Posts made by A. B.

@surreality I know the feeling. Cheers!

@Ominous Why this now particularly, when I'm getting myself together and starting to get something useful out of some of what's being said? You seeing something that I'm not? Puzzled.

@Cupcake said in Tips for not wearing out your welcome:

What you just did there is leaving the pressure cooker on to explode.

Your pressure cooker's confusing me more and more. It started by making perfect sense, then you said "you should lift the lid and let others see what you're cooking, but bear in mind that others may not want to smell what you're cooking". Lift the lid or don't lift the lid? Or "lift the lid, while resigning yourself to the fact that it'll get you banned but you need to do it"? And now you seem to be saying that I'm keeping the lid on by admitting what I'm feeling, unless I've got your sentence completely the wrong way around.

stop and calmly explain that sometimes you have difficulty processing people's tone, and could they please clarify their intention?

In those exact words? Bit vague. On the other hand wouldn't want to risk hinting at what it is I'm worried they might mean, because that always leads to them calling that an accusation.

And I take it that by "calmly" you mean "pretending to be calm"? Because I can't switch on and off what I feel about a given thing. And frankly, I wouldn't want to, I've a right not to like being (as far as I can at that point tell) insulted, without being told to "calm down" it away whenever I don't like anything. The English language (probably other languages too, don't know) is a bit awkward in this way, it lumps together "feeling X" and "appearing to feel X", and "inspiring X emotional reaction" and "intended to inspire X emotional reaction" or even "pretending insincerely to intend to inspire X emotional reaction while knowing it'll do anything but". Oops, went off at a tangent.

@surreality

Hey. Misunderstanding. Absolutely not trying to accuse you of bad intentions, quite the reverse, in fact. Re-reading my post, I hadn't spelt that out as much as I thought I had. Terribly careless of me. I was just saying that you were going about it tactlessly at times, which was a huge relief to me to realise. People were making it sound as if I was the only one making mistakes and provoking people without meaning to and nobody else ever would, and I was believing every word!

I know it was terribly cheeky of me to say it "out loud", but it was just such a relief to say it - made it seem real!

I'm sticking to it, you were making a mess of it! Less of one now, though. Much appreciated you telling me you don't mean any harm.

Trust me when I say you're reading the 'incendiary' into it. If I want to be incendiary, uh... yeah. I will call someone a goat-fucking braindead syphcock-gobbling shitmonster with all the mental capacity of a freshly-licked rock without skipping a beat, k thx.

X-DD
I'd much rather you'd said that than what you have been saying, actually. If you were openly hostile, then I wouldn't feel I had to believe you. It's when people give these impartial-sounding criticisms of everything they speculate that I did and thought and meant that I start to feel that I must be guilty of all those things if they say I am, including the bits that I know aren't - and, even if it isn't, that everyone else who reads it will believe it is.

@surreality You are making a mess of things too. You're trampling all over everything in size 15 boots and I just wanted to say that because it's just struck me out of a clear blue sky after spending this whole conversation trying guiltily to believe that you (as a person who isn't me) are right about everything and I'm wrong about everything. I'm sure this is totally tactless but after all I've been putting myself through about it, I don't care. Naturally I'm sure you don't mean to (Aspie-five!) but you've been being at least as incendiary as I was.

To everyone - I've read that much advice on here about what I should say about things, and conscientiously taken it all to heart that much, even the bits that don't seem applicable, that everything I say now sounds like a polite lie to me, even when I didn't mean it to be. Therefore, don't go taking anything I say here from now on, including this message, to be true or what I mean. Just think of it as the output of an amusing randomised chatbot.

@Cupcake said in Tips for not wearing out your welcome:

@A-B Sorry for the delay in reply. The fact of that particular matter was I did in fact do something toe-steppy, because my anxiety got the better of me, only it turned out that the thing I actually did wasn't what got the other person upset. I thought it was, and so I immediately apologized for what I was able to realize was wrong. Even if I had known then what the problem was, I would have still apologized for taking that action, because I realized in retrospect it wasn't cool.

