One's job in life, Skipy, is not pleasing other people. It is being true to oneself as best one can.

The trouble with trying to please other people is...it's impossible to ever manage it perfectly.

I say this because I have, for example, a Mother who has spent so much of her energies attempting (fruitlessly) to please other people that she has basically wasted about 95% of her available life energy on it...and to utterly no purpose! She would have probably pleased them just as much (or even more) if she hadn't bothered with that particular obsession, but just been herself for God's sake!

To avoid "upsetting anyone" is impossible. I know, I've tried. ;-) If you do something, guess what? Someone doesn't like it. If you do something different, someone else doesn't like it. If you do absolutely NOTHING at all, someone else doesn't like THAT! It's hopeless.

The best one can do is simply try to "do unto others as one would like them to do unto you" or to put it another way....avoid doing to others what would hurt you.

Now, in this case, you happened, innocently, to start a thread which upset certain people...and from their point of view, that's totally understandable...while from your point of view, you didn't mean to upset anyone.

Okay, fine. It's nothing to leave the forum over.

I repeat: You are not living your life in ORDER to please other people. That's not the purpose of life. Its purposes are to learn, to grow in understanding, to communicate, and to love.

You also must not necessarily feel required to do "what you said you would do", as if the words bound you in some way. That kind of thinking sent thousands of young Japanese soldiers and airmen to bloody death in World War II, totally unnecessarily.

Who do you think this sort of self-sacrifice will please? And why should it be necessary? You're not guilty of anything, nor are you here to meet anyone's expectations. Nor are any of us.

But if you simply don't feel comfortable here now...well, then, by all means leave. That's your business, after all.

Consider this: If everyone here who ever upset anyone else was by that token bound by honor to LEAVE this forum...you know how many people would still be here? None, that's what I figure. Well, maybe one or two who almost never post here. ;-)