Stranger Danger

The hope when starting this tumblr is that, in some way, it would help me. One way is that I find that the process of writing down a problem causes me to think about it in ways I perhaps wouldn’t have.

Like I’ve realized recently that a lot of my struggle comes from me trying to please the “Stranger”; this hypothetical onlooker who will judge me or my actions.

I’ve always thought that this was a good thing, because it makes one very careful of what one believes. When you start to accept something, the Stranger chimes in, purposefully trying to find a way that what I’m accepting is completely wrong. The end effect is that I feel as though I’m able to view most things from more than one point of view. Perhaps not all of them, but at least multiple. This does, however, severely limit what I believe concretely; nearly everything is up for debate with the Stranger.

What occurred to me recently is the Stranger may have come from the internet. I spend a lot of time on the web and nearly everything you say online will attract at least one person who thinks you’re retarded for whatever reason. Somewhere along the way, I think I started to try to anticipate negative responses before they’re made to avoid being embarrassed/proven wrong/lose an argument/what have you. And then that bled into thinking about everything.

Because that’s what’s odd: strangers don’t act that way in real life. Most don’t care that you exist, much less are willing to jump into a conversation and antagonize you. And while I’ve learned a long time ago to never feed the trolls, poor self esteem makes one question everything they think already, and people’s bravery behind anonymity doesn’t tend to help that at all.