Second Class.

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Somehow I have always felt I am a type of second class person. I won't go into recent details, but the recent events on the news and even this site which sems to mirror the world events, confirms this as the words directly play on my thoughts and effect my feelings.
The truth is that these events should not effect me, but they do because even though I have done nothing wrong, and I should therefore be completely immune to this, the results of the efforts to combat the issue mean that my ability to express myself is hampered so if I say words out of place, even if no one minds (which if someone knows me rarely does anyone mind as I am actually a very sensitive person even though I may not always show it, and I would not want to cause harm to someone unless they have personally attacked and bullied me... Which I guess is natural, though rarely have I ever acted in directed retaliation).

But anyway. I am not at liberty to say my feelings because this will start a hate debate against me, and if I try to explain where I am coming from to the few who choose to attack me, they don't listen but retaliate and I know this is natural, but it means that if I try to offer an origional poster advice based through personal experience and I have the key to the persons situation, and others who don't have this key so their views are very different jump on the bandwaggon and will do all they can to disscredit what I have just said. It actually puzzles me because they do not have the answers to the dilemma like I do as it is perfectly clear that they don't know anything about the subject the origional poster has suggested and their answers offer no hope whatsoever, and though I understand freely if the origional poster sees their attack and is blinded from reading the key points I was trying to make, and it all becomes an anti "Me" (And a few who defend me) slanging match which I can't be bothered with so I never look at or reply to the post again. I fully understand where Fnord is coming from, as though he is blunt and as he has seen this all to often, he is fed up at the backlash so says a tongue in cheek "Goodbye" to the reaction that has presented itself... And I am highly sensitive so I feel for both sides (Even though I don't understand empathy at all... Cant get my mind round it as I group it in m mind with sympathy)... But I get where he is coming from after a lifetime of missunderstandings and directed attacks.

The problem is that if I feel I have to watch every word I say I will leave the situation as I no longer ave the freedom to express myself and seeing I have many keys to many situations that I purpously don't respond to because if I did it would be a slanging match which I will pull out of rather then attempt to give the information that is needed.

I gess it is due to this that for the first 18 or so years of my life I was dead quiet, especially in school as if I did express myself and I had conflict.. Well. I was taught from an early age that conflict solves no wars.
(As I am the oldest son, if my brother who was three years younger in his childhood zeal to try to compete with me would start hitting me in anger as he was at an age dissadvantage, and I hit back, I would get the blame as I was older and he would usually get away scot free. If I ran to tell one of my parents I would often be told off for telling tales so I could not win or solve the issue! My brother still sees me as competition and tends to be somewhat jealous at times though we get along fine as we are adults now).

But the feeling of not being able to defend myself when attacked (And even though most of the time it is an indirect attack which was not intended to be personal, it seems to hit me as if it was personal and it can stay on my mind for a long time.
Sometimes when I get the rare build ups of what must be some type of meltdown situation, which mostly turn to full shutdowns but if they don't, and it is rare that they don't, I get my mind starting to race and all sorts of these past situations from many years ago start racing around my head, some of which I had long forgotten about! (I then get the pressure building up so I feel like my head will explode and I am expecting it to as I puzzle how the pressures can still be there without some kind of major explosion or something, and just when I can't take any more it suddenly stops and I feel dead calm and peaceful as if I am on a little rowing boat on dead calm waters with a lovely calming white mist in the air... And I usually fall asleep as those events happen at night after a hard day. It is unusual for me to habe my thoughts racing around my head at great speed as I am a naturally a slow but deep thinker).

But to conclude and reach the point I want to make, in the real world and on this site, I feel the errosion of the freedom to express onesself without limits due to the new laws on anti discrimination, make me feel in fear about what I say, and I have noticed that personal attacks have vastly risen to those who try to express themselves, even though they are not being discriminationary. It is those who have similar issues as I do when we feel like we are directly being attacked when we are not, but happen to be in a minority protected group will take what someone like I have said as if it was a direct attack against them... When I am ONLY attacking the principles behind my freedom to TRY to express my feelings.
The attacks in the past throughout my life which make me feel like a second class citizen where all the others are "Me first", and I have to go to the back of the queue... And if someone in athority sees it and puts me at the front, when that person is out of view I get directly bullied as a jelous attack so I will often not even attempt to queue even though it could be for something important. You can see why I am soo nurvous and for the most of the time I can't even go in shops due to this lockdown, as they have queue systems which I can't face, as I keep putring myself to the back of the queue to save stress as if someone is behind me it will make me just abandon the queue and go back home evenif it means I end up hungry.

