TobyTheSkunkKit
mhoyeOne of the things I’ve learned about the consequences of bullying is that when people tell you things like “I’m pretty bad at math” or “computers aren’t for me” or “I don’t really get art or fashion” and you talk to them for a bit what you often find - not always, but often - is what that really means is “somebody treated me like shit for trying to like this when I was 9.”
People will tell damn near any awful, demeaning story about themselves, build a whole identity around damn near any narrow, constrained, paranoid worldview only to give themselves some glimmer of meaning, some reason, when the alternative - the truth - is all that pain, all the cruelty of the people inflicting it, meant nothing. Confronting the fact that you've spent a lifetime convinced to hate something you could have loved, for no reason at all, is too monstrous to consider.
Dreaming of dad jazz.@mhoye let's also consider the terrible culture around "if you're bad at something you should never ever do that thing"
Reina 
@mhoye Thanks. I needed to "hear" this :)
I've recently started enjoying fashion which took me years to do, in many ways because of a combination of bullying as a kid and feeling this need to dress the way people expect rather than how I want.
The Animal and the Machine@mhoye @Daojoan
Seconded. Although I think a lot of the problem is that some people’s lives are so empty the only thing that gives them meaning and a sense of something bigger than themselves is to be a part of the tribe.
The next step is the reverse engineered logic of ‘I’m not evil, I am good’ and so therefore ‘my opinions are the right ones’ closed mind. You cannot defeat this bubble of logic as it’s sealed off from rational thought. The final piece is that empathy is taught, or we as a species could never have hunted. If you don’t learn to care you have no input to shake your logic.
You are left with a small town with a small town mentality and of the fresh blood, well, the smart people leave.
ethan@mhoye The opposite of this also constrains people: spending a lifetime convinced to love something that you should have reconsidered many times.
It took me about twelve years to decide I was no longer Christian (or religious).
PJ "Vote Green" CoffeyYeah there's a lot of that goes about.
arclight@mhoye There is this entire trope of Women, Math, and That Misogynist Math Teacher. The number of women I've met all with approximately the same experience is staggering and depressing. K-12 math education is some weird magnet for misogynists.
Colman Reilly
MylesRyden@arclight @mhoye My niece wanted to study astronomy in college. After not doing well on a math test her advisor told her that is why she will never have a career in astronomy (or by implication any other science). Made it pretty clear that it wasn't her, women just can't do math.
Unfortunately she quit immediately.
ಚಿರಾಗ್ 🌹✊🏾Ⓥ🌱🇵🇸 (he/him)
Anna Miriamsdochter@arclight @mhoye I had Mrs S. for maths and intro to CS when I was 12. She was marvellous. Gave zero fucks, wore short leather skirts, kept us updated on her mum’s adventures running a corner tobacco shop, made extra booklets because she thought 12 was an excellent age to start pure algebra and group theory. She propelled me right into studying physics at uni through five years of asshole male teachers after her.
JA Westenberg@arclight Smart enough to teach math but not smart enough to be a mathematician and extremely mad about it lol
@Daojoan "No; clearly it is the women who are wrong..." #TheEternalStruggleOfLisaSimpson
Kaz
James Baillie@mhoye A common alternative of "I don't hugely like this despite people expecting I ought to, and got publicly shamed for not doing so when younger, I've had to make that into A Trait About Myself to cope with it" happens too I think.
Mx. Luna Corbden 🐸@JubalBarca @mhoye Yeah, I think this variant (mild disinterest turns into identity traits centered on hating the thing) is common when it comes to geeks hating sports. I think our subculture has chilled out about it these days, but in me at least, there was all this pressure to like it, media portrayals that it was necessary to like it in order to be socially accepted, people who were bad at sports singled out for ridicule in school. This was not my source of disliking it, but certainly my source of vocally making a show of disliking it.
