N.B. This originally appears on my Substack. And I don’t want to keep writing about the attack that happened to me at the beginning of November. But I think the possible reason why it happened is important, and other people in these situations might be able to get some insights from it to help with their self-reflection/healing, so that’s why this post exists and why I put it on the website, too.
TLDR; I was attacked on X/Twitter after trying to participate on a kpop fandom post, and because I’m naive/used to accepting accusations, I believed them when they told me I made a major social mistake. But after LOTS of self-reflecting and analyzing the situation, I realised that they were not fair to me and projected a lot of negative things onto me.
So at first, my concern was with bringing an end to cancel culture.
But then…
I came across a tiktok (by theastrologyboy) talking about traits of people with Mars in the 10th house. They said that these people (lol me included) usually have a vibe of dominance, competitiveness, and authority in the way we walk through life, and we’re not always aware of it. This includes our communication styles.
And to be fair – there are times when I’m really not aware of it (more on that in a bit).
But I think because I’m also a Gemini moon (hello overthinking), I have learned to recognize it sometimes. So when I do, I try to stop and ask myself what’s going on (within me) that’s making me react that way.
Mainly because…
I DO NOT LIKE COMPETING WITH PEOPLE.
Ahem. I’m not sure if the caps were enough. So let me see if I can do that a little better.
I DO NOT LIKE COMPETING WITH PEOPLE.
Cool. The heading and bold and italics really stand out. I hope I made myself clear on how I feel about that kinda stuff.
Which brings me to the times I’m not aware of it.
Take for example that attack I experienced the other day in the kpop fandom.
My response to that person’s post began with something like, “I love topics like this so I’m glad you posted it!!”
But that wasn’t what the post creator focused on. All they saw (according to what their friends said when they attacked me) was that I was “shitting on her hard work” and rude for changing everything she wrote.
Re-reading what I posted (I saved screenshots)…I was definitely trying to add to the post – not change it. Yes, what I shared was MOSTLY different than what they wrote (there WAS one similarity, though, if we want to get technical)…
BUT with those differences, I was also listing reasons and memories.
And since a lot of kpop fans review memories together as a way of participating in the fandom…it’s a logical way to try and create connection (participate) with other fans.
Aka…I felt that my post didn’t make sense without their post. Which is why I posted under their post, and see it as an attempt at participation.
Anyways.
The post creator didn’t agree. And their friends…
(wait, there’s a little update on that, too: the twitter app glitched and showed me IT WAS A LOT MORE THAN SIX PEOPLE)…
Ahem. Once their friends revealed the “real” reasons they attacked me, I thought the entire situation was possibly due to some kind of ego wound the post creator experienced. I still didn’t understand what could have done it, though. The vibe from my posts is a happy one (I tried to look at it a bit objectively, even though I know I’m probably always going to have some bias since I wrote it).
So…there’s another idea it could be.
Wait for it.
Wait.
Take a deep breath with me – *breathes in and out.*
Okay…
“Hierarchy.”
And let me note here that I actually h&te that word/concept. It doesn’t help anyone anywhere, and it forces everyone to be in competition with each other but there aren’t any hard rules so it’s quite literally made up and different for everyone.
Which leaves a lot of room for conflict when everyone has a slightly different understanding of what the ranking is.
But to some people, it’s a very real and important concern.
So combining the ideas behind 10th house mars communication styles, and hierarchy status, this might be what’s happening:
- Person with 10th house mars speaks normally (for them) in a group
- Someone sees it and thinks it’s authoritative/competitive, and thus a threat to their position in the hierarchy of the group, so they go into fight-flight-fawn-freeze.
- if they think they can’t win, they choose fawn/flight/freeze
- if they see evidence of weakness, they choose fight
- Regardless of the outcome, they tell everyone that the person with mars in 10th house is a problem. They do this in order to maintain a positive image of themselves despite the situation, which serves as a sign of their hierarchy position
- if they chose flight/fawn/freeze, person with mars in 10th is called a bully because a bully will always be seen as lower status than the flight/fawn/freeze person by any onlookers
- if they chose fight, the person with mars in 10th is called rude/other insults/told to apologize and “take the L” to show the mars in 10th person is lower in the hierarchy because they’re expected to do what everyone else wants (kind of like how customers treat cashiers, which is considered an entry position in the workforce)
Applied to this specific attack:
Her first reply to me actually looked like it might have been fawning (it was passive aggressive enough for me to see there was some kind of issue, but I didn’t really understand what was going on).
But then as I showed that I was willing to apologize/do what she wanted…….(*facepalm* I also kept talking like a mars in 10th house as I made suggestions on how to prevent future unwanted interactions because I felt hurt and was trying to communicate that there are healthy ways to set boundaries)…….she switched tactics and chose fight.
So that show of weakness plus my further “mars in 10th style” suggestion might explain why she attacked me even though I had already apologized.
Basically:
- She might have cared about hierarchy and maybe saw my attempt at participation as challenging her position in the fandom hierarchy, but maybe didn’t feel powerful enough to do much about it at first
- and then my apology showed just enough weakness to maybe give her the idea she could win, and my continued “mars in 10th style” speaking might have confirmed her suspicions that she had to do something, which could prompt a switch in tactics to fight (resulting in a win)
- and then she called me rude/made a post about my audacity, possibly as a method of asserting her dominance/authority, which her followers got behind without checking both sides of the story and then also made demands from me.
