"Let me splain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up."
The LGBTQ one was born of my general advocacy related to homelessness because LGBTQ individuals are at high risk of homelessness. But the positioning of the site made it sound like it was about someone I used to know whom I want nothing more to do with ever again, so that was a problem.
Another problem is that I'm sort of an edge case, not really heterosexual and not really LGBTQ. I've wrestled with how to talk about that because I don't know of good existing language. I've come up with phrases like "I'm very hetero passing" and "Men are my favorite flavor and I have no real reason to get with a woman."
The fact that I'm not actually straight helped make me a useful resource for the troubled trans youth the site was sort of named after but that was a private relationship. I never knew how to translate those private conversations to writing more publicly while protecting that individual's privacy.
Ultimately, I ended up feeling uncomfortably like I was coming across as "straight splaining" to the LGBTQ community and the site mostly languished. So at the moment I am thinking it's probably better for any LGBTQ advocacy I do to be more baked in to other things as one ingredient and not the main thrust of it.
Similarly, I am a small part Native American and ended up feeling like my blog about Native American stuff was coming across as "White splaining." I think that's not good for me and not good for other people reading it.
This is kind of a punchline from one of my all-time favorite online conversations:
So you're saying you agree with me: The world works different for women than men, so telling a woman "If you're sweating while working hard in the heat, take your top off." would be actively bad advice that assumes she's merely stupid for not doing so?I spent many years arguing with a very articulate husband where we both did this stupid stuff of trying to nail each other to the wall over "But you SAID..." rather than actually trying to understand each other. And then during my divorce, I had a string of relationships with men who spoke English as a second (or third or fourth) language.
It meant that when we had stupid fights I could very sincerely say "I have no idea what you are talking about. I never said that. I never thought that. I don't know where you got that from. I'm hurting. You're hurting. Can we not do this? I think this is a terrible misunderstanding."
Kind of like Madonna in the above video returning at the end to her original position, minus all the people pulling on her, I am trying to get back to telling my story when I blog and giving my point of view, but hopefully with fewer openings for people to latch onto my words and act like I've somehow said something about them and their life and it's a reason to hate on me.
In a world with roughly eight billion people from myriad different backgrounds, effective online communication is often much harder than I originally expected it to be. Telling my story seems like the best way to try to say something true and meaningful and potentially useful to other people in a way that is in line with the values I live by.