#offline behaviour

That’s twice recently where a friend has decided to lash out in a really quite personal way on a post of mine where resulting conversations have come out as “it’s something I’ve seen a lot of recently that was irritating me for x reason and I’m stressed and that’s why I snapped”. And I’m hearing of similar experiences from other disabled people.

I follow a lot of multiply-marginalised people across various platforms because I spend 80-90% of my life lying down resting and it’s a way to learn how things affect people less privileged than me that is about what they choose to share. And I’ve seen discussions of this from a number of people I follow and Pages related to intersectional issues recently.

All the posts I’ve seen it on are from women or femme-read people, or ones the people reacting *thought* were women.

All the posts have been from disabled people and/or BIPOC.

The vast majority of the people reacting have had masc names and/or present masc in profile pics.

So what I would *really* like is for people to think about their behaviour online - and in meatspace too - given current conditions.

Things are *extremely* stressful right now. News from the US is incredibly worrying. Things with Palestine are horrific. International issues re Ukraine are stressful. Labour continue to make things worse for everyone who isn’t wealthy and right-wing AF. People want to take action to help this and ways to actually do anything are feeling increasingly pointless or dangerous for systemic reasons.

Frustration, anger, fear and anxiety are absolutely normal and understandable reactions to this. What I would like is for people to *think* about how they manage their reactions.

And in particular to think about why something from a particular person, particularly one you broadly agree with, irritates you enough for you to react by attacking them when you did not react that way to other people who said or shared it.

Humans are extremely social, hierarchical animals. All of our brains are constantly tracking hierarchies and calibrating our behaviour accordingly. You may not think that you are doing this, particularly when a particular reaction feels spontaneous, but the *trend* of results says otherwise. There is a pattern of people unloading anger, frustration, fear, etc etc on certain people because they are more marginalised than them.

I will absolutely note that my experiences in this as a white, usually-femme-read non-binary disabled person have been absolutely minor compared to, say, an out black disabled trans women. It’s still enough of a gut punch to me that I *know* it will affect my posting behaviour unless I take specific steps to prevent it from doing so. The cumulative effect of this for people who are much more marginalised than me, and especially for people who have no support offline and nowhere to turn for it except online, will be much, much worse.

And no, I’m not trawling around to find example after example of this because it shouldn’t take me breaking myself to do so for people to listen to me when I request this of them; *please be mindful in how you react to things you hear or read that stress you*. Take a moment and *think* about *why* something stresses you and if it’s something that’s a pattern of multiple people doing a certain thing, think about why *this* person is the one that makes you want to unload that built-up stress on *them*.

This *very* much applies to both online and meatspace. We don’t hear enough about the increased interpersonal burden marginalised people deal with at times of societal stress because they are safer targets to let off steam at, but it’s far from an online-only phenomenon.

None of this means you’re not allowed to get angry, frustrated or anxious. They are very reasonable reactions right now. And none of it means not addressing a pattern of behaviour that upsets or angers you from a particular person, though I’d always urge asking yourself about intersectional power levels and how it might affect both your feelings and your actions before you do so. It’s about addressing general issues you have with people to *everyone* rather than unloading it on one person, and about trying to deal with the increased levels of stress *everyone* is feeling rn rather than letting them build up.

Including those of us who are predisposed to particular behaviour patterns because of neurodivergence, such as RSD. We can’t really stop having those reactions internally, at least not without years upon years of work, if ever, but we can think about how we let those out and who deals with the fallout. (I really can speak to this personally. RSD is *awful*, I hate it, but it *is* possible to recognise when it makes you behave in ways you don’t want to and find coping strategies that at least minimise how you affect other people.)