Oh, makes sense. If you actually do have some idea what mistake you made, or one of them anyway, that's different. It's when you're having to "take responsibility" and admit that you're in the wrong for something that you see no way you could have avoided doing, or that you're sure you actually didn't do, that it gets tricky.

Am I irritated that I got cut off before I could find out what the actual problem was? Of course. One of my biggest, long standing triggers I've discovered is the feeling I am not being listened to.

Me too! (I knew that already.) That may be why I don't respond very much, except to want to scream, to all the advice about "you shouldn't be saying what you mean, you should be saying these things that you don't mean instead". And possibly why I needed to put that disclaimer at the top of this posting. If I'm only supposed to say things I don't mean, what's the point of me being in the channel at all? I might as well just leave them a tape recording of somebody else saying something else and be on my way.

So I could choose to seethe, or I can acknowledge or even express my frustration in a healthy way and crack on.

Will you look at that - it turns out I was right the first time to be hopping mad at being described as "choosing" to be frustrated and to think it was totally unfair, because the thing you did instead, I have no idea how to do, hence I couldn't really have done it. You're apparently ahead of me there. How can you "acknowledge or express your frustration in a healthy way"? That's what I thought I was doing by saying I was angry, and got monstered for it.

@surreality Oh, fair enough. It looked, to someone who didn't know what you meant, rather as if you'd meant that (like, you know, "that doesn't give me the right to post a hate-filled screed like I presume you did". Thanks for telling me, and thank you more for telling everybody else.

There's just too MUCH. Too many possible variables. I mean I see where you're coming from - but are you sure that asking what you did wrong or apologising is always a bad thing? (Faraday didn't seem to think the same. Is that conflicting data?)

You really need to seek out pro-bono online counseling or consultation with a professional. There are peer support groups online that are specifically oriented towards helping you through those feelings. This is not one of them.

I was kind of hoping that online ones existed, being currently not good in person - sometimes it seems there are and sometimes (notably by local professionals on the brief, disastrous occasions they've tried to do anything for me) I'm told firmly that there aren't.
If you happen to know where off-hand it would save time. If not, no harm done. Just asking in passing since, you know, there's sometimes a limit to how much web-searching one person can stand in one day.

@Cupcake said in Tips for not wearing out your welcome:

And it's not all universal. In the past year I got page-banned by someone completely out of the blue, without any reason given - and when I tried to figure it out on my own, I wasn't correct, though I still took responsibility for a choice I realized was wrong, and as someone with anxiety, having people freeze you out without knowing why is the worst thing.

How do you do that, when you either don't know what it was you did wrong or don't know how you could have avoided it? Not that you've any duty to give me advice or anything, it's not like I'm paying you, but you saying that did catch my attention.
For me, accepting that everything I did was wrong and I deserve to feel horrible - without e
en knowing what, hence it just means accepting that I shouldn't attempt to speak at all to anybody and am generally an essentially horrible person without meaning to be - really doesn't do anything for my mental state at all, and I can't usually keep it up for more than a few minutes without screaming.
Given this, I assume this is not what I'm meant to be doing?
(This one's less of a problem because I do have some idea - I assume that their grievance is either that they were freaked out by how upset I was getting or just that I was taking up too much space in their channel, and I was silly to go in a strange chat, where they don't know me, at all on a day when I was that strung out.)

That said? If staff did their due diligence, they at least took the time to tell you why they made the decision to ban you. They may even have tried to correct your actions prior to banning you and giving you some form of heads up/warning to course correct.

As it happens, no, in this instance, nobody told me a dam' thing, either before or afterwards. I mean the only way it could POSSIBLY be true is if maybe there was some strange kind of network glitch that resulted in that message not arriving, I suppose that's possible, though it seems unlikely.

There you are, you see - my conscience is hammering at me to accept that what you said was right and I was told, even though I objectively wasn't.

The best advice I can give you is to bear in mind that while mushing can be helpful, it doesn't replace therapy or psychiatric care.

Not possible, as I've said several times. Booklet somebody linked to noted and will be looked at.

Thanks for trying to advise, anyway, especially since it's not like I'm paying you.

