Depending On A Person - Tumblr Posts

My fault as a person is that I have zero sympathy for people who don't even try to understand what I'm saying. I have comprehension issues, I often miss roughly 20% of what people say to me, so I've learned to somewhat-instinctively just come up with two or three most likely options of what they might mean, and choose the one that makes the most sense in context, because I'm more likely to assume that the person I'm talking with is an intelligent person who says things that make sense.

So I tend to assume that other people do the same, and get insulted when they assume that I said something stupid. I project my own pathways of thinking onto them, and assume their thought process goes "hmm, did this person mean it in the regularly interpreted way that would be an idiotic claim in this context, or the literal way that makes perfect sense in this context? Since I believe that this person is fucking stupid, then obviously they mean the idiotic thing."

I get angry at people misunderstanding me because I instinctively assume that they function by the same framework as I do, understanding 80% and doing context clue deduction for the last 20%. So it feels like they're going out of their way to misunderstand me when 90% of what I said should make sense in context, but they specifically chose the 10% and pretend it's what I meant.

If I say "you see more birds in the city than in the wild", I think what I meant is obvious because it can be interpreted in two ways: either that there are more birds in the city, or that the city birds are simply more visible to people because they are habituated to human presence. And since one claim is idiotic and the other one makes sense, I take it as their assessment of my intelligence whether they assume I'd say something stupid, or something that makes sense.

So I am offended and insulted when people respond to a statement like that with "of course there are more birds in the wilderness than in cities! How could you say that?" and linking me with 15 pages of bird statistics. And I am outraged that I have to clarify that I literally meant seeing them, that the presence of birds is more visually evident in cities where they do not go out of their way to hide from humans. Obviously I know that there are more birds in the wild than within cities, as I am not fucking stupid.

And people just go "how was I supposed to know that you literally meant exactly what you said?" like it's perfectly understandable that they'd rather interpret my words as the words of an idiot.