#oneaday Day 820: Disagreement

I hate arguing. In fact, I’d go further than that. I hate disagreeing. I have absolutely no doubt that this particular aspect of my personality is a side-effect of the social anxiety that I suffer from, but it sometimes makes discussions hard to participate in.

I’m fine with expressing my opinion and feel I can argue my viewpoint pretty convincingly in most instances — this blog is filled with numerous examples of that, as longtime readers will doubtless know. It’s in the things that happen after my opinion has been stated that things get a little trickier — namely, if someone comes along with a diametrically-opposed viewpoint and the willingness (and/or ability) to argue until they’re blue in the face about how much I’m wrong and how they’re absolutely right.

Most of the time, these disagreements don’t descend into “you’re an idiot”, but my discomfort with disagreeing makes me sometimes feel like it’s implied. I like to think that I go through life as a fairly likeable sort of chap and take great pains to try not to offend anyone (swearing and masturbating stickmen aside, obviously — I’m referring specifically to personal attacks here) so having someone disagree with me and argue their case in an impassioned manner is a frustrating, disquieting experience that often makes me wish I had kept my mouth shut in the first place.

Part of this is due to the fact that I tend to cycle negative experiences around and around inside my head involuntarily. Even a seemingly innocuous, irrelevant discussion that might have gotten a little bit heated somewhere along the way is enough to keep me awake at night sometimes — and those rare situations where someone is actually genuinely upset by something which has occurred? I can pretty much forget about remaining calm, instead preferring to stare into space, replaying the incident in my mind and wondering what could have happened if things went a little differently.

It can happen before time, too. If I know there’s some form of difficult conversation coming up, I’ll find myself role-playing it in my head, imagining what might happen. Inevitably my mental conversation has the worst possible outcome, usually descending into someone getting yelled at or thumped. This does at least make having the actual conversation pleasantly surprising almost without exception, since no-one ever gets thumped and hardly anyone ever gets yelled at.

I guess part of the frustration over all this is to do with power, or more specifically, a feeling of powerlessness. If you know (or at least believe) that your opinion on something is inherently sensible and others seem to think that you’re speaking gibberish, it’s disheartening — particularly if said opponents of your viewpoint are aggressive and stubborn in their dismissal of what you have to say. It’s particularly disappointing and upsetting when people whom you like and respect fall into this category, too.

Nine times out of ten, the argument just wasn’t worth having in the first place, too. So what I have taken to doing most of the time these days is just stepping back before jumping in to a debate, thinking “will this get heated? Is it worth potentially getting upset over?” and then — only then — making a decision on whether or not to proceed. In some cases, said decision leads to launching a discussion and dealing with the consequences. In others, it leads to walking away — deleting the unsent tweet, closing the comments section, biting my tongue. And in extreme cases, it leads to me feeling like the correct course of action is simply to remove myself from the situation in question and ensure it doesn’t arise again — online, that means unfriending, unfollowing and/or blocking people; offline… well, you just walk away and don’t look back.

Some people are built for arguing. I don’t think I’m one of them.