I wasn’t sure, at first, why I was thinking about it today in particular, but then I realised that–depending on whether I’m remembering the context right–it may very well have been six years ago precisely. It’s probably close, at any rate.

After all this time, (in something like irony), I still remember her telling me it was unreasonable to expect people to remember something I’d said last week.

(It hadn’t even been last week. It was yesterday. Part of the same ongoing conversation.)

She didn’t frame it as her having a bad memory–that would have been something else entirely–but as *my*…my arrogance in thinking that somebody might bother to remember things I’d said from one day to the next, my unrealistic demand for any continuity in my social relationships.

(I’d been hanging out with that group for over four months. (If I’m remembering the timing right. Dates are not my strong suit memory-wise. Perhaps people weren’t hers, but that isn’t what she said.))

I don’t know whether I still believe she’s right. I don’t want to believe it. Maybe I just *fear* that she’s right.

But I *still* feel surprised whenever people reference things I said earlier, whenever anyone outside my immediate family gives enough of a shit about me to remember me from one day to the next.

(And when they don’t–when they ask me the same questions over and over, when they tell me (after *two years*!) that I’m not worth arguing with because they only argue with people they know–I sigh, and I wonder if perhaps it is what I deserve.)

—

It occurs to me that possibly this is some sort of divide between people who think of people on the Internet as interchangeable NPCs and people who don’t. Both of the most egregious instances *were* on the Internet, after all.

It’s a slightly different flavour of horrible than how I was originally thinking of it. Instead of the reliability of “*all* of your friends think of you as an interchangeable NPC”, it’s “a significant percentage of your friends think of you as an interchangeable NPC, but you don’t know how large a percentage and you mostly don’t know which ones”.

(And it still means that in day-to-day social interactions, I generally don’t get to trust that people have any idea what I’m talking about without providing full context every time.

…I think I’m beginning to realise how much that’s been eating away at me, and how much it’s part of the appeal of rationalist Tumblr: I can’t trust people to understand references to things *I* said, but there *do* exist previous statements and conversations that I can reference and safely predict that people will understand.)

Tags:

#oh look an original post #vagueblogging #(sort of) #the more I think about it the more reasons I think of for why I’d be thinking about this *now* #Alison said recently it was a shame that more people didn’t come with manuals on their socialising needs and preferences #and I thought ”do I even *know* my socialising needs and preferences #let alone well enough to write a man page?” #I guess here’s part of an answer #(don’t get me wrong I suck at relationship object permanence) #(but that just means I mostly don’t tend to think about people when they’re not around) #(if reminded of their existence I generally remember a fair bit about them) #I’m worried about insulting people who can’t keep Internet people straight in their heads #but otoh the more likely someone is to be targeted by that the less likely they are to care about my opinion #so maybe it works out? #if you do have a bad memory for such things I’m not gonna hate you for it #unless you frame it as [me not being worth remembering] rather than [you not being good at remembering things] #tag rambles #I feel like this probably deserves some additional warning tag but I’m not sure what