[378] Tone Deaf

This has to start somewhere.

My voice has changed. Because I can't figure out how to explain it, I'm just going to run with examples.

A few short years ago, I would have been the guy yelling “you deluded fucking crazy Christian fucks!” at the Mormons I've sat and talked to for several hours on several different occasions at this point. I wouldn't have capitalized Christian because...passive aggressive shows of disrespect work? I would have never heard one of the most hilarious and telling things I've ever heard out of a believer. “If I wasn't a Mormon, I think I'd definitely go for the Muslim thing.” What a missed opportunity that would have been.

I've been told by Rin that I handle or engage with conflict in a more understanding or empathetic way. Most of my life has been a policy of no-holds-bar, it doesn't matter what you think, here let me lay it out for you kind of posturing. There are certainly limits to self-awareness, and while I can certainly see that voice in my old writing and agree there's been a switch, at the time, I genuinely believed in how I was saying something. At least my problems were relegated to the level of interpersonal discussions.

As striking as the tone difference is, I'm hit with a demoralizing wave concerning how much hasn't changed. The same shit I complain about your relationship, politics, or awareness of responsibility all play out exactly as the first time they pissed me off. It's the idea that they'll never get better. That me bitching, me pointing it out, me trying to get a different dialogue about it, literally means nothing. Well, except to me. I can sit high-minded and wise for having the balls to put it out there. You know, lonely and self-satisfied. It's where we all aspire to be, right? Anyone? Hello...?

I lament not getting feedback because I used to. I used to get nearly everything I wrote commented on. It turned into a discussion. I got to be called out or questioned. I don't know what to say about the idea that for all the people commenting and discussing, they're mostly people I don't talk to anymore. One or more fights, also semi-chronicled in blog form, picking apart the seems of what I thought I liked and could trust in my relationships. Best friends, business partners, general co-collaborators in some endeavor are now all but strangers.

And I mean, I'm 25, for a little while longer anyway. We're talking about 5 or 6 years. Hundreds of people. Just blips. Just remembered through their comments. It's not like I'm the last one alive of my generation or something. But huge swaths of influence, identity, and engagement is “past” where I'm supposed to conceive of myself today.

I'm terribly interested in the idea of “well, I don't feel different.” I can actually read, in too many details, how I am different, and still say that I pretty much still believed what I was saying. I still think religious types are deluded. I still think most of your relationships are a joke or unhealthy. I think the biggest change is that I just don't think I can really do anything about it besides talk. Yet when you feel amazingly redundant but no less relevant, you want to air on the side of shutting the fuck up.

It's the problems and drama that focus you. I don't like the idea of “getting specific” when it comes to thinking, or thinking about how to think, or how to talk. We so easily conceive of people being smart or motivated because they simply decided on one thing over another. What a shit way to go about conceiving of people.

Why do I still have some of the same friends before, during, and now after college? There must be independent personality traits or a kind of awareness that allows for those friends to have seen through too many angsty fuck yous, no? A mutual pursuit of truth perhaps? A respect for what's put out there, even if the phrasing needs work. Inevitably, my personality, or writing style or what have you, seems to draw very stark lines between who I get along with and why. I like this very much, but what I think it says about people I don't get along with feels resoundingly disturbing.

My goal has always been to, at the very least, speak to what I think is fucked. The “same old story” cliches and responses kinda suck my will to live. Over time, the goal has sort of morphed and been added to. To try and account for why our discourse, or sometimes lives, break down into these cliches. Try to get people to use their voice. Try to inform a perspective so it can be a hot little ball of anger and still manage to remain constructive. That, or at least refrain from being destructive.

The point is that there's always something to say as long as it remains fucked. You're fucked. I'm fucked. Stop being afraid of it and join in. Engage and get sad, or angry. Feel as defeated as I am and maybe we'll flirt with empathy and understanding. We're all smart. We're all busy. We've all laid down some foundation we think we can ride off into the future on. It's wrong. It's temporary. It's small-minded. We need better ideas about what we put into the hive mind and about what it's telling us.

And if it takes one self-described smart person as long as it has me to change something simple like “maybe don't lead with cussing them out,” I shutter to think how we endeavor to overhaul the amount of things I've brought up (reiterated) over the years.