A post about anxiety, and not about rules...

First One...

Been a while, and here's why....Facebook arguments.  I appear to have been afflicted with a disease which makes me constantly fail to communicate in the manner in which I intended...or the other guy was in fact acting like a massive penis, It's one of the two...good thing I have actual evidence of the Penis acting, such as multiple complaints about the other guys behaviour and comments within our clubs page etc etc...but to the chase we go...the whole thing blew up about a month ago and I have been quite badly and emotionally affected by it...I'll spare you, gentle reader, any details, but suffice to say that no one was squeaky clean, and one party was guilty of applying his or her own filters to anything that was written, and disregarding anything the other said as irrelevant trolling.   It just really knocked me for 6 and put me on the back foot in a way I genuinely didn't know that something like that could.   I went through a month of examining my behaviour and really holding a mirror up to what I was saying and where.   I now try so damn hard to be unambiguous that I can barely communicate at all...I'm over sensitive to the slightest thing, perceiving everything as an attack, having to read things several times over and eventually just giving up.  

In short, I feel completely cut off from the wargaming community locally....I know this is just me being stupid, as I game several times a week with good friends and still try and get out with new games to new people, but the anxiety and social dread that I spent years overcoming has just flooded back.   The only way I can think of to get over this is to get out there and prove that it wasn't my fault to myself, but I cant, I'm too fucking scared to go out and be around people.  It took me years to get confident enough to get out and do things, Wargaming when I was a nipper was a place you could go to be weird and alone, but I always tried to be more normal, and for a few years there I was doing quite well, I even got elected (well, no one else stood so I don't think it really counts) to represent my local gaming group on line...and now...crippling anxiety has me on the back foot.

Other One....

Remember a few posts back I talked about how I had never met "that guy" at a tournament?   Well, I met that fucking guy in a local hobby discussion forum...the guy threatened and cajoled me, even though I was on his side in a "debate", then made it personal and threatened legal action etc etc...all the Internet tough guy bullshit, I have it on very good authority that that individual is essentially persona non grata almost everywhere , and that no one has been spared his particular brand of bullying and bullshit...so that one I could chalk down as a weird blip and move on...after all, I have many more people that I can talk hobby with on the back of being that bastards victim.

So that was strike 1 , if you like...that was a while ago and I had promised not air my laundry in public, but this is why I haven't been writing anything for a fucking age...I have the bullshit of two Internet arguments blocking up my flow....one was just one guy who is universally regarded as a fucking knobber by the entire Glasgow scene(he is a stranger to me, I have never met him in the flesh and never want to, but the knobber title is one that has been earned by him from several people, so I use it here as the majority term).   The second one , from my PoV , its a guy who said the wrong thing, got a beef about it then perceived anything said by the other as hostile or trolling, even when the other party tried to smooth things over they rode roughshod over things as they believed they were right.  Now its mortal enemies over misunderstood words.

So that's why I haven't blogged in a while...I'm a fucking pussy who has let two random Internet bullshit conversations drag me down into a spiral that I need to fight to get out of.   I would have been the first in the past to ride on in here and say "don't worry about it, move on", but I just had to get this off my chest and out of my creative pipeline...After all...the world is about to end for 40K!