WHAT is the 'hornets stung my ass' corollary
I was very tired when I posted that last night so please accept my apologies for using a weird idiosyncratic turn of phrase without any explanation.
If you're familiar with the "Leopards Ate My Face" thing just skip this paragraph, but on the off-chance and for context where it might help anyone else, that part comes from a joke/subreddit of the same name. To wit, "I never wanted leopards to eat MY face," says person who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party. It's the idea of someone experiencing the consequences of actions they aimed at other people, in a karmic sort of way-- some people want to sanction or punish others, and then are shocked and apalled when they suffer the same in turn.
"Hornets Stung My Ass," on the other hand, was a thing I (to my knowledge) coined during a discussion with some friends when I wanted to describe the grey area that can overlap between victim and instigator. As the analogy went, someone takes a rock and pitches it straight through a hornet hive; predictably, they get swarmed and stung six ways from Sunday. This begs the question, though, of "are they a victim or are they to blame?"
In my mind, in some cases the answer is both. On the one hand, the injuries are real-- this person has suffered welts and stings (and possible anaphylaxis if they're unlucky or allergic or the vespids in question were those incredibly territorial, vindictive-ass German yellowjacket invasives that haunted me growing up in the Finger Lakes). Those injuries need acknowledgment, treatment, and consideration, because the damage is actual and real.
On the other hand, they knowingly hucked a line drive straight at the proverbially-literal hornet's nest, and come on, what do hornets do? They fucking sting the shit out of you if you piss them off, duh. This was not an unknown risk going in to the situation, and while it could be righfully argued that the yellowjackets should perhaps not have rendered them unto a mini-coma as a result, one does to a degree take their fate into their own hands if you @ the hornets and try to collectively ratio the hive wholesale on Bird Webbed Site.
I guess the long and short of it is while that I do not condone or approve of victim-blaming and try to be very cognizant of my own potential to slip into making lazily vindictive judgments of that sort, it's not without merit to also consider the role someone's own volition can play in encountering The Unpleasantness. I work in adolescent psychiatry, and I've quoted this maxim in the course of my duties more than once; the harm is real, and it's my goal to heal and support, but it's also my job to help my kiddos learn and grow-- understanding your own role in unsafe situations and destructive behaviors is important.
And sometimes you just gotta shrug and accept that, yup, hornets stung my ass.
