Did you know there isn't/wasn't a "where am I" thread on here before? Maybe that's because I'm the only one asking....and the rest of you know where you are.

Credit where credit is due: Wysiwyg spoke of "triage" on another thread which is what inspired me to use it here. She was speaking of the community experience, the word "ministry" was used too I recall. And the part of her post that woke me up, was when she spoke of people to whom she had given verbal advice, who "aren't read to listen." She went on to speak of how, years later, people who had consulted with her and who had not responded to her counsel at the time, would contact her again and say, okay, after all this time, NOW I hear you."

So, enough about Wysiwyg. What about me?

I am still smarting from the hostilities that resulted in the recent policy change at the Mudcat Café. And I wasn't even a direct target of those hostilities. I had to stop and ask myself why it smarts if it wasn't directed at me.

What smarts is, of course, old scar tissue, from long before encountering the community of Mudcatters. Old memories still hurt enough to change the way I draw breath. I have many memories growing up in a household in which almost everyone raised their voices, and nobody listened. This was a routine thing, happening several times a day. In fact, on some day when the vocalizing failed to happen, it was not a relief, but a warning signal that something much more dangerous might be happening.

Interestingly enough, the subjects about which voices were raised were not the subjects that have been getting forum threads closed of late. The vocalizers in my past, were not carrying on about religion or science, or debate versus verbal abuse, for example.

Oh, and in the interest of honesty, from childhood I was schooled when to raise my voice and when to shut up, which is to say that I too contributed to the vocalizing in my day. It is a fact that I did some yelling and hollering myself, and called people names, and so on. The others who were present will vouch for that, I would be lying if I said otherwise.

Examining the problem here and now, I observe two things about what I experienced as a routine occurrence. One, is that mentally speaking, the people who raised their voices were already decided. Nobody actually changed their minds at the end of the day. There was much verbal pressure to admit, you know, that my way is the right way, and if you don't think my way, you're wrong. But in fact the vocalizing decided nothing and changed nothing, and everybody ended up repeating what they had yelled and hollered on previous occasions, too many times to count.

The other thing, is all that emotion. A verbal or mental spark would ignite volatile emotion, and: ignition! Off we go! The words might not be all that emotional, even the topic might not be all that emotional, but there was definitely emotion fuelling the engine of the verbal carryings-on. And no words on anyone's part were of avail to check the emotion.

I'm going to pause here because it's really embarrassing to open up about this, and I have little alarms going off in my mind about it. Wysiwyg spoke of ministry, well, I am nothing like a minister nor am I in the helping profession. I ask for help more than I give it. Maybe somebody else here understands how I feel. I could go on but this post is long enough. Thanks for listening.