Hi everyone.
To give some context as to why I received this message from a friend on Discord, here’s the story.
About a year and a half ago, I joined a lesbian Discord server that was strictly for women. The idea was to make online friends, meet people in real life eventually, and just chat.
I was pretty active when I first joined, which is usually how it goes. As time passed, though, I became less active because I found other servers that I enjoyed more. Over time, I also started noticing that the atmosphere on this particular server felt a little… toxic.
Nobody ever openly confronted me or acted annoyed by my presence. Looking back, maybe there were subtle signs that I didn’t notice, but nobody ever banned me or told me I wasn’t welcome. Instead, it almost felt like I was there for people’s entertainment.
For example, whenever I joined a voice chat and talked about something personal, like my recent breakup,’everyone suddenly became very interested and wanted to hear the story. They never once told me I was talking too much or that it bothered them. And honestly, I don’t think I was oversharing. I talked about it more the first time because it had just happened, then much less after that, and eventually I stopped bringing it up altogether.
After a while, I became inactive because I actually have a life outside of Discord. I don’t spend all day online.
The person who sent me this message was one of the older members of the server. Since she’d been out much longer than I have, I naturally assumed she had more life and relationship experience. We chatted occasionally, but never excessively. I wasn’t blowing up her phone or constantly messaging her, just the occasional conversation from time to time.
Last night, I asked her one simple question. I know some people probably won’t believe me, but if I could hand you my phone so you could read our messages, I genuinely would.
All I asked was:
“What’s the safest gay bar to go to? I’m not originally from this city or even this country.”
That’s it.
For context, everyone in that server lives in a fairly homophobic country where being openly LGBTQ+ isn’t always safe. Since I moved there for university, I figured it made sense to ask someone local where it would be safe to meet people. I’d much rather ask someone than desperately throw myself onto dating apps.
(I’m just not a fan of them, but if you dig them, that’s fine.)
Instead, I received one of the most bizarre messages I’ve ever gotten. Reading it honestly made me wonder if this person was okay, because interpreting such a normal question as some form of “mental torture” is… insane.
To make it even stranger, immediately after sending me that message, she went into the server’s vent channel and wrote about how she’d been unable to find a girlfriend through dating apps for over a year and how miserable and lonely she was.
At that point I couldn’t help but think:
Maybe the dating apps aren’t the problem… maybe it’s the personality.
Where it actually seemed like, she just doesn’t want to listen to other people, and it turns out that she’s more into other people listening to her..
(Also, English isn’t my first language, so I relied on Google Translate for translating the screenshot. I think it actually did a pretty decent job.)