Thread by @AlexandraErin

Going to preface this thread that I'm not speaking as a wise woman from atop the mountain of wisdom but as someone working through how and why she responds so badly to things so often. Also turning off replies for a very specific reason, which I'll get to in the next tweet.

The reason replies are turned off is because there are easily half a dozen people who would read some of these tweets and respond, for reasons that undoubtedly make sense to them, with apologies and encouragement to things that don't really call for them.

And one of the things that spikes my anxiety in the specific way that leaves me feeling brittle and defensive is when people are expressing emotions at me that I don't know what to do with.

Anyway.

The thing I want to say here is: I feel like while Twitter does bring out the worst in a lot of us (US! See first tweet, please), I think the tendency to attribute a lack of nuance and good faith to the character limit... well, I was going to say it lets us off the hook.

If you read a tweet that runs up against the current character limit -- in English, at least -- you will find that while it might feel frustratingly short when you're trying to unpack a complicated idea, it's actually a fairly significant chunk of words, in terms of speech?

And while it's true that the bad faith replies you receive to a tweet will tend to include stuff that depends on things you couldn't fit into the tweet... it will also include stuff that disregards what you did fit in.

And as somebody who has, at times, been absolutely obsessed with trying to hedge off bad-faith replies with anticipatory wording and pre-clarifications and disclaimers... I feel confident that it's a fool's errand.

You know the school of social media joke that goes something like,

"me: I love orange juice.

reply: WHAT ABOUT APPLE JUICE?

reply: This is pomegranate erasure.

reply: MURDER VICTIMS CAN'T EVEN DRINK ORANGE JUICE, DID YOU THINK ABOUT THAT? YOU JUST MURDERED THEM AGAIN."

The thing is, if you experienced a scenario like that but you had access to a time machine that let you go back and change your message... you could incorporate the specific objections you received, and you'd still get similar objections from at least some of the same people.

Because. It's bad faith. I'm the person who coined the phrase "You can't deny ammo to a munitions factory." and it's taken me this long to fully appreciate how much that applies to everyday discourse with strangers.

If you're not familiar with the phrase "Bitch Eating Crackers", it's when you've elevated someone in your mind to a level of nemesishood where whatever they're doing, no matter how innocuous, is bad because of who is the one doing it.

"Look at that bitch, eating crackers."

The thing is that the way I've understood this phrase... I used the phrase "nemesishood" in my explanation of it, but the thing is, the identity of Cracker-Eating Bitch is flexible and fungible. It's not a person. It's a position that exists at a point within your gaze.

And if you find yourself in a position where people are jumping up your ass on Twitter while as far as you can tell you're just minding your business and eating crackers... you might have fallen within that position in someone else's sight.

I've RTed this tweet a couple of times in the last few days.

The thing is, I became completely addicted to internet chatrooms about five seconds after I learned they existed, and this tweet right here explains why and how that happened.

https://twitter.com/nut_fire/status/1467150781665234949

I am an uncommonly fast and accurate typist. This is not bragging; I have much cooler things to brag about. But if I had money to bet to some kind of magical arbiter, I would confidently bet any amount that I am a faster typist than the first hundred people who read this tweet.

I was not as good at typing in high school as I am today, but I was still way ahead of the curve. Which meant that in a text-based environment with few rules and little to no moderation, I could dominate any conversation. Which meant I could control it.

I had a mother... who had very particular ideas about how things should be done, and how they should be. And while she was a gifted educator in many ways, there were a number of things she felt it was important that children know, but she had little notion of how to impart them.

I had a bit of an emotional breakdown/breakthrough this weekend while I was prepping the prompts for the first month of my writing challenge, #NiNoBilMa. The prompt was "colors", as in "write about a color", but I decided to try writing about the concept of color as a whole.

And so I started writing the story of how I went from a child who loved wearing bright colors to a teen and twenty something who wore all black (or heavily black monochromatic) outfits back to embracing the rainbow in my late thirties onward, so far.

