WHAT NATALIE DID NEXT
YOU 'DISCUSSED' ME
I have been shocked to my inner pixels to find that some people think that I have been acting very ‘calm’ and ‘well behaved’. Seeing these words typed in my IM box was enough to make me want to check my ass into therapy and made me re-evaluate how I spent my time in second life and who I spent it with. I would like to stress that I am not in Second Life to be sensible or well behaved. That is what real life is for!
After a bit of a discussion about this with some friends, I decided to look at my friends list and began to remove some people from it. It wasn’t that I had become calm or quiet, it was that the people who assumed I had, I just didn’t spend time with them and they don’t speak to me. It was then that I got a big shock because; I discovered that some people treat their sl friends list in different ways. Being the little journo that I am I decided to investigate this further.
Some people come in Second Life and decide that they will be one way or another. Some people call it role play and ROLE PLAY isn’t just about being gorean or a vampire. You will never get to know a person if they don’t want you to know them in here. Many will only let you see the side they want you to see and on occasion some people screw up and the guard slips. Some people like to try and appear to be really sweet and innocent but in a split second their behaviour can change and the real person can emerge. A lot of people do this and hope that no one is clever enough to pick up on it. Many won’t notice, but there will always be those who do. It is up to you to decide if that is the type of person you wish to roll with or if you don’t.
Wouldn’t it be brill if sl friendships was easy, but it isn’t. Plenty of people hate me and I don’t know them. I have become accustomed to the fact that I am either someone’s Best Friend or someone’s worst enemy. Some hate me because their friends hate me and if that is true then you’re a silly bitch. If you hate me because I had words with your friend at some point, then you need to take a closer look at your friend, because we probably weren’t arguing for nothing. She (or he) was probably doing something they didn’t want anyone knowing about, so the next time my name rolls from your mouths, I hope you choke on it!
Some people hate me because Rawly wrote an article about them and I wouldn’t remove it. They probably slagged him off and Rawly is my guy so I wouldn’t have tolerated that and I was probably quite vicious. Some people hate Rawly because they hate me, and so the herd continues to follow the rest of the herd. Just for the record, while I am on this subject, don’t ask me to remove articles or threaten me with stuff, I am just not afraid of anyone or anything.
Anyway, let me get right to an interesting scenario I found myself in recently. I swear fate always does this to me when I am researching things, and since I was thinking about sl friendships the timing was uncanny. I was very shocked when I received a very nasty IM from a person who I had convinced myself over the last month, might actually be an ok person. The person had noticed that another person, who I hang out with, had removed them from their friend list. I was given full blame of this and there was things said in IM that backed up other stories I had heard about the behaviour of this person. (Things that myself and other persons close to me had been told , that I had chosen not to believe.DUH!)
The person who had done the removing is an extremely intelligent and loyal person. He wouldn’t be the type of person who could be easily manipulated, so I was a bit shocked that I was receiving the blame. I was also annoyed that the person who was IMing me didn’t realise that the person he was talking about just wouldn’t be easily led.
Before asking the person who had done the removing, I strolled down memory lane. I realised that the nasty person who was blaming me was never wrong.(Please read next part and think sarcasm) He doesn’t do bad things and has never done anything bad EVER. Anything he ever done that made people hate him, I caused. So it was inevitable that I would receive full blame for everything as usual.
I went to the person who had done the removing and asked why they had done it and asked them to clarify it was nothing to do with me. I was shocked when the person told me it was because of me, but not because of anything I had said or done because I hadn’t needed to say anything.
I hadn’t manipulated him in any way. All I had done was be myself and he had grown to love me and he was proud to call me his friend. Apparently I don’t pretend to be something I’m not and I am not the nasty dramatica most of you say I am. He told me he also had a mind of his own and his memory was good. He didn’t like the person he had grown to know and wondered how the other person could have ever hurt me the way they did, how quickly they did it and without remorse or feeling.
He told me he admired me for having such a forgiving nature, but he didn’t have the same threshold for forgiveness as me. He had spent time with both the other person and myself and realised that one of us was really his friend and the other one wasn’t, so the inevitable happened.
He was also quick to tell me that he hoped I’d learned my lesson, because a person who can treat another in such a fierce way was not a friend.
I was again reminded over coffee that I had not lost a friend in the person who had just tore bits of me (again) because that was predicted amongst my nearest and dearest. They had been suspicious of the person who had suddenly come back into my ‘friend zone’. It seemed the person wanted to keep the friendship of the person who had removed them and has gained a rep for using people. My friends had predicted that once the friendship it was gone, I would be tossed aside and take the full force of the frustrations.
It wasn’t just this one person I took the blame for, I had to go and speak to the other people. I was reminded that they had themselves, witnessed the very public behaviour of the person I was getting blamed for everyone removing. They had been made a fool of also by the person, so they chose not to draw breath with someone who can change so quickly and swing from one persona to the other. They told it me it wouldn’t have mattered if it was me or someone else, they basically didn’t like what they saw. They told me if that person was capable of putting on such a very public show of friendship and then do what they did to someone who was extremely close to them, then what would they be capable of doing to them?
For the person to carry on blaming me for things, made them loathe the person that little bit more and seeing the person get me upset over something they did, like removing them from a friends list, fuelled it further. I realised that most people shared the outlook on SL friendship that a lot of my close friends did. If you don’t speak to them, you get removed. If you speak to them only when you have an event planned or some other thing you think that you can get help with, you get removed. They also couldn’t understand why I even bothered to pass the time of day with this person or why I was stressing about it.
Let this be a lesson to anyone who treats their friends list like a business directory or for the people who only IM people when they want their help with something. Some people in this place won’t tolerate it. Next time you plan on doing it, look at the bigger picture and try to remember that the friend who removed you might have their own issues and may need their friends around them.
For all other people, please carry on hating me because your friend does.If you would rather you had a reason all of your own, please don’t hesitate to call me up and I can sort you out. Try and pick a good person to confide in and bitch with. Even your BFF or lover might have a mouth like the black hole and you never know who they innocently tell your private business to. Things you might say privately in IM will never look good when they get passed to the person they were said about. Never take for granted that you know someone either and never trust them when they say "Honestly I never told anyone", when deep down in your soul you know they had to have told someone. If you are called up on something like this, its best not to start your reply with, "Who told you?". Basically this is an admission of guilt, you know you said it and you want to find out who passed it along because you only told one person who you trust.
Its all very psychological and is like looking under a small child's bed to convince them there is no monsters there. Looking under the bed for monsters is telling a child they exist but aren't there at that time. I'll let you all think about that.
Lastly, to all those people that I have spent hours visualising myself sticking duct tape over the mouths of, again please try and be a bit more careful when you rip the back out of us because we have been about a while on the grid and there isn’t much we don’t get sent back to us. Remember that when you are doing it, that the back you stab today might be connected to the ass you will have to kiss tomorrow and we forget nothing.
Lots of Love
Natalie xx
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