Today I received a hate mail. It was completely unexpected. Apparently someone I encountered in passing earlier today had created an entire fantasy around an actual set of events, and had rearranged things in their mind to create a fantasy version of those events. In their fantasy I was some sort of larger-than-life villain. The venom and sheer nastiness of the email I received was a bit overwhelming, and more than a little scary.<\/p>\n
When something like this happens, a part of me wants to argue, to defend myself, to point out the various places where my correspondent’s version of events has deviated from reality. But it’s no use. The fact that someone has even sent such an email means that they are not invested in reality – at least not in the way that you or I understand it.<\/p>\n
In the end I realized I needed to just walk away, to not answer the email at all. There is no such thing as a constructive argument with a person who is not starting from reality. And yet it feels terrible, this knowledge that I am simply walking away from a fellow human being – one who on some level is clearly crying out in pain.<\/p>\n
Yes, it feels terrible, and yet there is no useful answer that I can give them, nothing that I can do – I cannot enter their reality, even to try to lead them out of it. The inner pain that leads this person to send such terrible messages of hate is not a pain that I could ever hope to heal. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Today I received a hate mail. It was completely unexpected. Apparently someone I encountered in passing earlier today had created an entire fantasy around an actual set of events, and had rearranged things in their mind to create a fantasy version of those events. In their fantasy I was some sort of larger-than-life villain. The … Continue reading “Hate mail”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/415"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=415"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/415\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=415"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=415"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=415"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}