And the story involves a Neil Gaiman quote, that he said, I think in particular about why he always wore the same (black) shirts everywhere, and his answer was, "They go well with anything. Well, anything black."

I don't know exactly how old I was when I read this, but I felt a profound sense of relief when it clicked what he was saying: if you don't wear color, you never have to figure out which colors match.

So, I was writing this this story, and the exercise I was doing, the point was to start writing from a prompt and then just keep writing no matter what. I started with the Neil Gaiman bit because that was strongest in my head, and then worked my way backwards in time from that.

Because having said how much relief I felt when I caught his drift, I had to explain what the relief was about, and what it was about was cutting off, forever and ever, all possibility of a recurrence of an argument I'd been having with my mother for as long as I could remember.

And the point of this exercise, again, was to start write and keep writing, to just write. Not to edit or revise or rethink on the fly. But I found myself worrying: is this my portrayal of my mother fair to her? Can a story that involves a dead woman be entirely mine to tell?

The thing is... the argument, it only could have happened in full-blown fashion two or three times, and I think it's more likely to be two times than three. The actual circumstances that could spawn it were basically limited to mid-to-upper elementary school holiday programs.

her: Didn't I tell you to get dressed for the concert?

me: Yes. I did!

her: You can't wear that.

me: Why not?

her: It doesn't match.

me: How?

her: The colors don't match.

me: In what way?

her: By. Not. Matching. That blue? That gray? You think they match?

me: ...yes?

her: Go change.

me: Okay, but you said no jeans and that's the only other thing I have left that's clean?

her: I know I told you to make sure you have a clean outfit ready for the concert. I told you on the weekend. Why didn't you listen?

me: I did? I'm wearing it?

And as I wrote a version of that dialogue in my writing exercise, I found myself eager to explain that she wasn't some overbearing ogre who stifled my creativity at every turn. Most of the time she didn't care what I was wearing, beyond scope of hygiene and public decency.

And that as an adult I understand that in these few specific cases where this clash happened, it was a combination of:

1. An event where there'd be a potentially judgmental audience of parents and teachers.
2. Where people would be taking pictures.
and
3. There was a time crunch

And the possibility that her own family would be there and/or would see the pictures was no doubt weighing on her mind, because this stuff is generational.

But to quote something I first heard in another formative goth influence of my youth: "Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children."

This experience, as a child, of being blamed by my mother for following her instructions but to have apparently done so imperfectly due to a secret layer of instruction I didn't understand and she couldn't explain... it affected me.

Deeply.

And not having a clear view at the time of the priorities that had affected her behavior on the nights when the argument erupted, I reacted to it as something that might unpredictably rear its head at any time. I hated picking clothes. Hated getting dressed.

And while I found myself disclaiming, in an ultimately abandoned writing exercise, that *this* argument only really happened probably twice... the fact is, it was representative of a broader trend.

That is, the range of subjects that she could not explain to me and didn't seem to understand needed to be explained was not limited to specific combinations of shades of clothing were acceptable for me to wear to a school concert.

But I didn't really see the pattern at the time, even while I was affected by it. I felt it. I felt like I had no say over my own life, my own reality.

I had a teacher who, owing to the small size of my school, was my main teacher for two years in a row, 5th and 6th grade.

This teacher was actively abusive to me. Singled me out for humiliation on the basis of disability accommodations. Lost my assignments or failed to record the grade before she handed them back, then insisted I must not have turned it in or she would have recorded the grade.

And when I told my mother that my teacher was lying... she slapped me across the face so hard my glasses flew across the room and hit the wall. (Luckily, unbroken.)

And then later she took all the graded homework I had lying around my room and went through it until she found one of the contested assignments and then, when *she* had proven it to herself, she believed... well, she believed herself.

I could not believe how quickly she turned around and when I tried to talk about it, she shut me down. When I said she had slapped me, she denied it. When I said that she'd knocked my glasses off, she said that she had taken them off me so I wouldn't break them, I was so upset.

And in the end I gave up and gave in. I dropped it, because she was on my side, or at least against my teacher, and I greatly preferred that.

