Aw, thanks. I really did mean to, I dunno, start conversations or something, but I guess it does sound more like a witness. It wasn't my intention.
*nods* Sometimes people want to start conversation and sometimes they just want to be heard, and I'm always wary of assuming the first when they might mean the second, you know?
It's also not my instinct, you know? To trick, to manipulate. But I think, even though it's not natural, that it might be an important adaptive skill. I do value communication a lot. It's worth it, I think.
This I get. I tend to be, if anything, more honest than I should be and tend to assume that other people are being honest with me and I've had people take advantage of that and play me like a fiddle. I think some degree of manipulative ability can be useful, and it can especially be useful to be able to detect it in others, but I'm not there yet.
I think ...the tone thing sets me off. I don't hear tone very well. I'm not great at reading or presenting non-verbal communication correctly and I've often had people assume things about non-verbal symbols I'm not aware I'm sending and it's gotten me into rather a lot of trouble, to the point where I twitch at the word "tone." And reading the second article you linked to (about the airplane) set me off in weird ways because I had all sorts of reactions...like how I don't see the racism aspect to what happened (I see it as older men and women reacting to a younger woman) but I've had similar-but-different things happen to me and so reading it was putting a lump in my throat (and that helped with questioning the racism because I've had similar accusations and stuff when all involved parties were white) and...I'm not going anywhere coherent with this.
Communication is an interesting thing. It is vitally important and, in some ways, all we have for interacting with each other and learning about each other and functioning as a member of society. And yet it can be so different and it can fail so spectacularly. And shouldn't we be about finding ways to stop that failure? Shouldn't we listen to each other and, I don't know, care about our fellow human beings?
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2008-03-08 10:40 pm (UTC)*nods* Sometimes people want to start conversation and sometimes they just want to be heard, and I'm always wary of assuming the first when they might mean the second, you know?
It's also not my instinct, you know? To trick, to manipulate. But I think, even though it's not natural, that it might be an important adaptive skill. I do value communication a lot. It's worth it, I think.
This I get. I tend to be, if anything, more honest than I should be and tend to assume that other people are being honest with me and I've had people take advantage of that and play me like a fiddle. I think some degree of manipulative ability can be useful, and it can especially be useful to be able to detect it in others, but I'm not there yet.
I think ...the tone thing sets me off. I don't hear tone very well. I'm not great at reading or presenting non-verbal communication correctly and I've often had people assume things about non-verbal symbols I'm not aware I'm sending and it's gotten me into rather a lot of trouble, to the point where I twitch at the word "tone." And reading the second article you linked to (about the airplane) set me off in weird ways because I had all sorts of reactions...like how I don't see the racism aspect to what happened (I see it as older men and women reacting to a younger woman) but I've had similar-but-different things happen to me and so reading it was putting a lump in my throat (and that helped with questioning the racism because I've had similar accusations and stuff when all involved parties were white) and...I'm not going anywhere coherent with this.
Communication is an interesting thing. It is vitally important and, in some ways, all we have for interacting with each other and learning about each other and functioning as a member of society. And yet it can be so different and it can fail so spectacularly. And shouldn't we be about finding ways to stop that failure? Shouldn't we listen to each other and, I don't know, care about our fellow human beings?