A lifetime of things, good and bad made me this way. I don't agree that I have any particular pathos I need to nail down, but being better is always the goal, right?
This whole thing just turned into a whirlwind of Poe's law.
It's about you pushing buttons by making insensitive and disrespectful comments, then continuing to feign ignorance, avoiding responsibility for your hurtful words and finally trying to shift blame for the situation onto me.
The technical term for what you're doing is emotional abuse and gaslighting. This behavior is typically observed in those who have had it done to them. If you were paying me to be your therapist, I could help you fix the bugs in your psyche. But I'm not your therapist, and you seem to recognize nothing odd about your behavior, so there's no point in continuing the conversation at this time. Be well.
I downshifted from jokes to (an attempt at!) sensitivity not to manipulate or gaslight you. Perhaps I was trying to manipulate you into feeling less upset.
I thought I pushed your buttons with my original insensitive and disrespectful comments because of the death of your family member. If that's not the case, I don't know. I've nearly forgotten what the point of all this is.
Perhaps what you consider feigning ignorance, gaslighting, and manipulation stems from me not meeting your hostility with hostility, I understand that the mere suggestion of that is probably like 4th or 5th dimensional gaslighting.
I'm happy to acknowledge some of the things I say are offensive to some people, I'll continue trying to talk to people I offend with respect, until cynicism gets the best of me and the glib persona takes over completely ;)
I'm not willing to censor myself because you want me to though, I think I spelled that out clearly enough without feigning anything.
It's feels icky to get autobiographical, but the major reason of why I leaned into the conversation at the expense of my pretty funny joke is because of May 22, 1998. It was the day my brother succumbed to a gunshot wound to the head inflicted by his roommate.
For a while after that, whenever a kid would allude to shooting someone in the head while talking about videogames or playing, it felt like a punch to my gut. I remember lashing out at people once or twice over it. It never brought any satisfaction, or helped with my grief. Trying to dominate the forms of communication between 5th graders to shield my heart was a silly, tyrannical proposition. If it had even worked, it would have taught me all the wrong things.
Fortunately the mere idea of not talking about headshots was well beyond the capabilities of an entire school playing goldeneye. Haha
It's good to let someone stir your tanks every once in a while. Last night I got to try striking a balance between kindness and conviction, normally it's just sarcasm and conviction.