The constrictions on the freedom of speech and other restrictions that effect my life in a direct way either physically or mentally (A physical example is I get breathing issues if I have any foods or drinks with artificial sweetners, and due to the sugar tax and the government wanting to ban sugar, there is less and less I can eat, and accidently having artificial sweetners effects my eyesight as well, I have no chance in reading the smallprint. Also atrificial sweetners come in different hidden names these days which they keep changing the names for the same product. Why can't they just NOT sweeten foods? I would be fine then!). Mentally as stated above.
So I am very much a second class citizen in a dog eat dog world. (Never seen a dog eating a dog though I have seen dogs fighting) and that is even if I am found to not be on the spectrum.

My point is that before words were restricted I would be both physically and verbally bullied, but this is NOTHING compared to the turmoil in my mind that I have when every word has to be carefully thought out before I write it or I say it... So since the laws I have had to distance myself from the minority groups or be very careful what I say to avoid this mental overtime working of my brain.

So with the rules being enforced recently to comply with the laws, I may be less able to express myself on here.

I try all I can not to be discriminative after having a life as of feeling second class. But as I am not a minority as in all ways I am classed as a majority in being a straight white Christian male, then the effects of watching every word I say on top of already not sharing the minority privelidges (As here where I live due to EU laws* anyone who is classed as a minority has first choice in jobs, housing etc, and in an area where jobs and housing is scarce it is a big deal).
*EU gives employers and councils big grants to employ and to house minority groups in my area, where it has been known for employers to make employees redundant to make room for a minority to get the grants, and a similar issue with housing has been known with some councils (Councils are the organization responsible for running a county. The call them "States" in the USA).

But anyway. I am scared now to write replies offering my advice on threads. If by writing this I have broken rules so be it as I may as well be banned if I have no freedom to express myself in writren form. One of the reasons why I took soo well to rhis site was that an UK based site would be ensuring that no word is out of place and coming down extra heavy on offenders. This site seemed to have an air of "As long as it is sensible and not intended to cause harm then we shall allow it", which meant I could "Breathe" even though I never intended to hurt anyones feelings.

What I have noticed is that since the rules are being tightened, it seems that peoples minds are conciously looking for things to report in a type of "Hate" retaliation to anything which they feel "Edgy" about. It is this reason alone that I find myself no longer able to express myself fully other then to state what I have just said.
I will leave it like that for now and let everyone carry on.

I honestly haven't noticed anyone taking a dislike to you or taking exception to your posts. Neither have I seen anything remotely offensive in your posts. You're a valued user here and definitely not second class as we don't have a class system or special preferences on here. Please feel free to draw our attention to any potential bullying behaviour against you. You are one of the last people here that I would expect to break any rules!

So please relax...and feel at home here.

Thanks. I tend to over react to things in my mind so I go into "Extra careful" mode which means I usually go quiet.

I will try and relax. Thanks.

You always strike me as a pleasant and reasonable person. I don't think I've ever crossed swords with you in "Politics, Philosphy and Religeon" or "Current Events," but then I avoid those places like the plague these days. They bring out the worst in everyone and there's just no way to win. Conservative? They'll attack you for being a fascist. Liberal? They'll attack you for being a SJW. Somewhere in between? They'll attack you for being a spineless centrist. Nothing personal, just insanely argumentative idiots looking for The Other Side to scream abuse at.

Hmmm, last night I wanted to write something about attending a Nazi officer's funeral (which I did in 1999). It dawned on me that it might not be the wisest thing to advertise about oneself in this day and age. I'm not a Nazi, in fact my grandfather lost 17 family members during the holocaust, however, I did go to the funeral of a Nazi officer and I wore a suit and tie.

Looking back, I didn't feel conflicted about going and didn't view my attendance as a show of solidarity. I accompanied his slightly bonkers granddaughter to the funeral and loitered at the back of the Chapel, dressed in a shabby suit. I mused over the facts of his life, (though I never met him) and didn't regret his passing. The improbability of my being there made the situation feel quite surreal. I met the grandmother, an imperious old fart, who interrogated me after the service for all of 20 seconds.

I felt out of place among the people who attended and to some extent, I may have been invited to serve that purpose, to be the fly in the ointment. The fact remains, I attended and in retrospect, I'm not sure how I could defend that choice today.

