On Teaching Vs Venting - Tumblr Posts
I feel like many tumblr users could get a lot of value from periodically reminding themselves (both for their own posts, and when encountering other people's posts full of the particular brand of emotionally manipulative language I see go around all the time on this website) that:
While it is absolutely true that no one is obligated to put aside their own emotional reactions to stressful conversations that directly affect their day-to-day lives in order to act as objective educators for every rando who hops in their inbox with disingenuous, lazy, or Marginalization 101 level questions, the reason for this is not because there is some threshhold of marginalization beyond which you're just, like, allowed to be an asshole now and everyone else has to deal with it.
The reason is that teaching is hard fucking work, and teaching emotionally charged subjects that affect you personally can be doubly so.
But!
If you aren't going to put in the work to be an effective educator - for whatever reason, including if you just want to vent about your own personal experiences in your own online space - without doing the work of actually teaching other people about said experiences, then you do not get to demand that your personal rants be treated as containing any kind of educational authority, either.
Tone policing is a shitty, asshole thing to do to people who are just talking about their own lives.
It is also an incredibly important skill to learn and employ for yourself if you want to teach.
Personal vent spaces are a super valid and positive way for some people to let off steam and destress about shitty things in their lives, and everyone deserves to have people - friends, family, kind strangers with a lot of empathy to share - to lean on for empathy and validation during stressful times.
Realistic and effective education, on the other hand, is hard fucking work, and your vent post does not and should not count as an educational resource if you are not putting in that work to make it one for the audience that you are hoping to reach.