I must confess I have also been guilty of pushiness and intrusiveness over social boundaries. But in reality I was just pushing back whilst also trying to create some psychological space around myself so I could buy time to figure out what had been going on. From the moment I landed as a migrant, people have been pushing into my boundaries, telling me what my real character was, where they thought I was pretending and not being real, how I needed to be cut down to size, how all of my problems were imaginary, and so on. And this is because of their understanding of Rhodesia, which was based on their media constructs of the situation conducted in a mode of psychological warfare. And this has gone on and on. Even a couple of days ago, somebody reprimanded me for reposting a very sentimental picture of the Victoria Falls with the group’s title of “Rhodesian memories”. She has already reprimanded me before and now she ws doing it again for using a historical name to refer to a historical time and place. “Can’t you just like the image and not repost it?” she demanded. This is 2015 and she couldn’t let the psy. war die and become redundant.
I believe that this endless reflexive politicking, without stopping to find out who one is talking to, their real background, or their real attitudes, did give me a lot of justification for imposing my own experiences directly on others, especially after I was workplace bullied, losing my digestive health, and those I sought help from kept insisting it wasn’t really anything and they knew this because they simply knew.
It may be that intrusions into people’s lives come about as a result of their own actions, since they were the aggressor.
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