I finally decide to just be honest and get at what the problem I've been having is and the guy just shoots me down and refuses to talk about it. He is intent on invalidating my experiences. It's infuriating. He acts like I can't think beyond what I know, but he doesn't even know what I know. He acts like meaningful facts within one specfic context are these objective universal truths, and when I tell him they're not he just flippantly dismisses everything I have to say as me trying to needle him. It's so condescending. How can someone who rails against elitism act so superior all the time?
I just want to keep asking him "why" to everything over and over until he gets what I'm trying to say and that seems like a really horrible way to spend my time, but it really bothers me. And then he's like "Oh you can think whatever you want about my intentions or Buddhism". This was never about any of that. I don't care about Buddhism. I don't care what he came here intending to do. I care about what he actually did and said. I care about him treating me like an idiot. Things I have spent decades learning and thinking about are suddenly unimportant because I have to "think outside my current paradigm" in order to talk to him about his new way of looking at reality, even though he knows nothing about them. He stubbornly, myopically acts like his own experiences give him any insight into mine, like he knows where I would have to start without me telling him. It could never be that he doesn't understand what I had to say, only that I didn't understand him.
And I tend toward terseness in these kinds of discussions, where him and Rip and Dex are posting these novels to each other, so of course I get completely ignored most of the time. The utter lack of respect is appalling. And this stupid thing about learning to be mean. What the everloving fuck is that? What a cynical, miserable thing to say. And he still doesn't understand how he's being offensive? It's mind boggling. He decides to become a jerk, makes a conscious decision to be a bad person, and has the gall to act like he's the uplifting happy one who sees the good in everything. And he wants to know what happened to me? Aren't writers supposed to be more self-aware than this?
And now I'm the one being an asshole? Again it's my grievances that don't count. I'm the untrustworthy one. Not him, who has shown a total lack of respect for me and my ideas. No, I'm an asshole for actually standing up for myself. Great.