Isibnuy 🐇@mhoye me with sports
I swear if I never got graded for badminton I'd probably really like it
I swear if I never got graded for badminton I'd probably really like it
Leona@michaelcoyote @mhoye school sports is just illogical. How exactly do they manage to pretend there would be the same standards everyone could reach if kids can have undiagnosed disabilities and similar that aren't their fault
@isibell @michaelcoyote it makes perfect sense when you realize that the worst teachers at any school were made to teach gym so they didn’t wreck anyone’s arts or science grades.
Rob 🏳️🌈 Rartsy Humanist@isibell @michaelcoyote @mhoye I came to talk about sports but it’s still hard to share. Just not a safe space for gay me in the 70s-80s. I’ve never been physically fit or comfortable. I have avoided so many activities that continues to now, even now when I’m much more comfortable as myself. Sports culture felt so toxic to me. So many things did. So it’s not that I was explicitly discouraged from participating, but it felt alienating.
@RMiddleton
Yeah, it sucks people have this sort of damage around sports and exercise.
Michaela Sue@michaelcoyote @isibell @mhoye The PE thing that really got me was being expected to play the "popular" sports without ever being told the rules and procedures because I guess "everyone already knows."
John Schrag@mhoye This is so true. When I was younger I used to direct an adult community choir. Some new members had this tentative, self-apologetic quiet way of singing which over years I came to recognize. I’d ask them if someone in their life told them as a child that they shouldn’t sing, and they’d reply “how did you know?”
John Ward
Bethany Brookshire@mhoye The way this hit me right in the live experience my god.
PeoriaBummer@mhoye @rodneylives Had a student respond to a question with “I’m bad at math.” I told her, “No you’re not. Whoever gave you that idea was wrong. We’re not in a hurry. Take your time and do your best.” She paused a second and then answered the question correctly without difficulty.
Schroedingers_Cat@mhoye Computers is my bag, and whenever people say they struggle with computers, I talk about how the problem is not them, but the computer systems.
The systems are not people friendly, often. They are geek-friendly (sometimes).
And believe me, I have seen tools that make techies want to try something else too.
So often - in all these areas - the problem is not that "I don't get on with this" - it is, as you say, someone has dismissed their problems, not tried to adjust for them.
Bee O'Problem 
@SteveClough @mhoye the thing that frustrates me these days is that geek friendly is disappearing. It's more like marketing/PR friendly
I've lost count of the number of times a site/app goes "UwU Something Went Wrong!" with actual useful info maybe buried somewhere only a turbo-geek would actually think to look. For a geek it's frustrating and for an ordinary user I imagine it's flat out demoralizing.
@beeoproblem @SteveClough That doesn't bother me on the website side of things, because there's basically nothing an end user human can do about a website. It's infuriating if it's a program I can modify on a device I own though.
@mhoye @SteveClough one case where it was a problem I could fix on my end was when uploading a video to the birdsite. It had an encoding issue but the error message refused to say what it was. I was able to find the actual problem in Chrome's devtools though. EDIT: otherwise, I agree, most errors are beyond the user's control
Not exactly a nice experience for a user.
Mark Gardner@SteveClough @mhoye My standard response when someone expresses a computer problem is, “I apologize on behalf of my entire industry. I don’t know the answer, but let’s search the web for it, OK?”
Ranna@mhoye as someone who spent a lot of time teaching art to kids as young as four, it unfortunately happens younger than nine. I'd have literal toddlers tell me they were bad artists.
@Ranna I spend a lot of time saying, you're not bad, you're not stupid, you're not useless, you're young. You're inexperienced. Don't talk yourself out of loving this now just because it's not what you could be making in 20 years.
@mhoye The words good and bad were banned from my lessons. I would say "bad" just means "i don't like this" and "good" just means "i like this" and everyone likes different things. (This is easier to do with art than other subjects)
I noticed that no one has to tell kids they're "bad" at something. Oftentimes they watch the kids who are "good" get a lot of praise and, when they don't get any form of positive reinforcement, come to the conclusion that they are "bad" at the thing on their own.
✨pencilears✨@mhoye extremely true for people who think they can't draw
sidereal@mhoye See this is why I hated grades in school. Giving kids paperwork telling them that they suck at things they're already struggling with is actually a terrible pedagogical strategy.
