needing extra grace

I've been watching stuff, mostly from the outside, but it strikes me (as I said on Twitter) that people are kind of brittle right now and likely to go off over small things. Here, in the third year of the pandemic, we're more tired and sad than most of us are willing to admit, and I think that's affecting how we treat people.

I am only going to speak for my small circle; I see what I think of as "greater cruelty" out in the world (read a thread on Twitter about a man going into truly ugly behavior on a plane towards an East Indian woman who MIGHT have bumped his seat taking her tray table down - he went into a racist, misogynistic rant, and abruptly reclined his seat while she was trying to lie her head on the tray table to get a little rest) and I don't know about those, whether they're happening more or being reported more.

But.

I think of the person at church who disagreed with the minister on something, the minister refused to yield or alter the plan, and the person just dropped their responsibility - resigned, and did it through ME, the head elder, which meant I got the added task of smoothing over the "why didn't they come and talk DIRECTLY to me about it?" afterward (believe me: I wish they had)

And I think of last week, when I was called to do a task with assessment on short notice, and did it, and submitted the numbers, and got back a curt "there aren't enough students in the sample, I think you lost some of the scan trons" and spent 40 minutes searching my office, and finally checked the old rosters to learn that NO, none of the scan-trons were missing, and the class really WAS that small and I didn't get an apology back on that and I spent Friday evening just really feeling bad about the whole thing and telling myself "well maybe you just do a bad enough job of it and it will be taken away from you and someone else will have to do it"

And now, seeing a little group of people I follow on Twitter fundamentally break up and one person (who quit following me a long time ago, so whatever) block two of the others over what I thought was an innocuous comment and....well

We're all brittle and frayed right now. I know I cry more easily and rage more easily (I did both while tearing my office apart looking for the scan trons, and I really hope I can find the couple pieces of late work a student who had been sick handed in that I hadn't graded yet now. And yes, I raged in my office - no one else was around, the person in the office next to me is with their sick-in-the-hospital-post-COVID child, the next office down is the guy who retired that we didn't manage to replace, so I might as well be on Jupiter for everyone who could hear me. 

But it does make me sad. Part of it is I can see how I've emotionally regressed: the tight rein I once kept over my temper has slipped, and while I have NEVER been able to yell at a PERSON, I rage now at either inanimate objects or at myself (I don't count to myself as a person some times). I called myself "stupid" and worse when I thought I had lost those scan trons. 

And also, at the same time, I find myself even more desperate for other people's approval/validation. I'm very much once again the schoolgirl who wants to hear from her teachers that she did a good job, or get a gold foil star stuck on her homework. 

But I'm grown up, I'm alone, and I have no one to validate me but me, and I am monumentally bad at that even at the best of times.

I also found the little online blow up reminded me of why I used to self-censor more, and probably should start doing so again: I don't want to lose friends or friendly acquaintances. One thing a lot of my interactions with peers as a kid taught me was:"people don't want to see the real you" which lead me to suspect "the real you isn't actually very likable or palatable." I had let that one slip lately - again, no one to listen to me in "meatspace" so I am more prone to vent online, and maybe I need to stop that and just keep everything inside again instead.

And yes yes, people would be fast to remind me: but your real friends won't mind. They won't set invisible rules that they will drop you over*. Except when I was a kid I had a couple pretty spectacular friend-betrayals, and a few instances of people who did the silent treatment after I transgressed some minor and unspoken and idiosyncratic-to-them rule of "you don't say that" or " you don't do that" - think some kind of minor etiquette thing, like "you started eating your lunch before I did" or some such, only they don't give you the courtesy of TELLING you what it is, or even giving you one strike.

(*and yes, I know: there are some hard lines. I would say you're justified in cutting off contact with someone who is racist or makes fun of your religion or whatever. But I'm talking here about the weird invisible rules, the "On Wednesdays we wear pink" kinds of things that are not things a "reasonable" person would know. I have known people like that, that if you violated one of their idiosyncratic unspoken "rules," you were ostracized, and you often didn't know what for)

So then I get weird and anxious, like "I'm going to alienate everyone and I'll be even more alone than I am" and I find myself clamming up even more - I'm already doing it in person, to the point where people who know me have commented on it.

We're all broken now, and I don't know how we get fixed. And that makes me sad. I am very much once again, in some ways, the sad, lonesome 12-year-old I was, the person eating her lunch in the dim corner of the lunchroom because none of the other tables wanted to let me sit with them, and who is wondering what rule she violated that makes her so unlovable....