Not everything people have been assuming I did or said is true. I just want to say that. (E.g. there was no "hate-filled screed". I just got despondent at incredible length - like I say, should never have been silly enough to visit it in the first place when I was under that much strain that day - about my inability to get my head around a certain aspect of writing.) You haven't seen either the original conversation in the Spirit Lake OOC channel that they were objecting to or the original message I tried to send Tat. I won't go into details, not wanting to start a huge argument again, but nobody likes leaving statements like that about themselves to go without comment as if they're agreeing they're true. You wouldn't yourself.

Shite, shite, shite. I did not mean to start this.

I was not asked to leave, I was thrown out without warning. If you'd told me you wanted me to stop blethering, I could have stopped blethering.

Will look into Haven. Thanks for that.

[looks at RPI link] A HA! This looks a lot like Underlight, which was marvellous if only the time zone issue hadn't finally made me admit it was more trouble than it was worth. If there was anything about this in the links you refer to, I must've missed it somehow. (This seems to be rather the opposite of an "RP encouraged but not enforced" MUD.) Thanks much for this.

...now to start combing through the lists and e-mailing enquiries once more for any that are feasible for UK time zone. Sigh. Oh well.

I am doing my best about those things. It's just a question of not going completely insane from isolation in the meantime.

Would like an answer to the question of what an RPI is? A format where you don't have to explain yourself much sounds promising. (Tried a search on the site but it's too short a word to work right.)

Like I said, I got nothing else.

The main requirement, after what's just happened, I think, would be tolerance for the first, second and third thing I do being breaking down in tears and sobbing repeatedly that they're going to throw me out, I know they are. Tall order.

If I seem to be making this far too important, the reason is that I happen to have been housebound since long before it became fashionable These things are basically my entire social life. It makes it difficult to not be bothered when you start being unable to keep them.

Anyway, I'm doing basically the same thing I did on Spirit Lake, plaintively asking variations on the same questions over and over again in the hope that somebody will come up with an answer when they haven't before, therefore I'll get out of your hair. I'll just leave this here just in case somebody happens to say something.

@surreality What's an RPI? That's one acronym I don't remember hearing before.

@KDraygo I didn't say I didn't want it. I said I wasn't in a position to or I would.

@Tinuviel - We've moved on from that, I'm not talking to the Spirit Lake mods, I'm trying to get advice from people about whether there's any way to make it less likely to happen over and over again in other things. Admittedly the original incident keeps coming up as an example.

@Groth - It's more that the game seemed very heavy on analysing characters' feelings and describing them in minute detail and I struggle with that, it embarrasses me and I don't know what to say, not when there's nothing happening except feelings, and we were discussing how much of that was really necessary and advice about ways of doing it, quite productively at first. But I got despondent and wailed a bit (as I say, I had other things on my mind at the time and should never have been there, only I was that desperate for something to take my mind off things).

Tinuviel - Elucidate?

Mietze - Yes, I was thinking that, too, but didn't really know what to do about it. Thanks.

@mietze said in Spirit Lake - Discussion:

But learning to choose to respect staff or a player telling you "stop with X behavior" can really help. It is easier said than done if it's something you struggle with, but it also isn't something you can force other people to help you with.

I wasn't told, that's the thing. I was worrying about something to do with RPing, whether I could manage what seemed to be required, and we had a bit of a discussion about it, and because I was on edge I went on and on wittering about it, and wondering nervously whether they were getting impatient but as I said that's my permanent state in chats at all times by now hence it told me nothing, and they suddenly threw me out. Thinking about it, though, that doesn't usually happen. Most of the times I've got into trouble somewhere I have at least got some warning. This was exceptional. No need to panic to quite that extent.

No one owes you a private message back, even if you would very much like
one. And if you rush it, the likelihood of an outcome in your favor decreases.

In my defence, I waited two days. And I could see when I checked it that Tat had been on frequently since then, and just wondered - since there was no reaction at all - if something had gone wrong with the works and they hadn't got it. It's impossible to know what any particular site or person is in the habit of considering to be "rushing it".