The AirPods Effect

I strongly feel that that's the thing that's mitigated modern queer integration into popular society.

I understand that being either loud and proud or even just unabashedly your own self can be trying at times. I know, by first hand experience (as a cis-ish passing transwoman if you squint), that embodying your own reality in public can be a difficult and damaging experience...

But it's just...necessary. Even on a completely selfish front, no one's going to accept me myself for who I am if I can't tell people who I am. And then there's the larger front that those who have come before me did some of the work to make my life easier, and that by my own work I can make the lives of those who come after me easier.

It's just...sad, you know? Like I know it's hard for us to keep banging our heads against the wall. It's hard to go out in public and recieve insult after insult. It is hard to visit an unfamiliar locale not knowing how we will be accepted. But we have to! Literally the only path to acceptance lies through exposure.

That's the real reason that I am so sociable. I know that the only way past the insults is past the insults. If I only ever hide in the closet...well, the closet isn't all that big is it? I believe that if I show up as myself in any and every interaction I can only have a positive effect. At worst, I find people so bigotted that they are beyond help, avoid them, and pray for those few. In the middle everyone lets me slide. At best, I find bigots who I can expose to reality as it is and help them to get over their fears and prejudices.

I have found through experience, that this reality is closer to the best of possible worlds I just described and far from the worst of the worlds I just described. I have been rewarded time and time again in my encounters, finding countless people that I am able to relieve of their fears and knowing that I have saved countless unknown queers from the vitriol that those I have helped would otherwise have spewed.

It's very telling that you think creepy and ugly are you synonyms and non-creepy and attractive are synonyms.

Those guys are creepy too.

If they're a non-creepy guy, it's because they don't behave like a creep. Not because they're handsome.

I actually made the decision long before I was ever capable of carrying out the act itself.

I was in a depressive suicidal hole, and had been for well over a decade. The first time I tried to kill my self, I was seven years old.

It began with the realization, while I was trying to drink myself to the courage to finally pull the trigger, that the common refrain "it's all my fault" meant just a bit more than I'd given it credit for.

I realized, huddle on the floor behind my recliner because it was the smallest place I could find and fit in to, that if the desperate quality of my life were truly entirely my own fault, then it could be possible that I could stop being the source of my own malcontent. That was enough to save me from that particular suicidal flare. That I could stop harming myself.

It's been many years from then, and it was many years from there to when I realized that I could even be a source of happiness for myself instead of merely not harming myself.

But it was a choice that I was making, to view myself as inept, beyond salvation, capable of and likely to ruin everything, hater of my fellow mankind, etc. I have found in the years since the last time I tried to kill my self that almost every single unhappiness in my life was a matter of perspective rather than a genuine immutable fact.

Consider the article. People are noisy. Do I have to be upset about that? I certainly used to be bothered by all sorts of rude and noisy people. On the train, at the library, in the grocery, etc. That anger contributed to my general dismay of humanity such that I used to feel that it was all hopeless, and that if everything were hopeless, I shouldn't persist in trying.

That posture was a choice. Choosing to make the effort to no longer adopt that posture was a choice. That I have continued to attempt to make the choice to be compassionate and equanimous towards others is a choice that I have struggled with, and have ultimately both struggled with and succeeded in pursuing.

It's a choice that I have ultimately benefitted from. I cannot possibly see going back to the world in which I elevate my own concerns so highly above others that I simply and outright refuse to observe their own suffering. The world's a bummer, for sure, but for me personally, I am happier observing the problems and contributing to their diminution than I ever was ignoring or pretending the problems didn't exist.

I'm sorry that you think I'm asking anything of anyone, and that you think I've got anything at all adjacent to a religious attitude. Neither could be further from the truth. I am merely sharing my own experience as a contrasting example to the phenomenon described. I know that many people associate certain words with religious activity, but I can assure you that I definitely do not practious any such thing, and would never advise anyone else to do any such thing.

I used to be a person who shut everyone and everything out. I used to do so because I believed that anyone and everything were the source of my suicidal ideation. When I chose to change my beliefs, to believe that perhaps I was the source of my own discontent, was the first moment that I had a glimpse of a future in which I was no longer suicidal.

I just figured this was an opportunity to be like "hey, listening to and talking to people is actually possibly a good thing because it was for me even though I used to think otherwise"

Wildly unfriendly and standoffish, but also extremely unaccepting of dinguses blasting music without headphones on trains and buses. You win some, you lose some. I’ll embrace the silence and make my friends outside of transit and elevators, I think. (Bias disclaimer: PNW dweller for the past 9 years)

And you can't see, at all, that the folks who choose to wear business suits feel precisely the same way?

That they like getting compliments from the people they interact with? That it makes them feel good about themselves and feel like it matches who they are?

That the suit feels good too them due to the materials being quality and expensive?

That they would never feel good in leather because it's not who they are? That even if the leather wasn't sweaty and sticky, they'd still feel horrible?

Both of y'all are doing the same shit. You're wearing what you want to wear because it feels good to you and it feels good to you because you get compliments on it and getting compliments on it means that you've been accepted by the group you wish to be accepted by.

The suit and the leather gimp suit are the same thing. The vest and the kapris are the same thing. The turtle neck and the neck tie are the same thing. They are all status symbols. They all say "I want to talk to people dressed like this" and probably "I don't want to talk to anyone who dresses like that"