility and intentionality about whose needs gets prioritized and how.

Another thing; as someone who expects overlap because of my cultural upbringing, when someone doesn't overlap me I just start looping and repeating myself because I'm waiting for them to interrupt and they're "politely" waiting for me to finish speaking.

Okay nobody ever put that into words but the looping is exactly what I do in therapy - I should tell my therapist about this so I don’t need to say the same thing over and over again lol

A field of study i think is vital to society but has absolutely no representation in formal education and also is bogged down by pseudoscience and misinformation: interpersonal communication

Don't let the communication or situation be bigger than you. Be bigger than it, because either way it will happen. Ignoring facts (including feelings or realities) don't make them go away it just means you're no longer in charge of what happens. The truth shows itself anyway, either now incrementally under your control or further down the line catastrophically.

If you don't know how to approach it, remember that it's about just asking them how they feel or if they've thought about it, sussing out whether they're willing to talk about (maybe just ask) and then stating how you feel about things (confused, uncertain, unsure, worried) and then reassure them that you accept and love them and that yet there is a problem to discuss here. (So it's not at odds with each other).

The only way to have a full and productive conversation is to approach it with compassion and patience. Gentleness and patience. There's not just one way to think about things, every Convo doesn't have to be about announcing the structure with which you view the world and demanding agreement.

And remember a part of emotional honesty with someone also means applying it during good times or moments (which cannot be returned or replicated so do it when you can!!) So like compliment and appreciate them the moment you feel it, acknowledge their effort and energy when you see it bc that's compassionate but it's also just a recognition of their worth.

And recognition of someone's effort in a moment doesn't tell you anything about how worthy they are or whether they're right or wrong about everything or whether they can make mistakes later or whether you're upset at them or etc etc etc. It's just its own moment that has no bearing on other moments. Remember that, and give generously what they deserve to hear and should hear.

And remember it's about sincerity and appropriate context as well, like don't say it when it's out of touch or may seem manipulative, say it when they're receptive to hearing it. Be genuine too. Make sure all your compliments are unique and sincere.

It's also about consent so when it comes to divulging trauma and heavy things, ask before putting that emotional weight/burden on them. Not everyone is in the headspace, position, or mood to handle and absorb all that information or pain. Remember that. Empathy takes work.

Also the reason emotional conversations are so important is because trust and intimacy can't be faked, replaced, or adopted. If you want something to be real, your connection, then you must make sure that you let the connection be natural, honest and patient. Not forced and not quick. But real.

how to stop isolating yourself?? the answer is give up on code and hidden messages. love fully and loudly and truthfully and always. be deliberate. be open. feel everything. but won’t it be hard? won’t it hurt? yes!!!! yes.

normalize proper communication (boundaries, when something is uncomfortable, working through issues, etc.) in non-romantic relationships as well. communication is important in every type of relationship, not just romantic.