Fuck your social cues
Now that I have your attention (let’s pretend my blogposts have regular readership)….
Yes, the title is a clickbait.
I do believe the ability to read social cues is an important skill. I am already an awkward person and I hate making a social situation even more awkward.
And I do think this skill makes you more tactful. I know how painful it is to deal with tactless people and I hate giving such experience to undeserving people.
But, this skill is not the be-all and end-all.
As important as it is to read the room, you also need to be honest. Why can’t you just be so with others? Your insistence to hide your true feelings is infuriating; it is even more so when someone repeatedly asks questions like “are you sure?”, giving you multiple opportunities to come clean… and you choose to keep lying, like a backstabbing and cowardly pussy you are.
Unless there are severe repercussions to your straightforwardness and honesty, you deserve the discomfort and the distress caused by your refusal to speak up. You can criticise someone’s inability to read the room. But, let’s not pretend you are not a victim of your own doing.
If it is trauma-related, get a therapy. Don’t wait until you suddenly blow up and burden people around you with the surge of unexpected negative emotions.
And I haven’t talked about the inconsistency.
It took me a long time to had this painful realisation: as bad as I was in reading social cues, I was NEVER that bad.
There were indeed times when I failed to see the cues and I definitely get better as I age. But, there were also times when I did nothing wrong and yet I still got berated anyway.
Let me give you a very specific and definitely not personal example:
If you are the type of person who always complains about every inconvenience imaginable, minor or not, like how bland the foods are, how the foods don’t have enough certain ingredients, how tired you are washing the dishes, how tired you are too drive, how hot the weather is, how dark the room is, how smelly I am, how bad my driving is, how mannerless I am, it is obvious you have the ability to express your displeasure; even if you never ask explicitly, it is obvious you want me to either help you or to change myself according to your liking. If you don’t complain about it, that means you are fine with it.
Except, that’s not true, is it?
There are times when you berate me because I am not sensitive enough to detect your displeasure about something, even though not once you complain about that something, not once you tiredly sigh about doing it. You expect me to be a mind reader.
To make it even more infuriating, you berate me when I try to help doing something you clearly struggle with, saying I am more a burden than a help.
You can tell I am talking about a very specific individual in my life. But, others are also guilty of such thing, albeit to a lesser extent.
Now, let’s talk about things which everyone is almost equally guilty of.
The same people who have chastised me for not reading their cues… are also the same ones who don’t read mine. They disregard my discomfort every time they cross my personal boundaries; they ask personal/inappropriate questions and they act like they are my close family members or best friends, even though they are mere acquaintances.
I can attribute their disregard of boundaries to one thing: they are Indonesians.
Yes, we Indonesians think no one is entitled to privacy and only entitled to tiny personal spaces. We are very Kepo… and my God, some of us take pride in that label. It explains why they don’t take heed of my discomfort; either they don’t see how anyone can be uncomfortable about it OR they know, they just don’t care.
But, that does not explain the double standard about the teasing.
I don’t know why others are allowed to make jokes about aspects of my life which I am insecure about… and yet, I am considered rude if I dare to flip the table. I was told it is rude to insult people, unless the insults are about me.
Maybe, socially, I don’t deserve the tactfulness. I was a fat, socially-awkward, introverted stutterer who did not share my peers’ interests and who failed societal masculinity demands…. and I still have all of those traits. Maybe, they think my status is too lowly to deserve it. God forbids when entitled older people are involved.
And when they do embrace tact, it is duplicitous. They do it NOT because they acknowledge me as a fellow human being who also deserves respect, but because they see me as a spoiled child with tantrum issue. Their speaking tone is undeniably patronising.
I don’t know if the following things are relevant or tangential.
People insist I actually never try to get rid of my speech impediment; they are also the same people who insist they feel victimised by my stuttering, even though I am the one who has to deal with the stigma, whose self-esteem is in ruins.
People — specifically extroverts — insist I don’t know the joy of human bonding; not only I know the feeling, I can definitely say mine is genuine as I am not one of those weirdos who befriend people just for the sake of it and ending up with skin-deep bonding.
When I was in high school, a few people insisted I was jealous of my sister because our mom bought her a new car. Not only I wasn’t jealous, I have always hated driving; I drive simply because my city has shit mass transit and walkability.
People love to confidently yet wrongly make assumptions about me. The less they know me, the more confident and wrong they are.
Also infuriatingly, they love to bother me when I am clearly busy doing something.
It should be obvious when I am doing school assignments, driving on dangerous Indonesian roads, cooking laborious/time-consuming recipes, typing professionally-consequential business letters, talking with the banks/utilities companies on the phone, holding heavy and fragile things, or thinking of a solution for an urgent and complex problem, you are not entitled to my full attention. If anything, you should consider yourself lucky I am willing to give you some.
And I haven’t talked about the people who get angry when I don’t immediately answer their non-urgent questions….. while I am having a coughing or sneezing fit.
I have to mention those because the same people guilty of them also overlap with the hypocritical social cues assholes.
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