tryna talk to m about house and pandemic things, like i’ve said before. dared say the house is hurt and angry and scared bc her direct, active decisions have introduced risks to their physical safety. risks that would’ve been easy to mitigate. and her response…. i don’t know why i’m surprised. her response is the same as it’s always been even just with her and me and like… the fucking dishes or w/e. deflection and pointing the finger at some random “traumatic” thing someone else did to her several months ago where like…. she never even tried to talk about it after the fact, and just decides that the price can come due now.
especially funny bc literally all i said was that it’s “understandable” that k wouldn’t be perfectly nice, and she can’t even let that slide. like, no, it’s somehow not understandable… not because any part of the context of his actions is missing or unconsidered, but because people clearly are never allowed to be less than flawlessly polite to you, regardless of how you’ve treated them, if they’ve ever had conflict with you in the past.
what you mean isn’t “it’s not understandable,” but “it’s not fair.” but one of those sounds like a better argument stance, doesn’t it
“too busy attacking you?“ he literally said one mildly critical sentence
if you really want to talk about mutually supporting each other… when we have these uhh tense talks and you bring up stuff you’ve contributed to the house/other ppl using them as a reason why ppl aren’t allowed to get mad at you or why you’re doing your part for the house… as awesome and fun as the various media server projects are, they’re not exactly essential to house functioning, and can’t replace what is essential. there’s certain non-negotiables, the most obvious of which is paying rent/utilities in a timely fashion, but then you also have things like picking up after yourself and communicating w housemates about time-sensitive shit.
the general way that group houses work is that we come together and establish rules and practices that we agree upon, even if it’s hard or if some folks have to compromise. and that can be a formal process, like with house meetings, or sometimes looks like ppl discussing stuff on the fly in text/discord/etc and coming to an agreement there.
house meetings have been weird since we haven’t all been in the same space, and extra weird bc this turned into such a fraught topic, but lbr. everyone else in the house has wanted to take certain precautions to avoid bringing this virus into the house. getting you to agree to some of those things has been a series of awful, friendship-wrecking fights, followed up with like… *some* eventual adherence to safety measures, but no direct amends for the hurt from the previous fights, just unrelated stuff like buying the house beer/food or doing cool media server shit that can be shared with peeps. which it seems are like, cool, and appreciated, and are nice short-term ways to interact with peeps to show them that there’s still care and thought there, but… seriously. people are hurt really bad by the things you’ve said and done, and that’s not going to go away without you directly addressing it. if you don’t, people will keep feeling hurt and angry.
kind of like how you still have feelings about the carpet cleaning times, for some reason? i have no idea what kelley said—i remember you being frustrated with tadhg that their offer of help was limited to the night before carpet cleaning, but never heard anything about kelley interactions. but anyway yeah… in both cases, unless people are able to discuss them directly (and also presumably take responsibility for their own actions and feelings) that shit tends to stick around.
this dynamic used to mostly happen just between you and me, talking about apartment cleaning stuff at the old place. i would bring up a current apartment maintenance-related thing, and generally your response would be to get upset and start bringing up things from months ago that were also upsetting for you, BUT crucially, these were often things you were bringing up like this for the first time. The last few times this happened, I started responding to those situations with a specific thing, which is the reason I’m bringing up that dynamic: if you feel shitty about an interaction? if you need someone to address something further? it’s largely on you to let them know. it’s on you to bring it up to the other person and try to collaboratively figure out how to make it better. shit’s not going to magically get better by itself. talking isn’t a guarantee of your perfect desired outcome, either, but it’s still a necessary step. and it’s a shitty thing to do to yourself and to the other person, to silently sit with something that someone else did that hurt you/made you feel angry, and not give them a chance to improve that behavior riiiiiight up until they’re trying to have a different conversation with you… THEN throw it in their face as loudly as you can.
that’s something i’ve told you before. it 100% applies here. kelley made an off-hand, kinda harsh remark about the house discord you keep sowing, and *now* you want to bring up a carpet cleaning interaction, and say that he has no right to talk to you about his thing until he’s addressed this random thing that you’ve never tried to get closure on until now? … your concerns can be valid, and it can still be a deflection. i’ve never known your queue to be 100% linear, and i think for relationships where you want to show up and do the work, those two conversations could totally happen simultaneously, or around each other. my best guess? you straight-up don’t want to address these things on others’ terms, and this is the best way you can think of to justify how angry you feel at the loss of control in being called out.
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she keeps coming back to the chat and adding more tone policing about carpet cleaning. i don’t fucking want to spend my day off on this, fuck.