It doesn't sound good does it? In 1999 I attended the funeral of a high ranking Nazi officer. His family were affluent and thought of themselves as upright people.They gathered to pay their respects and commend his soul to almighty God and I went too.

I was 27 at the time, residing and working illegally in Switzerland. I was in the habit of shaving my head and to some degree may have resembled one of the ghoulish and guant young fascists who occasionally trooped over the border from Germany.

Sounds terrible right?

My mother used to say,
"you need to eat more, you look like you just stepped out of Dachau"

That always felt like a distasteful analogy.

FWIW You appear to be one of the most inoffensive posters here .

Thank you all. I am not sure what FWIW is, but thanks.

Sometimes trying to put words into sentences to express inner feelings is not easy and through much of my life it has been... Well. I didn't used to talk much at one time. It was all just bottled up. I am not saying I did not talk at all.
From about the age of 17 going on 18 onwards I started to open up as an elderly lady in a shop I started going to used to shout at me to break my shyness. She would encourage me to shout. It was wierd because I would speak quietly and it was wierd as well because she started something. Then due to the predominantly retail enviroment I worked in I had to talk... But guess what? I was in my element talking to customers about my secondary special interest. It was kinda joint secondary special interest at one time because... Well. In my earlier childhood years I was a kind of car encyclopedia and I would wait for a bus with my Mum and brother, and used to recite the make and model of every car that passed. Only rarely did I not know the make and model. That was the age of about seven. Apparently the other people who were adults were quite taken aback that I could do this and some of them did not even know half of them, and some hardly knew any at all apart from maybe the obvious ones Like Mini and Morris Minor, which themselves could be 25 to 30 years old in those days though Minis were still being made right up until the 1990's. I remember watching a Morris Minor having a flat battery and its owner brought out the starting handle and hand cranked it to get it to run.
Also loved the trafficators on those early cars, though most had been fitted with standard indicaters as an optional extra.
Anyway, bicycles which I had always liked... I kinda slipped into working in a bicycle shop as I was almost never away from there! So I soon was able to open up a bit.
I was masking to open up. About two jobs later I took a job at a large new sports shop and within a very short time found myself in charge of the bike department.
Oh gosh. This is where I had dealings with the fax machine which are written elsewhere on this site.
I found with that job my mind just could not switch off when I got back home. It was a 24/7 365 days a year job due to this, and the cracks appeared in the masking after about two years. It was the same 2 year (Or just over) cycle where I felt I had to leave the first job. I am sad I was not able to explain myself to the old boss as I did not understand myself and what was going on and I could not explain to him... My focus was I had to get out and work elsewhere. I did not know why so if people asked I would say some negative things about the boss (Which may have been true but they were only a very small reason compared to the masking coming off).

I need to state something here. If one does not know what is happening and one can't explain ones feelings, if one is asked, the only thoughts that come into ones mind are to try and reason based on negative experiences which were relatively minor and irrelivent. One is not able to get to the root of ones feelings if one has not heard of autism and its traits, to unravel things, where even if one is a BAP or an NT with the odd trait, it is important to do... As I have gone through most of my life until recently not being able to unravel my inner thoughts and feelings and make any sense of them.

A typical example. In school at lunchtime after we had eaten lunch so we had the rest of the time to amuse ourselves it was raining, so we all had to go to the little hall, so there was an overcrowded hall with kids "At ease" shouting and screaming and running around.
I could not cope with all those different loud noises at the same time. It was torture! BUT, I had no explination. I burst into tears when holding my hands over my ears was not enough to drown out the noise. But I did not know how to describe what I felt. When a kind girl I was in class with came to ask what was wrong and she got one of the lunchtime supervisor staff, all I could think of which to say was to lie and say "I have a headache" as I was overwealmed with all the different noise, and when people get headaches they don't like noise, so not being able to explain what was really going on, it was the only way I knew how to communicate to get some message across somehow to relate to how I felt.

Sorry. I think I have gone way off topic. I will post because it makes sense to someone. Thanks.

FWIW = “for what it’s worth.”

^ You're a valued member of these forums.

Thanks Firemonkey.

Choo choo!
You are a Blessed Peacemaker here

Thanks Magz.

You are my beloved MG, don't you dare stop posting what you feel, whenever you feel like it. If someone attacks you then that is their defect not yours. I join magz in choo choooooooo!! !! !! Biiiiiig hug sweet MG

As a fellow Welshman you can do no wrong in my book MG