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No video yet.  What shall i do with this blog entry?  Ooh, i know!

Yesterday i left a group on Facebook for reasons i'm not sure i understand.  I had thought that the purpose of the group was to support people who were in conflict with a governmental body - going to keep this vague.  I was rather surprised to find this was not the purpose of the group even though i'd been a member for a long time and specifically refrained from posting my pathetic videos and the like on the group because i expected it to be perceived as spamming, which incidentally i can't grasp either as spam bothers me not a whit, but anyway.  One of the members of the group perceived herself as being bullied by several other members.  I couldn't see that myself, but of course "the heart is deceitful above all things".  Hence, because i may have been amongst the perceived bullies, i left the group in order to err on the side of caution, something i often practice.

I have a whole splodge of issues about this, as it happens.  One is that i'm being an attention-seeking drama queen, which is not good.  Hence the very polite and positive entreaties by other people on this matter won't elicit a response because i shouldn't reward myself for attention-seeking behaviour.  Frankly, i should've grown out of it by my age.  It's a shame though, because the people involved are being very nice and my lack of a response probably seems rude, and let's face it, is rude.  I need to cut my losses there though.

So far this looks like stupid, inconsequential FB drama on my part, of course, although i would also say that FB fills such an important role in many people's lives currently that it's not fair of me to say that.  However, i'm also vexed by the very concept of bullying.  It seems to me that bullying is just bad behaviour and may not be a useful additional way of seeing things.  This is not to excuse behaviour described as bullying at all.  It's no better and it still happens even if there is no such thing as bullying.  However, i somehow feel, and i know i'm being vague here, that there's something suspicious about the idea of bullying that gives it a kind of bandwagony (is that a word?) feel to it.  Here i'm up against difficulty expressing myself emotionally - this is probably the role that poetry would play in my life if the door to it hadn't been forever slammed and barred to me at an early age, but there it is - the fact is that i can't express it.

Countless times have i quoted the most obvious example of apparent bullying in my life, as the pupil of a teacher who had understandable difficulty controlling a class which was more than 50% larger than it should've been.  I'm not going to talk about that now, but about another more recent incident which is less clear-cut - more ambiguous.  Before i say it, i want to emphasise that i bear the person concerned no ill-will and understand where she was coming from, so let's start there:

Suppose you have worked hard to build up a business which is heart work for you - it's really something you believe in, so much more than merely making a living and is, in a positive sense of the word, a crusade.  A vocation, if you will.  You are able to do this in collaboration with someone else who is equally committed to the principles concerned.  Unfortunately, the relationship with your business partner breaks down and you are so stressed by this that you become physically ill and can no longer manage the business by yourself, so you are forced to pay much of your hard-earned profits from it to employees.  I don't know if this is the exact process but i think it's somewhere near.

Given that you are in constant pain, have mobility problems and are having to take options which involve extended contact with an organisation whose aims are inimical to your own values and treats you with no respect because of that merely perceived enmity, it would be entirely unsurprising if you view your employees with some degree of hostility, no matter how well-intentioned they may be.  In such circumstances, micromanagement at least is entirely understandable even if it's not rational.  Who's rational anyway?  Why should anyone even try to be rational?  Excessive rationality can be as unbalanced as histrionics.

Anyway, this situation could be described as bullying, but would that help?  It seems to me that an attempt to empathise with the so-called "bully" is a lot more helpful than labelling them and being done with it.  Are they likely to be listened to after that?  I don't know.  Maybe.  It certainly doesn't seem to me that they have much power, to be honest, any more than a teacher having to manage a class of four dozen children as a result of LEA underfunding has.  Two apparent examples of bullying in my life, both perpetrated victims.

However, out of deference to the possibility that bullying is a useful concept, which perhaps i haven't appreciated enough, to be accused of bullying by a person who then leaves the group, thereby removing the possibility of dialogue, means i have to err on the side of caution and remain open to the possibility that i have in fact engaged in bullying, so i likewise remove myself from the situation to render further bullying impossible.  It may have been a mirage, but it can't be resolved and in the absence of that possibility, my response is to get out of it instead.

So i suppose that's why i've done it - doesn't feel quite right though.

I'm wondering if there's another factor here, and again this is complicated.  Here's a popular organ:

My first reaction to this is an empathetic "ouch", and to wonder whose it was.  This is, however, a lot more than just a "bag of fat" attached to someone's chest of course, and i'm not talking about ducts, ligaments and the like either.  The thing is, the reason they develop like this is of course something like this:

Not a very good photo, incidentally.  Anyway, most of the human race secretes loads of that stuff.  Some of us can't.  If i think i'm taking that, there will of course be a placebo effect, but it's precise nature is interesting.  Presumably it would make me pretend to be whatever my image of a typical woman would be, so whereas it may not be having an effect, it is having one at least in the sense of revealing my inner sexism to others.  Incidentally, i'm not taking the contents of that bottle.

My point is, i'm behaving in a particular way and making associations of this kind that definitely appear to be different regarding the emotional arena.  It's more complicated than that too.  I now have no idea at all if i have breast development because i'm too emotionally involved in what i'm doing.

Oh, i don't know, blah blah blah.  I'm about to do a somewhat startling video which i expect to be ignored, but i'll enjoy making it anyway, so maybe that'll come across.

I wish i could be coherent sometimes.