So I moved back to my city after 7 years where my family lives.
It’s been 2 years but I never really enjoyed people here. Mostly people I met were from my previous circles, family, school friends and their partners.
I always thought something was off and maybe over time I will figure things out but it was just not happening.
Yesterday I went to dinner with my partners friends and damn it was whole different vibe. As if it’s a different culture. I really enjoyed talking and was genuinely interested in next meeting.
Resparked my joy in meeting people and I guess I was with wrong people and there are people who are out there who vibe match with me but it’s so hard to find them.
It’s true.
I’m lucky to have a lot of friends via the roller derby community, but I’m a white man in a largely liberal and activist community, so my mantra whenever any controversial topic comes up is: “I don’t feel it’s my place to speak on that” or “I don’t know enough to have an opinion on that”. (Which in a lot of cases is probably true.)
Those friends end up being surface-level in a lot of ways because I love the sport and can’t risk accidentally saying something that offends someone and risk losing my access to it, because if you say the wrong thing, malice is always assumed and there’s simply no grace given for error.
that’s exactly why i left my communities/hobby activities. I can’t live my life that way. It’s miserable being around miserable people who want to be offended by everything. like you want to play a board game, and there are only male/female pieces and the person goes on a rant about how awful and cruel and abusive you are for choosing that game because it’s not ‘gender inclusive’. it’s a fucking game. it’s not reality. it’s supposed to be simple. just like the pieces only come in one color and not 1000s.
In a personal relationship it’s called ‘walking on eggshells’ and it’s a form of emotional abuse. I don’t want to hang out with emotionally abusive people. The irrational insane abusive people should be shunned, not the people who are well-intentioned, but for some reason we’ve inverted this now and the insane abusive people get catered to as being far more valuable and special than the non abusive people.
It can be like that for sure. I accidentally called a trans skater ‘she’ three years ago, and they got over it and understood it was a mistake, but one of the refs in the league still won’t talk to me. So petty and stupid how people can be.
honestly, i have had the SAME experience. the trans people are way more chill than the non-trans people who think they are ‘fighting’ on behalf of trans people. they are drunk on self-righteousness. i got more shit about BLM from white women who had zero black friends, than i ever did from a black person. multiple times I got screamed at for not attending a BLM protest… by a woman who didn’t herself attend and would say ‘i woudln’t feel safe attending a blm protest as a white woman’. totally ignorant of her own racism inherent in that statement.