How You Can Provoke Me by Adam Bobat
I can’t remember the last time I was truly provoked. There are two reasons for this. The first one is that I forget about a lot of things that don’t matter. It could’ve happened a day or two ago, and I will still forget. The second reason is that the last time I was provoked to the point of crashing out was a couple of years ago–middle school or the beginning of high school. Ever since I got to Uni, I have been getting bullied. Now I don’t consider it bullying, but some might. I’m talking about the constant fat shaming that I have to face every day. This would provoke many people, but it has little to no effect on me.
For example, if a stranger walked up to me on the street and called me fat, I would be a little ticked off, but mostly be too busy thinking about what was going through the person's mind that prompted them to be so rude. No, this has never happened to me. This is a hypothetical scenario of how I think I would react. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that a lot of the time, when someone is trying to provoke you, it is to get a reaction out of you. For the past couple of years, I have been trying to work on not engaging with people trying to provoke me, so they don’t get the satisfaction. I don’t want to feed into someone’s drama or hostility when I don’t owe them anything. So I keep calm and don’t give a response.
The act of provoking someone is referred to as ragebaiting nowadays–the act of trying to make someone mad to the point of crashing out. Every day at school, I experience this because my friends always try to ragebait me. It could be calling me fat or something else, but it’s almost always calling me fat. At first, this would annoy me a little bit, but after a month or two, I got used to it, and it doesn’t affect me anymore. I don’t typically react angrily, but instead resort to ragebaiting them back.
In fact, ragebaiting brings joy to me. I know this sounds bad, but I only try to ragebait my friends. There is something about seeing a reaction on the face of the person you successfully ragebaited, and even more fulfilling when they fail to ragebait you beforehand. One of my favorite people to ragebait, I don’t want to anmedrop him, is in this class and sits at my table. It’s fairly simple to get a reaction out of him because you have to say two things, but the reason I can comfortably try to make him mad is that, without fail, he will always say something back, trying to get back at me. When he does say something back, for the majority of the time, I find it funny and entertaining, and the only times I don’t find it funny are when he overuses his ragebait line.
Furthermore, ragebaiting seems to be a healthy practice to take part in. One reason is that it helps you not to take everything so personally. If you were to have friends every day who make jokes about, and in turn you make jokes about them in a friendly manner, it will help you take jokes better and get offended less easily. For example, one day, one of your friends tells you you’re stupid, and has never done that before, you will probably be hurt and take offense. But if you and that same friend had friendly banter every day, trying to provoke each other, you guys would have more fun, and you would be able to take a joke. In my own experience, I would say that my reaction to being provoked is not showing any reaction, but trying to provoke the provoker back.
Before anything, you good? Cause regardless of whether it actively bothers you or not, that doesn't sound like an ideal situation.
ReplyDeleteRegarding my obligation to give you feedback on the essay, I think it's full of emotional potential as a work of personal reflection. I think it feels a bit loosely structured, with a lot of bouncing around to new points, but there's some interesting stuff in there. Primarily, I think you get into it pretty well, but I would really keep the focus throughout in the whole 'ragebaiting' culture and how it reflects us as kids. I don't know if this is something purely restricted to our generation, but it is something I've seen a lot, and it is genuinely interesting. The places where I was most engaged were: when you mentioned the progression between being annoyed at first, then adjusted, then resorting to counter-ragebait; the section where you explore the 'healthiness' of ragebait culture, though I think it could be a bit more nuanced than you go into in just that final paragraph (could just be me); and the first bit where you mention the last time you were provoked to the point of crashing out, mainly because I was curious to see where that was going.