• 1 Post
  • 220 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 10th, 2023

help-circle

  • Yes. I started during the pandemic when a significant portion of the people I respected suddenly deemed me as expendable.

    I have a lung condition that put me at high risk, especially during the early days when there was no treatment available. Everyone I know with the same condition who got covid during the first ~8 months either is dead or has pretty severe long term damage that has left them practically bed ridden.

    So when people I respected said they would not wear masks around me or even just stay the fuck away, I was the problem because sUrVivAl Of ThE FiTtEsT. I was unable to telework due to having a hardware specific job, and apparently it was too much to expect them to just keep their distance and/or wear a mask. Instead they would cough in my direction, literally say “I hope people like you die soon so this can all be over and we can go out to eat again” (ironically that same person still has a cough from their three months bout with covid in 2021). Yes I told them I had a lung condition, that only made the harassment worse.

    I went to therapy for specific issues, how to handle the direct harassment and how to deal with having all the respect for a large amount of people disappear in about a month. I went through two different therapists on betterhelp. The first one was good at helping me through it, but they took more than a week to respond to messages. The second one was really good though. They really helped me just write off those people entirely, even if we used to be friendly those times are over and they made their choices. They also gave me some advice on how to convince my manager to provide reasonable accommodations and gave me a different office on the other side of the building.

    I’ve been debating going back for some advice on some lingering health anxiety I still have from those days.












  • “Toxic” is just a way to say you’ve taken things too far and it’s now overly harmful to yourself or others.

    Toxic positivity is only seeing the good things and overlooking clear and obvious negative things.

    For example, there is nothing positive about a school shooting. There is no reason to say “at least only seven children were shot”. If you’re trying to find something positive about that kind of situation, you’re engaged in toxic positivity. Trying to be positive would only serve to mitigate the situation and minimize the pain and suffering of those who were involved.



  • I work in an area where it’s impossible to record their behavior, and since there were so many people doing it snitching wasn’t an option. They were smart enough to only “joke” when management was within earshot and resume actual harassment when they left.

    I still work with that same group, funny enough they went back to being buddy-buddy once I got vaccinated and was able to drop the mask.

    I have forgiven them in the sense that I don’t think about it when I interact with them, but now I know how selfish they are and how they’d happily push me into a wood chipper if it meant they could avoid having to wear a small piece of fabric on their face.



  • Honestly, therapy. I basically had the same reaction when my coworkers, who i thought were pretty alright, would cough in my general direction and say survival of the fittest because I was wearing a mask during peak covid. I had a lung condition that put me at high risk, and I told them that… And that lead them to be even more hostile to me, openly saying they hoped I’d get covid and die off quickly.

    I struggled with the fact that people can turn on you so fast, and that people couldn’t do the minimum effort to prevent someone they know from dying. We used to be cool, pretty often we went out to eat and hung out outside of work hours, then in the span of a couple months they were practically verbally assaulting me every day. I talked to a therapist and it really helped. I barely remember what they told me since it was years ago now, but it got me through it and I rarely think about it now.



  • There is one other thing you buy a company for, and it’s to remove them from the market. I’m fully convinced that if he had any goal, it was to completely wreck Twitter as fast as possible without drawing everyone to that conclusion.

    It’s literally the only thing he has done with the company, drive it further and further into a right wing cesspit that high value advertisers want nothing to do with.

    I’m not convinced that he had any goals, he made a meme joke offer during a manic episode and tried to back out of it but was caught by his own need for public ridicule.