When you say stupid shit and read it back almost 2 decades later when you’re cleaning up your blog
Part 1 of a series
But I’d had soft beaten out of me long before then and I was pretty sure I’d never be able to become soft, so I silently rejected his advice as an impossibility. I didn’t know it then (nor did he), but I was angry. There’s just no dealing with anger when you don’t know that’s what it is.
So here I am, 12 years later, and life has just beaten me to a pulp. Am I any softer? Maybe, but that’s the effect of time, like water smoothing out a rock.
But it’s still a rock, and aimed correctly, thrown with enough force, can still kill or at least stun.
I mostly don’t engage in internet scuffles now. I shitpost on 𝕏 when I feel like it, usually about writing, self/publishing, and plain silliness. Obviously I haven’t tended my blog in forever.
I also don’t engage with people much in real life, and certainly don’t go off the handle in public (mostly). I’ve learned to pick my battles.
My latest battles:
- One incompetent physician (heated arguments over my mom’s almost-death bed, complaints to the hospital, a bad review on HealthGrades [which is not visible], and the Missouri Board of Healing Arts).
- One very selfish aunt whom we (my brothers and I) forced into doing the right thing (sell the house that my mother owned half of so we could pay for her medical care) after she flat refused because she valued the property more than everything else, including her sister’s welfare, and thought reality didn’t apply to her because she’d always gotten what she wanted.
I’m still angry, not soft.
I’m just too tired to care much until it’s a bona fide threat.