ReallyCanadianFly@mhoye sounds like the history of humanity. "I don't get this or like this so I'm going to denigrate or demean anyone who has an interest in it, especially when they're first trying it so their confidence is at the lowest to protect them from criticism." Repeat over thousands of years.
J.S. Pailly@mhoye I appreciate this, and relate to this, so damn hard. Thank you.
Jeff ♨️ Darcy@mhoye Yup. For me, it was physical things. I was always that nerdy kid (didn't help that I was always a year younger and thus smaller too) who couldn't possibly be good at sports. It was quite a while after I finished growing that I realized ... hey. I'm actually pretty damn good at physical stuff. Who knew? Not me, because I'd been (forcibly) told otherwise.
@Obdurodon @mhoye You were also in the gifted early-admission club? If there’s one fundamental mistake my parents made with me, it was listening to whoever advised them to do that.
Sumire@mhoye Thanks for this post! And to my followers, read the comments on this, it sums up my feelings on this.
I had a nice math teacher but he wasn't really good at explaining things to me. I was a typical "I am to stupid to understand math." girl. Accidentaly started studying informatics though. I don't love math now, but I it can be really cool and is definitely no high magic stuff...
My teacher laughed hard as I told him, whats my job now. He thought I would go doing something with art.
knirirr
Helle, Queen of Dissociation 
@mhoye having to rediscover my enjoyment of making art is an ongoing project. Thanks school for adding deadlines and grading and ruining it for me.
@mhoye YESYESYES
Stuck HereWatch people who apologize often for things that are totally out of their control too. It is a sign of them being put down often, blamed for failures in the need to keep order and the peace.
I'm one of these. I learned peace making skills from my mom when we both had to brace the turmoil caused by angry people, narcissistic people.
There is an inheritance of hurt that can be carried by future generations and they haven't a clue as to who bequethed it.
Jen@mhoye oh, my, yes!
I've had to significantly rewrite my self-understanding twice because of this.
1) I was terrible at writing at school, to the point of being tested for dyslexia. At 30, I accidentally became a technical author. Turns out handwriting and wordsmithing are separate skills.
2) I was always "terrible" at all sports. Literal *years* of encouragement from my brother saw me complete C25K. I'm just not aggressively competitive and PE classes were awful.
Alexander Knochel
Colin Rosenthal ✡️🕎 ❤️🇮🇱❤️ 🕎✡️@mhoye The art teacher who told us he didn’t believe in giving failing grades to anyone ended up giving me one :-). Otoh the music teachers who told me I couldn’t sing were, in fact, wrong. It turns out that singing is a technique which you can actually _learn_. Who knew? Well, not them obviously.
Indigo 🏳️⚧️
OH MY GOD! This is my best girlfriend I swear!
She says this about computers and videogames!
I found out why about both, but never coorelated it. I found out that she was picked on RECENTLY on videogames.
"Man Girlname, you suck" is what a guy told her. Like jeez. Ugh
@mhoye @randomgeek Just @ me and my pudgy non-athletic eating-my-feelings-because-of-playground-kickball-trauma next time
Lisa the Rue@mhoye Having a 9-year-old right now, I can confirm this, but also that a 9-year-old's social antennae are so over-sensitive, as they learn to tune them, that some of the discouragement and aversion are purely invented, imagined, and sadly self-inflicted. It takes good parents, teachers and others to overcome the common 9-year-old starting point of "I've never tried X / I'm not good at X / people will judge me if I do X"
Mel@lisarue around that age my youngest’s teacher did a thing where she’d add “yet”. They even did an assignment along the lines of “I’m not good at X yet, but I’m learning”. And they talked about ways they could learn/get better at that thing. I loved it and found it so encouraging because it acknowledged that they weren’t good at it, but that they could be.
Lance Bachmeier@mhoye Art and music teachers were the worst when I was a kid. They never actually did any teaching. They just raged against those of us that weren't enlightened and criticized our work.
Ursidinoj/The Bjornsdottirs@mhoye being human isn't for me. I just want fur and a fluffy tail and cute lil pointy ears