'Splaining

Reading this blog, and seeing how I've neglected it recently, it makes me realise something: I used to spend a whole lot more time, and energy and effort, trying to explain my behaviour. Not rationalise, not justify, not excuse - just *explain*: This behaviour, which may look incomprehensible to others, happens because I am feeling X, Y and Z.

Did it do any good? Not really. People draw their own conclusions, they project their own situations. "That is not the way that I feel, in fact, I could never even conceive of feeling or thinking X, Y or Z, therefore you must be lying or ~making it up~, and I will now tell you how you *must* be feeling, to be doing that, if you were *me*." Never mind that I've spent 40 years in this body, in this brain, in this set of experiences, and they have known me for a few months, mediated entirely through a messageboard format which strips context, culture, affect and emotion from everything that I say.

So I eventually gave up explaining.

Did the projecting and the accusing and the condemning stop? Of course it didn't. But at least I wasn't wasting my time, my effort, and all that emotional energy of trying to justify my very existence to people unwilling or unable to listen. What a relief.