“Toxic shame drives us out of connection and community and makes us believe we do not belong.”
THE BOOK OF FORGIVING
This site is an experiment to see if we can actually stay nice on the internet. Ok, nice does not adequately capture my goal. This is an opportunity to learn to communicate in a faceless, non-physical space with the guiding rule of human worth and dignity (yours and others’).
We say everyone is of equal worth but in day-to-day scenarios, we are not treated as such and we do not treat others as such. Here, in this community, we are of equal value, equally deserving of space to process our own experiences and equally in need of exposure to others’ diversity of experiences.
Every human experience is valid, but not every extrapolation of information from an experience is accurate. That is why I feel witnessing the lives of others is so important, but access must come with boundaries. So we have community guidelines. I will probably revisit these guidelines very soon, but in the meantime:
- Life Knome is for self-reflection, not self-projection (share your own experiences, if you choose, but do not start trying to fix other people via a comment war).
- Review your language for shame subtext before posting (Brené Brown’s books will help you better recognize when it’s there)
- Do not belittle another based on perceived level of intelligence or education (meaning don’t jump on someone else’s typo or wrong word as proof of your rightness).
- Do not speak to others from a place of superiority based on experience, background or financial/class status (this one’s sneaky, but a bit of it is in a lot of us. Try to notice when it’s sneaking through, before you hit “post”).
- Do not hold your team jersey above the sacredness or extension of human worth (I’m not asking you to not have a political party, but I am asking you to remember that teams put us in competition instead of conversation).
- Participate only when you want to, and only when it serves your journey (if you don’t have the emotional bandwidth sometimes, that’s ok.)
- Practice observing the underlying source of your instinctive responses (& spend a little time processing that before you jump on a comment thread)
This is my goal: to build a place where we can engage with others in a way that always offers dignity, even if someone does not offer us the same.
I’m not trying to be good. I’m trying to become whole.