And at the same time that this was happening... well, the time when one's peers start emulating teenagers can be a *very* hard time, socially, for an isolated queer kid. It was rough.

And a few years later... our school got wired for internet, and a bit after that, we got dial-up at home. Suddenly I could connect to people who didn't know I was a weird loser, people who thought the stuff that made me a weird loser to my former friends were actually cool.

And anybody in a chatroom who didn't like me... anybody I didn't like... I could talk circles around them. I could bury them in arguments to the point that it didn't matter if they were good or bad, though of course I didn't think any of them were bad, per se.

The thing about the internet is that nobody on it was my teacher or my mother. Nobody on it was in a position where they could win an argument by saying "Because I say so." or punish me for showing them where in the science textbook I found my answer that their key said was wrong

And that was so addictive. I could set the terms of a conversation. I could tell my own story. I could be the authority, the sole authority, on myself.

Glasses story aside, I don't think my mother was much of a gaslighter, primarily. But she was one of a few authority figures in my young life -- and the most central one -- who absolutely refused to let me explain myself, even when they demanded it.

https://twitter.com/nut_fire/status/1467150781665234949

And "an argumentative person desperate to prove your version of events bc you're used to being dismissed in an unfair power structure" is... that's them strumming my pain with their fingers right there, is what that is. That's me to an uncomfortably well-fitting T.

And while I have had the self-awareness to recognize that description as one that would fit me, I don't think I would have connected it to my mother if I hadn't read that tweet and then tried to tell a story about my shifting fashion sense, regarding colors.

It wasn't that I had never told anyone this story before. I've been telling the story of how I started wearing all black for years, but always focused on the shift to rather than the one from, with the focus on Neil as the direct inspiration.

How I started shifting back to colors... that I knew was about my mother. She was dying, you see. If you've been following me for a long time, you know she was dying for a long time.

And if I showed up wearing anything with a splash of color, it made her happy.

So, I started splashing more and more, and eventually my outfits were more splash than pool and my aesthetic had shifted from Lydia Deetz to Kefka Palazzo.

Before she died (she was dying for a long time), my mother wrote a last message to me, and I read it with a lot of trepidation. The pain, loss, and confusion of her long decline had not made her less critical, more prone to give explanations or listen to them, or kinder.

I didn't want to read it because at that point the last message I had received from her was an uncritical expression of love and I thought, "What if I read this and I lose that?"

What got me to read it was the realization that at the point that I wasn't reading it for fear it would be full of criticism, blame, backhanded compliments, or insinuations of failure... well, that was already now my last memory of her.

So I could leave it unread and leave that for sure as the status quo, or read it and have a chance -- a good chance -- that it would be something more loving.

And so I read it, and it was.

And one of the things she mentioned in it was how much she had loved watching me shed my sullen goth teenage aesthetic and grow into my adult fashion (these are my words, not hers, to be clear.)

And she talked about how she'd loved having such a bright and colorful child and it had been so painful to watch my love of color die and be replaced with the blank, bleak uniformity of black clothing (still my words, not hers).

And at the time that I read that, all I thought was: well, I'm glad I did that for her. At a base level I hadn't minded dressing for her approval when no one was making me do it. My body is a house I never leave so I'm the person least affected by what color siding I slap on it.

But trying to write about this shift from having been a rainbow child to a monochrome teen and twenty something to a cosmic wizard in my thirties and forties... in the context of having read that tweet... everything
clicked into place in a new light, all at once.

And if this thread that is the equivalent of ugly crying in a public restroom at midnight, on Twitter, circulates widely enough then I'm sure there will be people QTing or screenshotting it with "This chick's mom yelled at her twice about her clothes and it traumatized her?"

And the thing is... I'm not going to try to quantify my mother on a scale of Absolute Abusiveness for the edification of the internet. I'm not here to say that she wasn't that bad or that she was that bad. That's so far beside the point.

My point here is that I have been The People Who Argue About Everything On The Internet. I was it in chatrooms where the concept of character limits was different and on Livejournal where the concept of a limit barely applied (but I managed to find it anyway, LOL.)

