Where Angels Fear to Tread

I'm the OP. I'm making this post. If you like, comment, reblog (without comment) on this post, then I'm the one who will see all those notes in my activity page.

However...

If you reblog (with comment), I will get a notification that you did that, but any likes/comments/reblogs (without comment) you get on that reblog will only be shown to you. As OP I won't see them.

If someone adds a reblog (with comment) to your reblog...as OP I won't see that. I won't see any of those notes in my activity page.

Basically, if someone with a large following makes a comment, then they will get all the notes and OP will see nothing. If OP has said something silly because they're, y'know, 21 and it happens, and then someone reblogs it onto the dash of someone with a large following who then dunks on them for fun? OP doesn't see it, doesn't get notes for it, but they're gonna get the harrassment for it in their inbox.

If I, someone with a 5 digit follower count, reblog something to correct misinformation on Ancient Egypt, then OP will never see it unless it was on the original post, but I will continue to get notes on that post even though it's not my post. If I reblog fanart, or just art in general, with a comment like 'Oh this is so lovely!' then OP will not see any of the notes from people reblogging it from me. They'll only see my reblog. So it's possible for an art post by someone else to have 200 notes for them, but 9000 for someone who reblogs it with a comment, and the OP artist will have no idea it's been seen by that many people.

It's killing blow to the community we've built here, by someone higher up who doesn't understand that being able to see all the comments and reblogs is what makes this site the place I keep coming back to.

That's what sucks.

I saw a post about someone chiding Millennials for not knowing about JKRowlings transphobia, and asking how it is at all possible that people can exist in the world and the internet and, you know, not know.

Which I mean, I get. It is so present in so many of my online spaces that it seems astounding that someone could simply be ignorant! It feels impossible!

But let me tell you a story:

I went on a girls trip with a bunch of friends. All of us are rather incredibly liberal and all of us are incredibly online.

One girl would not stop talking about Harry Potter.

At one point, another girl asked her why she was ok with supporting it, and she had no real clue that JK Rowling was at all transphobic. She had heard that she likes to support Lesbian causes and thought “oh ok cool!” And that was it. She was AGOG with the news and rather horrified.

I must once again emphasize that she was an incredibly online person. She’s a foodie and a restaurant blogger.

Later in the trip we were picking restaurants and I suggested one I found on Google, and she gasped at me. Actually gasped, asking how I could ever be okay picking that one.

The shock must’ve been on my face, because she then told me all of the shitty things that restaurateur does. He abuses staff. Underpays them. Fires them on a whim. Is known for being one of the worst people to his employees in the entire restaurant business on this coast.

And she was so shocked I had never heard of this. Because in her mind, I was just as online as her. And in her online world, EVERYONE knew about this guy.

So I think the moral of this story is: always approach the other person with some empathy. Even online people, even people you think MUST know about how bad people are, may not have heard. It may truly be just them being on a different sphere of the internet than you.

So be gentle, be kind when letting people know they might not have heard about the cancellation of XYZ person. Don’t assume that everyone knows all the same info as you.

"A marriage ending isn't a failure at all. I spent eleven years with her. We were so in love that we couldn't image life apart from each other. We got our own place, adopted a dog, and supported each other through school. I thought if tow people loved each other enough the rest would fall into place, except... love isn't everything.

And I didn't want to believe that, but we were sitting in counseling one day, talking about our future and I realized we were describing two completely different lives. Where we'd live, what kind of life we wanted, what made us happy. And it hit me that- I love this woman and this woman loved me. And after eleven years of loss, grief, career changes, we were so deeply in love... but we weren't aligned. And I kept thinking 'We just need to try harder. We can find some compromise to make this work,' because that's what you're supposed to do when you love someone, right?

But the reality was, we had just become different people. Her trade school took her in one direction, my graduate degree in another and trying to force us back into who we were five years ago wasn't coming from a place of love. It was coming from a place of fear. Fear that, if this ended, it meant we wasted eleven years. But sitting there across from her, I realized: That's not how love works.

Those eleven years happened. They were real. The dog, our home, showing up for each other through grad school and trade school. I wouldn't change a single thing because loving someone doesn't mean you're meant to stay with them forever. And letting go doesn't erase what you had. We measure marriage by whether it lasts forever or not, but what if we measured it by whether it mattered?

What if we measured it by the love we gave, the life we built, and the people we became? Because love's job isn't to last forever, it's to help you become fully completely yourself, and sometimes the most loving thing you can do is give each other permission to be yourselves, separately. But the dog doesn't know were' divorced. He just gets two Christmases now."