I was responding locally to some gworley’s arguments that didn’t make sense to me, but, to be clear I do roughly endorse this comment.
I agree with “don’t take upon yourself the full weight of other people’s response to you”.
A few random things I think:
if someone hasn’t yet bought into having a big ol’ conversation, it’s generally better to start with something short that’s succinctly communicates the gist of the issue and checks if now’s a good time for a big ol’ conversation
if you’re having a somewhat triggered or anxious or slightly-annoyed conversation over text, and finding yourself wanting to write very long messages, it’s often better to shift towards in-person convo. One of the failure modes is that you don’t actually need all those caveats and qualifiers, you maybe need… like, 1 out of 5 of them, to avoid being misunderstood. If you’re having a realtime convo, it’s much more natural to just say the short version and then quickly back up and qualify things if your interlocutor reacts poorly or seems to not get it.
(meanwhile, if you write out all 5⁄5 qualifiers, you end up burying the real substance in noise that’s harder to read)
(if you’re mostly writing for the benefit of other people, this is maybe not relevant, depends on the situation though)
if you never end up expressing complex nuanced thoughts, something else is probably going wrong.
I also find it valuable to say “can I share a dangerous/confused/anxious thought?” with my partner.
I was responding locally to some gworley’s arguments that didn’t make sense to me, but, to be clear I do roughly endorse this comment.
I agree with “don’t take upon yourself the full weight of other people’s response to you”.
A few random things I think:
if someone hasn’t yet bought into having a big ol’ conversation, it’s generally better to start with something short that’s succinctly communicates the gist of the issue and checks if now’s a good time for a big ol’ conversation
if you’re having a somewhat triggered or anxious or slightly-annoyed conversation over text, and finding yourself wanting to write very long messages, it’s often better to shift towards in-person convo. One of the failure modes is that you don’t actually need all those caveats and qualifiers, you maybe need… like, 1 out of 5 of them, to avoid being misunderstood. If you’re having a realtime convo, it’s much more natural to just say the short version and then quickly back up and qualify things if your interlocutor reacts poorly or seems to not get it.
(meanwhile, if you write out all 5⁄5 qualifiers, you end up burying the real substance in noise that’s harder to read)
(if you’re mostly writing for the benefit of other people, this is maybe not relevant, depends on the situation though)
if you never end up expressing complex nuanced thoughts, something else is probably going wrong.
I also find it valuable to say “can I share a dangerous/confused/anxious thought?” with my partner.