Friends like these
Aug. 28th, 2003 11:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
j4As far as I can tell, nearly everybody on LiveJournal thinks that calling the list of watched journals a "friends" list is a big glaring misnomer. But fortunately most of the people I know aren't naïve enough to infer from the liberal (mis)use of words like "friends" and "community" that by joining LiveJournal they will instantly enter into a glorious utopia where they're showered with love by people who were previously strangers to them.
Unfortunately, this doesn't make it any more pleasant when people who I regard as real friends in real life decide to tell me that I'm a worthless friend because I don't follow up to their last post on LiveJournal. I didn't realise that when they voluntarily joined LiveJournal I had entered into a contract to a) read every new update to their journal as soon as it was posted, b) follow up to every post, c) guess that a fairly generic-looking paddy about the technical crapness of LiveJournal and NTL is actually a hugely emotional trauma about the failure of a community to nurture and support them, or d) chase them up on email and implore them to return to LiveJournal.
If people don't want to use LiveJournal, then fine. I don't see it as an alternative to friendship, merely another way of keeping in touch with people. Some of my friends don't have mobile phones, so I don't text them. Some of them don't use email, so I phone them and meet them face-to-face occasionally instead. If a friend decides, for example, that having a mobile phone is a bad investment of their time/money, then I'm not going to run after them screaming "NO! NO! Don't give up the mobile phone! How will I ever keep in touch with you?", I'll just contact them another way.
That is, if they still want to keep in touch.
Unfortunately, this doesn't make it any more pleasant when people who I regard as real friends in real life decide to tell me that I'm a worthless friend because I don't follow up to their last post on LiveJournal. I didn't realise that when they voluntarily joined LiveJournal I had entered into a contract to a) read every new update to their journal as soon as it was posted, b) follow up to every post, c) guess that a fairly generic-looking paddy about the technical crapness of LiveJournal and NTL is actually a hugely emotional trauma about the failure of a community to nurture and support them, or d) chase them up on email and implore them to return to LiveJournal.
If people don't want to use LiveJournal, then fine. I don't see it as an alternative to friendship, merely another way of keeping in touch with people. Some of my friends don't have mobile phones, so I don't text them. Some of them don't use email, so I phone them and meet them face-to-face occasionally instead. If a friend decides, for example, that having a mobile phone is a bad investment of their time/money, then I'm not going to run after them screaming "NO! NO! Don't give up the mobile phone! How will I ever keep in touch with you?", I'll just contact them another way.
That is, if they still want to keep in touch.
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no subject
Date: 2003-08-28 08:23 am (UTC)In my case it's also a question of "If $boss is at his desk or [worse] comes to talk to me I will not be able to do any email/LJ/news/irc/etc., because if $boss sees me doing it I will lose my job; so I may have to just vanish in the middle of conversations with no explanation".
[...]
c) if you have ego issues with either of these statements, they're your problem, not mine.
I wouldn't want to imply (I'm not sure whether or not you are doing so...) that anybody having a problem with these statements had "ego issues" -- if you-when-depressed stop reading other-depressed-people, then you're potentially already in some kind of feedback loop.
I find that what happens (and this is a recognised pattern rather than a reference to a specific person) is something like this:
1. I realise that reading X's communications in medium Y make me stressed and depressed, because X is depressed, so I stop reading them for a while.
2. X (who is, after all, depressed) assumes that I am ignoring them, and tries to contact me in medium Z, usually with "Where are you?" or "Do you hate me now?", or something similarly reply-requiring.
3. I reply and explain that conversation in medium Y was stressing me out, and I didn't feel able to reply to it.
4. The conversation gradually moves from "urgent request for contact" to being exactly the same type of conversation (in medium Z) as was depressing me and stressing me out in medium Y.
5. Rinse, repeat.
no subject
Date: 2003-08-28 09:12 am (UTC)I think I may just be talking about what you talk about below, in different words.
I do have a problem, though, if I say "I need to stop talking to person X [ or to person X about issue Y ] for specific reason Z to do with how I feel right now, and will come back as soon as I can", and person X insists on hearing that as a value judgement of them, or of how I feel about them, or of how important they are to me - which is essentially accusing me of lying when I go to the effort of explaining reason Z. The degree to which I am willing to put up with that grows ever less as I get older.
Fortunately, the simple application of Darwinian principles over time means I don't have many people in my life who do that any more. Ye gods it can hurt when they do though. I really hate people forcing their models of emotional reality onto the way my mind works.
[ There's also "I would rather not read your journal right now because I could really do with some time to calm down about the particular argument we're having or I might lose my temper in ways that could end the friendship." I like to think that any sensible person reading that would hear it as about me doubting myself and valuing the friendship enough not to want to hurt it.]