But at the same time that I was powerfully psychologically invested in "winning" arguments, I was just about as equally motivated to dissect and repair misunderstandings and gaps in communication, for all the same reasons.

When I could see two strangers talking past each other or somebody struggling to be heard and understood, I wanted to help because I could empathize. And I wanted to figure out how to convey ideas clearly out of a desire to never be misunderstood myself.

And on the basis of all of this... I can tell you that "280 characters" aren't the reason people talk past each other on here.

People talk past each other, by and large, when they're not interested in talking to each other. It's a choice that's being made.

And it might not be (and probably isn't) a choice in the sense of waking up in the morning and deciding, "I think I will talk past people on purpose." It's a vaguer and more general choice, one likely being made for reasons that are compelling without being good.

I know this thread is a lot, and that it's all over the place, and the different parts of it probably don't hang together as well as I think they do, and that's given that I've described this thread as the equivalent of ugly crying in public.

I guess I did preface this at the beginning with "this is me working through my stuff about why I react so badly to little things online" so any larger points I might manage to glancingly make about discourse in general are just kind of a bonus.

But there are thoughts I started to express without finishing, like the last sentence here:

I was going to say that this lets us off the hook... but I'm not sure we should be on the hook, exactly.

https://twitter.com/AlexandraErin/status/1468063589781102594

To be clear: I am responsible for everything I've ever tweeted, everything I said in a chatroom or on Livejournal or wherever. But the idea of assigning blame for the impulses, the tendencies, the whatevers behind it... that doesn't feel like a useful lens.

Twitter... Twitter is far from blameless. But you know the saying "You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink."?

You cannot make someone else understand you. You cannot explain yourself to anyone who will not extend you understanding.

Twitter's sin in all of this is in encouraging us to react: to engage quickly and stay engaged, so that we're firing off our first (worst) reactions over and over again. It rewards people who fish for that behavior and people who engage in it.

But the "nuance" problem didn't go away when they went from 140 characters to 280 characters and I doubt it would disappear if they doubled it again, or quadrupled it, or lifted it.

Because it also happened on Tumblr, and it happened on Livejournal in the comments of communities that had large populations of strangers interacting freely with each other in close to real time.

Anyway, all that stuff about my mother... it was meant to be an explanation of how and why I found myself using the internet as a pressure release valve for my need to explain and defend myself, which is how I became an argumentative jerk as a kid and a defensive jerk as an adult

But I think I talked myself around to where I see how it all comes to bear more directly: the people who you think are missing your point because "280 characters don't allow for nuance" aren't missing your point at all. They're shooting past your point to hit you.

You can have actual conversations in media that allow fewer than 140 characters at a time. I've had them. Heck, Twitter's original limit was based around the technical constraints of text messages.

And while there's certainly room for misunderstanding in texting... people have been having successful communications through texting since longer than phones had any good way to type.

You know, I came upstairs well over an hour ago intending to do some five-minute writing sprints on light subjects and then go to bed before midnight for once.

That, uh, didn't happen.

So, I'm going to make three more points and then sign off for the night.

One, I think part of the reason we tend to think "Oh, it's the character limit, not allowing for nuance" is that it's *appealing* to think that it would be possible to express oneself so perfectly as to be unassailable, and if one can't, some obstacle must be in the way.

But that's a vain fantasy, in both major senses of the word vain: excessively self-aggrandizing and utterly futile. Nothing is indisputable. No logic is airtight to anyone who does not consent to recognizing it.

Two, Twitter has a long history of trying to find ways to throw people who wouldn't otherwise be interacting (often for self-defense on one side) together under the idea that it would "improve the conversation".

I strongly suspect they know this worsens it, and count on it.

Civil discourse does not drive engagement the way raging trashfires do, and if one wishes to capitalize on that without being known as the raging trashfire site, one must find a way to encourage trashfires while being seen to fight them.

And my third point... identifying the origin of my argumentative/defensive impulses doesn't automagically end them, to say nothing of all the closely related baggage I've been carrying around.

But I am hopeful it will help me do better.