Lately, I’ve been feeling very ambivalent about the online community I spend most of my time on. I think it’s about time I attempted to articulate why.
As you guys know, I’m an avid knitter. I am an active member of Ravelry.com, and in fact spend a fair portion of my time there, reading and making posts on the forums, looking up fun patterns, chatting in the chat rooms. In general, I usually feel welcome and at ease there. But lately, I’ve started feeling stifled in terms of my expression, and I can’t figure out what to do to fix the situation.
For starters, I realize I have very strong opinions about things, and I want to make those opinions known. That’s a large portion of why I started blogging, because my opinions demand to be shared, and I feel strongly that I need to spread the word about things I consider important. I also realize that I can sometimes be off-putting to people because of the intensity of my emotions and opinions, which is why I try to “rein it in” in public places, like my job or a forum like Ravelry. But sometimes, I just feel like I have to speak up.
There are a couple groups I spend a LOT of time in, on Ravelry. No names, because I don’t like rubber-necking, but my Rav-based readers will likely recognize them immediately (and I ask you not to name them in comments either). One of them is a haven of support that I consider a welcoming place for crafters of all kinds, and the other is a fan community that regularly challenges its members to craft in new and exciting ways. And most of the time, I am very happy in those groups. I spend some time in other groups as well (several animal groups, and a couple lifestyle groups, as well as running a book club group which is still in its infancy), but these two places are my main homes on Rav, the places I check first thing in the morning and right before bed, the places where I make the majority of my posts and have the majority of my friends.
And here I’m going to broach the delicate topic, which has led to some drama for me before. In the past few months, one of these groups has instituted a new rule that any discussion of parenting or children in a negative light will lead to the topic being deleted and the posters being warned. This was a direct result of past discussions that grew heated, but this rule is beginning to feel stifling to me. Even the most gentle discussion of parenting seems to turn into “us against them” and makes me feel alienated and attacked for my child-free status, and I don’t even engage in the discussions myself anymore (it’s just not worth the drama and hurt feelings). Even people who imply that perhaps not all children are perfect and perhaps parenting is a job not all people do well get a verbal smack-down, it seems, and then a moderator pops in and tells them to cool it. I don’t want to go into whether the rule is harsh or not, or whether it should be broken, or any of that. All I want to highlight here is how I feel. Because this is my blog, and I feel I am justified in talking about how these discussions have made me feel. And alienated, frustrated, and hurt are my main feelings. I feel like my viewpoint as a member of that group is now considered lesser, that my voice is diminished because of my childfree status (which I can’t even mention for fear of breaking the rule), and that really bothers me. This is a place where I’ve grown a lot, learned a lot about myself and my relationships with other people, and I feel like part of that group has turned its back on me because of this. I struggle with the decision whether to leave the group outright (which I would do quietly, with nary a peep, because I do hate it when people publicly flounce), or stay and hope that this ends up blowing over and keep a low profile in the meantime. I don’t want to go, because I love the group, and most of the people in it (there isn’t anyone I really despise, and only one or two members who I mildly dislike, everyone else is either “neutral” or “OMG BEST PERSON EVAR”), but I still feel alienated and unrepresented as an individual.
The other group does not have that problem. There are plenty of parents in it, and lots of discussion of children, but no one is judgemental about the childfree and they’re very welcoming. No, the problem that I seem to be having in the other group is that of boundaries.
Boundaries are things that I have trouble with at the best of times, to be honest. As a small child through my teen years, I had no concept of “personal space” and would often hug people who I hardly knew if they looked friendly or in need of a hug. It wasn’t until high school when I had a rude awakening (being told by a friend that she was uncomfortable being hugged by me right after I came out to her as bisexual) that I began to withdraw and now I hardly feel comfortable touching anyone unless they touch me first. But that’s another discussion. Physical boundaries, emotional boundaries, boundaries of “appropriate topics of discussion”, these are things that have never made much sense to me. Perhaps it’s just because of my poor social skills, but I don’t really feel like there should be any separation between subjects, except in terms of comfort (such as not discussing rape with a rape victim) or very personal things (such as sex and personal relationships, unless mutually agreed upon by both parties).
So in this other group, which is a group with teenage members (and thus marked as mild language only, which I have no problem with), I’ve run up a couple times against boundaries that I wasn’t even aware of. Things like discussing my budding interest in energy manipulation or possible non-neurotypical disorders seems to make other people uncomfortable, and I end up getting a very gentle nudge from the moderators to perhaps not discuss the topic anymore (and they’re very nice about it, I never feel like I’ve been shouted at or shut down). What frustrates me is that I feel like I keep bumping up against invisible walls around discussion topics that I’m not supposed to talk about, and I have no idea where they are or how to avoid them. The fact is, being a bisexual size acceptance activist who is learning about energy manipulation and has a strong emotional investment in various social justice issues is who I am. My life is not the same as a lot of people’s lives (just the law of averages, population being a bell curve, I’m usually on the margin), so these things don’t feel odd or out of place to me, but I keep introducing a topic and then learning that it’s not something they normally discuss. As a result, it’s made me skittish about what to talk about there. I really like all the people in the group (really, I don’t even mildly dislike any of them so far, they’re all so nice) and I want to be an active member, but I feel like there’s only so much I can say about my knitting before I start repeating myself, and other topics are potentially off-limits so I don’t want to try to talk about them. So then I end up posting stupid one-line things like “hi, I’m bored, what’s up” and no one cares to read that all the time.
Individually, these two issues aren’t a huge deal. They don’t really impact my whole life, because my internet life is not the entirety of my existence. If I was only dealing with one of them, I’d probably just shrug and wait it out and hang out in other groups for the duration. But because both are happening simultaneously, with the two groups I spend the most time in, I’m starting to feel very frustrated by the whole thing. It’s a cumulative thing, bouncing from one to the other until I feel like my head’s going to explode because of the pent-up emotions that I don’t feel like I can express in either place. I try to go to other groups to decompress, but most of my other groups are quiet, and since every post can be viewed by anyone on Rav, I worry that venting someplace else could create drama in the main group, even if I’m vague. Plus, I don’t want to be the girl who complains constantly in one group while showing a blank emotionless face in the other. I just want to be me. x.x
Again, this blog post is sort of making this a bigger issue than it really is. In the long term, I probably won’t even remember all this a few years down the road (or heck, possibly even a few months), and since the internet is pretty fluid, most other people probably won’t remember it either. I just feel like I need to articulate how I feel, so I don’t keep growing more and more frustrated and end up exploding at someone who doesn’t deserve it. Blogging is my pressure valve. 😀
And that is all I have to say about that.
MirrorMe 
I just want to say that sometimes moderators have to enforce rules they don’t agree with… and that there is as much disagreement among the mods about certain topics being restricted as there is in the group at large. I think the group you are speaking of is experiencing some growing pains and I’m hoping that it’s going to work itself out organically. I would miss you if you left.