Unheard Voices: The Frustration of Being Ignored and Discredited

I’m breaking my silence. Chapel round is extremely triggering to me. I am also triggered by Chapel Run. I am triggered because I was telling people a year and a half ago to listen to her and I don’t know if anybody did. I don’t think so because if they had, they would have like said thanks. They would have let me know one of my kids is super into Chapel Road and I’m pretty sure I told them about her a while ago. It was the same with Sammy Ray and the friends. Like I was telling people over and over again to listen to them. And then a bunch of people I knew were at their concert with my partner night and we’re like, hold over by how good this music was. And I was like, I know I have really good taste. You should ask me for recommendations on lots of things.

Okay, this actually is triggering because this has been happening, I feel like my whole life where I have insight into something or I have a, you know, really good idea or I’ve noticed something about someone I’m close to and they do not listen to device or any information coming from me until they hear it coming from somewhere else. And I know of course, like if I were to give unwanted advice that’s like critical or something, of course people are gonna be resistant to that. But I mean, even if I’m like excited, I’m passionate about something, still it won’t be taken up until somebody else offers it.

Okay, here’s a list of examples I could think of off top my head. Okay, so I was the communications manager for this company and I was closely working with the CEO and I was writing copy for the website and then writing copy for the about page and I opened it with and I should say like it was a company that did that solved like really big problems, worked with really big stakeholders solving big problem. And I opened it with The World Is Burning. And I can’t even remember what else I said from there. And he was so insulting because he thought that sounded so melodramatic. And I don’t know, I think he heard it in like some, yeah, like dramatic girl voice or something. Okay, so he goes off to this UN conference and he’s, you know, sitting with all these major world leaders. And the thing he keeps hearing while he’s there is literally the sentence, the world is burning. And he comes back and has the nerve to say that’s what he kept hearing while he was there. And he doesn’t even apologize for how much he lit into me, like abusively, by the way, I would say, for how stupid my writing was. It wasn’t until he heard it from people who could verify for him that the world is literally burning that he was willing to accept that as the copy. And I believe it stayed on the website for a while. I’d have to go check the Wayback Machine. But so that’s one example. Okay, another example right now within the queer community, a lot of people are, I wanna say divesting, but I’m not sure we’re supposed to use that word, like leaving behind cancel culture, at least within our community, not using it as a tool laterally. A lot of people are taking issue with it. And I was ready in 2014 to speak out about it and to say why I didn’t think would work. And my partner at the time was like, didn’t agree with my takes, would get really upset. And then I think it was like 2016,2017, maybe it’s 2015. Somebody in Seattle, I can’t remember their name. Let me go look. Okay.

Francis Lee wrote X communicate me from the church of Social Justice in 2017. And then I was starting to feel safer around 2020,21 to talk about it. And I wrote this and something like Helen Lewis, I think it was published something in the Atlantic, basically saying the same thing. I suspect that she googled this topic before she wrote this. Like any good writer would. She would have found that other people were making the same argument. Don’t think she credited me or Francis Lee. Possibly. I haven’t got past the paywall, but initially it doesn’t look like it anyway. Now more people that are feeling comfortable talking about what’s not working about cancer culture. It helps that there are a lot of really great black thought leaders who are saying that. But people unfollow me because of it. My ex once said that I was practically a fortune teller cuz I could see into the future about like what was gonna happen in our lives or in the lives of people, let me know. But when I warned her about what was gonna happen with her relationship that she had after we broke up, she didn’t listen. And I ended up being right. And then she accused me of having something to do with it. She thought that I was involved, which I wasn’t at all.

And it’s not that I expect people to just like take what I say at face value and that’s it. I don’t think it’s not like I think I’m God I or I don’t even know. It’s just like if I’ve if you know that I’ve been right about things so often, then why not at least get curious? Why not consider the possibility that I might know something? Like, you don’t have to just immediately believe me, but you don’t have to immediately discount me either. That’s affects me. Like being immediately discounted or immediately ignored is really upsetting. There’s no reason for it. Like there’s something underlying that. I don’t know what it is, if it’s just misogyny, if it is like the way I come across as an artistic person that people dislike and there unconsciously pushing back on, I don’t know. Does this happen to you? And what are some examples and why do you think that?