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A note on interactions and awkwardness
Sep. 4th, 2014 11:23 pmThe good Captain has several times now recently said "assume that if people don't get back to you/respond to contact that you should back off", and I am having problems with this for all the obvious reasons, namely:
1. I am terrible at responding to e-mails, particularly during depressive flares. One of the things I am genuinely enormously proud of is that I now respond to the vast majority of e-mails I receive within an hour of getting them, as opposed to letting them languish for three weeks unread, even the terrifying ones. This doesn't mean I don't want people in my life.
2. ... I have a whole lot of friends who do very similar things, including two or three of the people I consider among my closest friends, who routinely do not respond to text-based comms because of anxiety or depression or elsewise lack-of-cope.
3. ... and my at-this-point-instinctive reaction to a lack of response (and one I stop coping with if the lack-of-response rate goes above about 30%, even if it's "to pings on IM when I know our clients don't play nice" and even if it's "someone I'm dating who has made it very clear that they feel positively toward me") is "this person clearly hates me and I should disappear from their life as completely as possible with immediate effect", which is (see above) almost never the right answer.
This is one of the reasons DW/LJ works for me so well as a platform - I get to keep in gentle approximately-continuous touch with an awful lot of amazing people and let them know how I'm getting on, without triggering my comms anxiety.
I know I need to keep working on 3 - "I haven't heard back from this person and it's been TWO WHOLE HOURS, clearly they want to ERASE ME FROM THE FACE OF THE EARTH, I am the WORST THING EVER" is obviously a disproportionate response - but the thing that the Captain's making me a little edgy about is how to balance giving people-in-general enough space with known factors 1 and 2.
For my own part I try very hard to make sure I say "if I do not reply to your e-mail it is because my memory's shit, if I haven't got back to you by date X please feel encouraged to remind me, I'm sorry about the extent to which this requires you to do extra work"; I try very hard to be someone it is easy to say no to -- but obviously that doesn't mean I succeed.
I suspect that my perspective on this is pretty alien to a lot of people, hence the ?inapplicability of the Captain's advice; I wish I knew what the middle ground in this situation looks like.
1. I am terrible at responding to e-mails, particularly during depressive flares. One of the things I am genuinely enormously proud of is that I now respond to the vast majority of e-mails I receive within an hour of getting them, as opposed to letting them languish for three weeks unread, even the terrifying ones. This doesn't mean I don't want people in my life.
2. ... I have a whole lot of friends who do very similar things, including two or three of the people I consider among my closest friends, who routinely do not respond to text-based comms because of anxiety or depression or elsewise lack-of-cope.
3. ... and my at-this-point-instinctive reaction to a lack of response (and one I stop coping with if the lack-of-response rate goes above about 30%, even if it's "to pings on IM when I know our clients don't play nice" and even if it's "someone I'm dating who has made it very clear that they feel positively toward me") is "this person clearly hates me and I should disappear from their life as completely as possible with immediate effect", which is (see above) almost never the right answer.
This is one of the reasons DW/LJ works for me so well as a platform - I get to keep in gentle approximately-continuous touch with an awful lot of amazing people and let them know how I'm getting on, without triggering my comms anxiety.
I know I need to keep working on 3 - "I haven't heard back from this person and it's been TWO WHOLE HOURS, clearly they want to ERASE ME FROM THE FACE OF THE EARTH, I am the WORST THING EVER" is obviously a disproportionate response - but the thing that the Captain's making me a little edgy about is how to balance giving people-in-general enough space with known factors 1 and 2.
For my own part I try very hard to make sure I say "if I do not reply to your e-mail it is because my memory's shit, if I haven't got back to you by date X please feel encouraged to remind me, I'm sorry about the extent to which this requires you to do extra work"; I try very hard to be someone it is easy to say no to -- but obviously that doesn't mean I succeed.
I suspect that my perspective on this is pretty alien to a lot of people, hence the ?inapplicability of the Captain's advice; I wish I knew what the middle ground in this situation looks like.