curiousconfusedpoly:

polyamoroamer:

Battery Low

We’ve all felt it: that low-level dread as you watch your phone’s battery percentage drop closer and closer to 0.

But we expect it. Our phones run off batteries, and we know that an overnight charge isn’t necessarily an all-day one. Hell, some of us still have phones that won’t stay up longer than two hours without a nap.

We all understand this.

So why do we think people are any different? Not all of us are a brand new, souped up Samsung Galaxy S9+razzmatazz and jangly bits. Some of us are a beaten up old Moto E with a cracked screen and janky charging port (guess who’s never owned an iPhone before…)

Some of the issues we have are due to careless friends dropping us down the stairs or in the toilet, and some of them are inbuilt flaws to comply with a society that thrives on planned obsolescence. Some of them are just random quirks that started up one day due to some jiggle or app incompatibility and now that notification light won’t stop flashing rainbows at an unholy speed.

Like humans, phones have a great deal of reasons to malfunction, or need special treatment or specific handling. I know I need a metric tonne of sunlight injected directly into my eyeballs every day or I get sad, and I’ve had phones where I’ve had to hold the rods in the charging port in place with a needle in order to get it to charge. It worked, it didn’t need replacing, it just needed some extra attention.

Some people might have thrown it away or shouted at it or smashed it in a fit of rage. I try not to be around those people, because let’s face it, phones and computers? We’ve tried like hell to make them behave like humans. We want them to have some measure of our beloved humanity, that’s why we give them voices and names and whisper ‘come on, come on’ under our breath when they take forever to load a page.

And if someone can unleash disproportionate and violent anger at an object, particularly one that is designed to mimic human behaviour, there is a high chance, or at least a strong fear, that they may behave that way towards me or another human.

Now, for those of us who have patience with our phones because we’re aware that they’re only little pieces of plastic, glass and metal doing their best to do our thinking for us: why do we often have that patience for our technology and not for ourselves?

We are all creatures born with the components we’re given (maybe a janky knee or funked up spine or a tendency to see things other people don’t), who have extra apps passed onto us (like how to make wicked cakes), then get treated by others in ways we will both like and dislike, that might polish our screens or put a crack in them out of deliberate malice or, more likely, carelessness.

Be patient with yourself. Like that beaten up old Moto E, you’re doing your best. Maybe you can only be typed on sideways because half the screen is taken up with green lines, or maybe you sometimes make an irritating buzzing noise or set false alarms, but you work just fine. If you can be patient with an old laptop, you can be patient with you.

Unlike a broken phone, you can heal a lot of damage, both mental and physical. You might need help from a professional or battalion of professionals, and maybe there will always be some green lines there, but you have the advantage of being able to fix yourself of the things that are fixable. And like a phone or computer, some quirks and inbuilt things that you’ve been told are bad? They’re just things that show you need some specific types of handling. And that’s OK – there will be people out there who also need it, and people out there who will love to give it.

Be kind to yourselves.

Something I needed to hear today