One of the (many) things still bothering me about Nuclear Drama, is that there's a fair number of people who now dislike /me/ that I don't know well enough to dislike myself.
That is, sure, they're blocked and I don't want to work with them or anything, because they said mean shit about me, but I legitimately don't know /them/ enough to actually like/dislike them as people.
This is frustrating, because people are assuming I dislike them or are angry with them or have personal emnity, and I honestly don't. I don't /know/ the person. They reacted to lies told about me by someone else, and have never actually interacted with me, and while I don't like how they treated me, I'm overall pretty neutral on them as humans. But people /think/ I dislike them. Which makes me feel like I have to kind of explain that I don't /know/ them.
I think that matters to me, because in general, I feel weird about disliking people. I want to dislike someone only after I took the time to get to know them enough that I /can/ dislike them. Disliking someone I've not really interacted with ever... that feels weird to me. I know there's nothing wrong with it or anything, and that it's fine to dislike people for whatever reason, but I want to do it because I've worked/talked/interacted with them and don't like how they handle themself, not for some round about reason that doesn't involve me attempting to see who they are and why they are like they are.
I'm in a position where I have to warn people that if they approach others about working with them for one of my projects, they might get met with negative reactions simply because it's for one of my projects. I'm not coming to those people to say "don't work with X person" (mostly), just "X person might be shitty to you if you ask." But that has caused people to reassure me they won't bring people into my project I don't like or who make me uncomfortable.
And in many cases I /don't/ dislike them. Or, not in a real way. I'm uncomfortable with them, because they were kind of shitty, but in quite a few of these cases, I think it's likely they got lied to, too. That they were told incorrect things, and didn't look into them. And sure, that makes them kind of sucky, but also makes them someone who's been manipulated. And yeah, they /should/ have talked to me before making weird, unilateral judgements. And yeah, I probably don't actually want to work with them anyway. But also, I don't really /dislike/ them, because I don't know enough about them to dislike.
And it feels super gross to me that other people will see this as me having animosity to these people. It feels like people are seeing me as being unforgiving (not opening up that whole subject, it's its own thing), and as holding grudges. And yeah, those grudges would be completely just and fair, but I'm /not holding them/. I don't know the people enough to be able to do that.
And so I'm finding myself following up the "you might get a crappy reaction" with "to be clear, I do not know this person, I have never interacted with this person, we've never spoken or worked together, and I legitimately have very little opinion on them as a human at all."
And that's /important/ to me, because so many of the angry people do not know me at all, and have not ever encountered me, or, in many cases, listened to any of my work.
And that matters.
It matters that at least 80% of the blowing up was people who had nothing to do with the situation, to the point of literally not knowing who I was prior to it.
I /need/ that to be seen.
Because it makes me feel like I'm going insane for people to think I'd developed this terrible reputation, rather than what actually happened which was someone stirred shit, and a lot of people jumped on the bandwagon.
(Today I am /very/ having a "what the fuck even WAS this" thoughts, about how people took Strong Moral Stands against me for... standing up for my right to have boundaries around myself, and what projects are connected to me, and use my material. And doing so in very polite terms, in private. And that people destroyed months of work, and tried to destroy more because of that. And that I literally cannot make this any bigger than that unless I just make shit up.)