- But I didn’t see any hierarchy at all, and just wanted to join in on the fun (participate)…
- so her responses baffled me, and then hurt/upset me because I thought I was failing to socialize/participate/made a big social mistake, and then finally I recognized there was nothing I could do so I asked for us to mutually block, then made a post asking people in the fandom to be kinder to each other or find a healthy outlet for aggression
- and then the attacks from her followers came after everything I said and made me worry that it would continue and/or spread towards sabotage of my creative pursuits since people have done similar to me before and I’ve seen how far it can go,
- so I had to leave the fandom/platform, and continued feeling upset but still didn’t fully understand why it worked out like that (until this idea).
- Bonus: Group research also shows that group members will try to get “misbehaving” people to conform (aka, “take the L”) when they see someone acting in ways they don’t like, and then if someone persists, they’ll get even more mean about it, and then finally they’ll ostracize someone if the person still won’t conform to what they want. So I think that’s essentially what they did to me,
- but it probably only started because the post creator didn’t like THE WAY my reply came across…not the content.
- and even if I had of “taken the L” and apologized A SECOND TIME, like I’ve done in situations before, it means that i would have been agreeing to a lower hierarchy in their eyes
- and from past experience when I’ve done that to keep the peace: anything I said after that would have to be self-censored, or else it would be met with worse attacks or just ostracization.
Anyways.
It’s interesting how one tiktok video explaining an idea/concept in just the right way can spark a new (possible) understanding. The entire time when situations like this happened…I just thought that people randomly decided they didn’t like me from very little evidence. Or that I wasn’t communicating well.
But maybe it really wasn’t about me (so cliche) or my communication skills at all. Maybe it was just hierarchy stuff mixing in a specific way with the way I (learned to) talk because of my mars in my 10th house.
Because yes…I learned how to write and talk with more assertion in like…2015? Everyone kept telling me that I was a pushover, and too gentle, and that’s why no one ever listened to me or took me seriously.
So I literally went and learned from a bunch of experts how to type and speak more assertively.
But ever since then, the above sequence of events has been a bit of a pattern with some people, but I didn’t really understand why. It’s not like people will tell you overtly, “hey I feel a little threatened about my imaginary place in line because of the way you’re speaking!”
Even when I find myself getting competitive, it isn’t about hierarchy, for me, so I don’t really understand that kinda thing.
Which means….the people who DO care about it actually have to spell out that problem for people like me.
In this case? I still tried to consider their feelings even though I was confused, but…they escalated, and it happened fast. It hurt, because I was really just trying to participate. It felt like it came from nowhere and was personal.
So it did feel like they bullied me, especially as more and more people piled in, whereas no one came to my defense. The twitter app glitched yesterday and showed me that they’re happily posting as if nothing happened, socializing and having fun. Meanwhile…I’ve been processing, self-reflecting, and trying to figure out what to do this whole time.
I worried a lot that I’d have to abandon this pen name, and all the work associated with it, out of fears of sabotage. Maybe it doesn’t look like much to some people, but this was a lot of work to build the little that I have.
And I haven’t wanted to interact with that fandom much, because very few people are working to solve these issues when they come up. But then it repeats, and repeats, and repeats…and it’s not healthy for the individuals it affects nor the fan group as a whole. So I’m assessing how much I want to interact with that group knowing there’s a lot of unaddressed pain going around.
Final Thoughts
For anyone struggling after similar situations, I also came across a tiktok (by sbbigs) talking about her red ball theory (she explains it better, so please look into it!). The gist of it is: when someone flings their stuff at us in an effort to make us carry it for them (such as, telling us we’re crazy over normal interactions, or need to stop being rude when we aren’t being rude, etc), some of us hang onto these “red balls” longer than we should.
But it was never ours to carry in the first place. That negative feeling was their issue to sort through. Although instead of facing it themselves, they tried to put it on us and make us deal with it. And it’s impossible for us to deal with because…it’s not ours.
This is something I had thought I healed and learned to recognize/set boundaries around. But I guess healing isn’t linear and I needed the reminder.
So I stand by what I said in my other article: in difficult situations, I think people need to learn to pause, and communicate/ask clarifying questions. Or maybe even stop, self-reflect, and ask themselves (because no one else can answer this for someone else) “wait – why am I feeling xyz about this?”
And if we don’t start doing those things more regularly to maintain positive relationships in our interest groups…then it’s time to ask ourselves: what really matters to us in the modern world? If it’s not community and health, then what’s really going on since we kind of need those things to survive as a species?
Disclaimer: while this idea seems to fit, it’s possible there was something else going on for her which is why I tried to word everything as “might” or “maybe”. But it is a fact that she and her friends kept attacking me by putting their beliefs onto me (calling me crazy/rude/full of audacity/not able to understand how threads work/needing to apologize when I already did, etc).
That wasn’t fair to me. And I’m not going to carry their beliefs about me.
I might even go back to big social media sometime and just be a happy/excited fan like I was trying to be.
Shout out to Irene Celis (on X) for reminding me that it shouldn’t matter what other people think of us when we know we didn’t do anything wrong, and that sometimes it really is as simple as explaining our situation and leaving it at that. I think that talk helped a lot.
***
PS –
I’ve posted this with the intention of showing that I’ve fully processed the interaction, that I do not feel it was fair to me (with reasons why), and in hopes of helping anyone else who may be going through similar situations because this seems to be common among many modern groups (especially for people who are neurodivergent or have CPTSD).
PPS – I was able to think of an example where I previously did the same action, and it was not a social mistake. This fan art below was also something I posted under someone else’s post. My rationale: I didn’t want it to seem like my own idea because it wasn’t (it was a different spin on theirs) so I posted it under their art.
The artists’ response? They were glad that I found their work inspiring…
