memes

NDs know, perhaps better than most, that victory always begins in the mind. It’s the first fight and often the hardest. It isn’t easy to see beyond present circumstances to a reality that does not yet exist. Convincing oneself that it could enables the vision required to know what to do next. Without it one can only react.

I see a lot of people on lemmy who are obviously hurting and scared. They come here to validate their despair among others whose hope for a better future has been cauterized repeatedly, who are similarly traumatized by current events. They are not yet ready to fight and should not be expected to do so by those who are. They’ll be able to fight later. First they need to recover. These are our wounded.

We also have people who are looking ahead, networking, and organizing. Their comments and posts are colored by some degree of optimism and esprit de corps. They are here to help and have the mental and emotional wherewithal to do so. These are our fit for duty.

With our wounded and our fit for duty intermingled, both groups are mutually frustrated.

Our fit for duty are frustrated by our wounded sowing discord and despair in the ranks. It comes across to them as selfish wallowing and doomerism that demoralizes when we need all hands on deck.

Our wounded, on the other hand, are discouraged when their reality is rejected by the fit for duty, who seem to judge their fears as weakness and might even scold them for voicing their despair. That comes across to them as a selfish, uncaring, and individualistic mindset which comes from a place of privilege (be it socioeconomic, identity, neurotype, locality, or something else).

I’ve been thinking about possible solutions. Obviously, our wounded would not prefer to doom-spiral in front of their comrades, and our fit for duty would not prefer to force our wounded into a head space they’re not ready for.

One approach is technical and requires an unmerged feature. We could offer literal channels, or designated subthreads, within comment sections such that at least one was dedicated to support. There it would be guaranteed safe for our wounded to voice pessimistic feelings free of judgement, and they could expect to have their despair acknowledged and discussed by others who felt the same.

Another approach would be to just acknowledge the mental health needs of users openly in a pinned post with a weekly dedicated comment section for voicing feelings of anger, sadness, and despair. This would obviously require approval at the moderator level but could be implemented immediately.

A hybrid approach that any community (namely those specifically dedicated to current events) could implement with an automod rule, would include a pinned comment in every post inviting child comments and discussions where any degree of pessimism or despair would be considered realistic.