Back to your regularly scheduled programming

I haven't been around much because I've been frustrated with people in general and it would do no good for me to take it out on others when I can better expend my energy doing things like taking walks and playing games.

I haven't really played any games in a while, and I decided that is a travesty, so I am going to make it a point to play more often. I am starting with games I know and love, and revisiting them after many years.

I am playing the Metroid Prime trilogy, and I will also be playing Legend of Mana with Owen. Now, regardless of the flak that game took for not really living up to the Mana universe, it is a good game, and I enjoy the fact that it is so free-associative in nature that you could, if you wanted to, relate it to the Mana universe of your childhood, or perceive it as something completely different. It's a self-contained, episodic story that could at any point branch out into any universe, if only your imagination allows for it.

I have too much baggage. I have baggage from school; I have baggage from friends; there are people who I am still so angry at, I can't speak to them. If I did, I'd rip them apart. Or else I'd just coldly tell them that they have no business speaking my name to anyone every again, and I won't speak theirs. I don't know which, honestly.

I am frustrated beyond words when someone approaches me on the pretense of "forgive and forget," only to demonstrate right off the bat that they have not changed at all in their attitudes towards the subject of conflict and would rather pretend the problem never happened, in doing so absolving themselves of all blame.

The problem with that is that I am incapable of forgetting. I retain my frustration until it is dealt with. I forgive by releasing the person of all social and emotional contracts, implied or explicit, with me. I let them go on their way so I can go mine, and I really would rather that arrangement be honored. If I have to face the person again, chances are they will have all but forgotten what the conflict is about, while I will remember very clearly and my annoyance will be further aggravated by the fact the other person doesn't. How can people forget conflicts that separated them in the first place? I don't understand.

And the amount of rationalizing, oh my fucking god. People rationalize their way out of responsibility like crazy. I don't just mean "I don't think it was wrong that I said/did that." That's the kind of statement I understand and respect, even if I don't agree. But the "Well, I wouldn't have said this/that if YOU hadn't said/done whatever and I have this or that sensitivity that YOU should have known about and accounted for and so it's YOUR fault that I said/did that."

No. No it isn't. I cannot control what other people do, feel or say. I can say insensitive things (although I rarely intend to, I am guilty of being a grade-A dickface on occasion), I can hold opinions that are annoying and inconvenient and just plain wrong, I can do things that are offensive or annoying, but when it comes to other people's actions and words, that's their responsibility, not mine. No single thing I could possibly say, no matter how hurtful, can make anyone else say or do something bad. There's no physics there. It's just not possible. This is not third grade and I have no patience for emotionally stunted adults who think that getting their feelings hurt justifies over-the-top, hateful abuse towards the nearest convenient target.

So when someone comes up to me and tells me that they want to start over, and I say fine, I'd love to start over, but first, I need an apology--and their answer is a long ramble trying to explain how my actions caused them to behave like a jackass, and how dare I ask for an apology after all this time, I should accept their request at face value and just assume that they're a better person, now...I tell them to go the fuck home and come back when they grow up and are ready to be straight about their actions. Well, I don't say it like that, I'm just ranting in a journal right now, but basically, that's my internal response.

I'm really not a jerk; I'm not saying that people's feelings are invalid. I'm not saying that there aren't instances where intense emotional distress can obscure a person's ability to make rational decisions. I am saying that if I call you a lazy, emotionally stunted leech, you have the right to feel hurt and think I'm mean, but if you then go accuse me of raping your mother years ago because it must have been me, I'm such a jerk, that lie is on you, not me. I am not responsible for the words that come out of your mouth just because I made one disparaging statement. And I will probably even admit later on, when I'm not as fired up, that what I said was insensitive and I shouldn't have said it. I will admit that, but I will not take responsibility for anything you said or did because of it.

(None of the above has ever happened to me with anyone; that is a made-up example for illustrative purposes, and has nothing to do with anyone else.)

If I "broke up" with you years ago, and you want to have a trusting connection with me now, don't approach me unless you're ready to apologize. Come at me with what you did wrong, don't try to explain away your actions or tell me you were a different person then, and especially don't try to justify your actions by something I said or did while in the same breath telling me that it's an old conflict that seems far away to you, now.

I'm not like that. I need resolution, not distance. No matter how far away a friendship-damaging event is (and it has to be pretty severe for me to actually wash my hands of someone), it will come back to me full-force if it's brought up. I will want to address the whole thing, as it used to be, right now. And if someone wants to bring it up simply to pass it off as dead and gone, then fuck them very much. Conflicts happen for a reason, and they don't get resolved by forgetting about them and are liable to crop up all over again if they aren't addressed. I hate feeling like there is this dark cloud of the past looming over a friendship that could descend at any given second. It's stupid. I can't ignore the elephant in the room. I won't.

So if you don't want to bring up old conflicts and if you aren't willing to diffuse those conflicts by offering an olive branch of "I'm so fucking sorry I was a jerk, I won't do it again, can we be friends now?", then I still want nothing to do with you. If I were ready to forgive and forget, I would be the one approaching with the olive branch of I'm sorry.

If you're serious about apologizing, and are willing to take my return apologies at face value, then I'll consider it. But it doesn't mean we're friends right away and it doesn't mean I'm suddenly not frustrated with you. It means I'll talk to you, again.

If you think that's unreasonable and that you have nothing to apologize for, good. Leave me alone, and I'll leave you alone, and you can feel free to forget all you want. But if you have this overwhelming need to get me to talk to you again, maybe you aren't as "over it" as you think you are.

I'm not over a lot of things. I don't think there's anything wrong with that; if you don't remember how much something hurt, it's hard to avoid it again in the future. But I'm also not stark raging mad about most baggage I carry, and I'm willing to revisit it under certain conditions (in fact, I wish I could, in a lot of cases, because really all I want to hear in most situations is a genuine apology and a pledge not to repeat the conflict).

But that's just me talking about myself. My actual, imminent frustration right now is that too many people I've broken ties with are too close to people I haven't. I hear about them all the time, and I'm very aware that my name comes up in conversation with these people. There's nothing I can (or should) do about this, but it makes me uncomfortable. I worry about becoming a point of contention between two other people. I worry about being talked about when I'm not there to defend myself. I worry that one day, someone I like very much will tell me that they just can't talk to me anymore because their other friend does not like or approve of me. That would make me sad.

None of that is likely to happen, and on the other hand, I don't terribly care what is said about me, so long as it is opinion (Luna is such a jerk) and not lies (Luna raped my mother and kicked my puppy). But it still bugs me, irrationally, from time to time. And recently I've just been avoiding people in general because I'm avoiding other people who I don't particularly get along with.

And sometimes I just want a chance to roast someone. And that's not good for anyone. So I'm playing video games, instead. It's good for the soul.