tips on interacting with a failure

(specifically, me)
(i.e. a clarification on my default expectations towards people)

When people talk about their failures in a space where it's unexpected, it's usually unwelcome.

What are they expecting?

How am I supposed to handle this?

Suddenly you're now experiencing for a moment what the failure thinks all the time. To live a "failed" life is deeply ostracizing when you're surrounded by "successful" people, even if they're kind.

For lack of elaboration, I have a hunch this is an undercurrent which causes a lot of problems in society.

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Let me be clear: When I speak of my failures, it's simply because it's the experiences I have to offer.

I'm not looking for sympathy, unless I ask for it (and I very rarely do).

Ideally I'd like to be understood. Camaraderie is wonderful when we're trying to lift each other out of the depths. But that's a high bar, and luckily not one I often aim for.

The real thing I wonder is, can your worldview accommodate me? I like to be investigative about concepts, and ultimately failures are a big motivating source of examples for me. It helps that they're good edge cases to test normative conceptualizations. So can you find something to say, anything, whether it's to identify something tangential inside yourself or to abstract away the situation?

Or addressing the presence of failure directly, does your understanding have a place in it for the outcasts and stragglers? Can you fit me in a place and say it to my face?

Or is the only thing you can say too demeaning? And maybe you don't like that... in which case I'm a challenge to your perspective. Feel free to say the demeaning thing as long as you also say you don't really mean that.

(if you do truly think of me as less, then you can screw off lol)

- - - - - - -

I know I'm weird in that I'm tone-deaf with regards to what's acceptable to say...

Maybe this is because, left to my own devices, I never talk when I'm actually miserable.

(it's more likely due to my really weird relationship with empathy/sympathy. but i wrote this as a better transition lol)

I may be talking about miserable things, but I'm not actually sad or anything... just happily processing. Or maybe the yapping is nice enough that I magically become "fine".

My therapist notices I smile and laugh constantly. I reassure her, it's all genuine emotion, in spite of the seemingly intractable problems I'm laying out and attempting to reshape. I don't mute my face in therapy. I just sometimes don't know how to talk about sad things in a not-sad way lol. I'm probably fine. And in the rare case I'm not, treating me as if I'm fine will go a long way.

Said tone-deafness also goes for you too.

So don't worry about having to sound sympathetic or keeping the mood low or anything. It's not what I want. I just want the convo to keep bouncing. Don't treat me with mittens either — I'm not delicate. I will call you out if I think your worldview flattens me, but that doesn't mean I'm mad at you...

I try to soften my deliveries when I do to make it seem less personal.
But I hope saying it explicitly here helps too.

- - - - - - -

Knowing this, if I still make you uncomfortable... why?

I can't escape the moral-tinged lens. The dilemma is that I'd like to talk about a state of things without all the implications around me having a "problem" (and by extent, you having to "deal with me".) In contemplating this, I'm forced between overwriting "I" with "one", hence neutering myself from the conversation, or not doing so and incurring the problem. But I want to own myself, not hide behind some abstraction of a hypothetical.

I want you to know me.  This is what I mean by, do I have a place in your world? So is there a hidden way out that doesn't force me to contort myself?

Maybe a solution: screw norms about oversharing.
(with me specifically, and this also goes both ways...)

In the context of honest conversation, one notion of "oversharing" has a necessary purpose: to protect yourself from unwanted emotional burdens. But I really would like to dodge the practice of just labeling infodumps and "negative" topics taboo. This alternate notion of oversharing lacks real nuance and only serves to keep certain perspectives out of conversations. I'd like to keep "oversharing" usefully defined by the description of an effect, not by a fixed category of behaviors. Granting that, we can move on.

What it all boils down to is this: I never expect  you to empathize with me. And I have really mixed feelings about you feeling sorry for me. My answer to that awkward, uhh... how am I suppoed to handle this,  urge is, "nothing! nothing is a perfectly acceptable response! it's not weird to me because there's nothing to handle!"

I'd rather you err on the side of invalidating my experiences or being "insensitive". My primary interest is in seeing the world, including your own, whether that be through your narratives or your ideas. If I lament, and you poke at some hole in my perspective which makes me elaborate and double-back, that would make my day. And if you don't ever respond, that's also okay. My default interpretation is that I said something too big or far-out to process, not that I made you uncomfy or that you don't like me. I have lots of things to say, and I'll try something else.

(this obviously only applies to text convos where you can simply scroll past uninteresting things, not to one where you'd have to painfully sit bored, listening to me drone on and on...)

(also this implies you have to tell me this behavior makes you uncomfortable and you want me to chill out / stop... in which case you do lose some access to me. just letting you make an informed choice. either that, or you can leave me hanging n times until I find you not very interesting lmao. either of these states are easily reversible; I don't hold it against anyone.)

In the end, this is why I take the explication of it all seriously: I want to talk to people, to know them, to live outside of this page and its decorated walls. But I need these norms to be broken for me to have a voice, one whose mere existence isn't seen as a burden.

This operation itself is not above critique. If you think I'm doing something stupid here, you should definitely tell me about it, because I'm notoriously bad at the whole "navigating other's emotions" thing.

And on the flipside, expect everything above from me. I'm not a good source of pure sympathy. But if you want someone interested in picking apart problems...

- - - - - - -

As for myself, my biggest fear is not that I've "failed" by normative standards. I've never subscribed to traditional notions of success anyway. I'm fully convinced now what it means for me to be winning.

The real failures of the past five years are these:

My brain is rotted. My memory is gone. My body's stress response is screwy and gives me hypertension and chest pain.

I regress socially, sometimes irreversibly. Operative knowledge of my friends has been lost to the void, and I lost myself too.

A life close to me extinguished themselves.

Most of that can be rebuilt, and I'm already seeing a lot of progress.
But damn is all that a hefty cost.

Whatever I make of those five years had better be fucking worth it.
Given what I've lost, it's all I have to start with.

That's why I must acknowledge and understand my failures, real or not.
And it's nicer if I yap to someone while doing so, if you don't mind.
I don't really need your help, I just find it fun, and that's enough.

But also, I hope you appreciate the view.
Maybe it could save you some strife.
That'd mean a lot to me.