May 4th, 2024
Every day of my life, there is a conflict of some sort. Whether it's a simple difference of opinion, a clash of ideals, or a full-on active disagreement, I was, more often than not, subjected to the short end of the stick. Why would I want to risk confrontation and open myself up for even more potential ridicule? It didn't make any sense at the time. And it was often just on the internet. Why would I pay so much attention to something that isn't even real?
Arguments like these were all were settled by me accepting the bullshit that people spewed at me, regardless of whether or not I believed it. I didn't have a developed method of dismantling and debating anyway, so the few times where I did try to defend myself, I ended up making a fool of myself, just as I expected.
So I stopped trying to defend them completely.
At one point in recent years, I looked at all of these arguments, and specifically how I was feeling after all of them. I can't keep feeling like shit for just existing, nor should I consistently feel like shit daily for the simple fact that other people have other opinions and try to force them onto others.
In the past few years, I have been taking a more active, nay, chaotic and aggressive approach to defending my viewpoint
I eventually found that this idling action is, in fact, still an action; a option of many. But what was even more important was all of the information that was interpreted by the other person due to the sheer lack of engagement I advertised. "If you want an argument, have fun yelling at yourself" was my mentality.
However, I found that the arguments that I never made were being used against me ad infinitum. I found that people were using their own interpretations and headcanon of things I never mentioned as justifications for their own viewpoint as part of a self-fulfilling prophecy, not to engage in a discussion or to justify an argument.
This was around 2018 to 2020