I understand, now more than ever, that showing weakness breeds contempt, and I have no plans to let that happen again even when I understand the consequences.

Quick story: Used to be a huge sack of anxiety and depression; been doing well for years now. Was having a great year and got hit with my first bout of heavy depression in a while during a freelance-work-related failure where I was in a very unenviable position of needing to make magic happen but didn't ("please be very sad and raw in this scene of putting down your stuff -- whoa nice, please do it again and stay sad and take less time in future takes -- oh my gosh where is your emotion going, bring it back bring it back -- fuuuu we are out of takes for this scene" ~ the director). My train of thought with my plate was: "I know I'm going to lose attraction from this plate by venting for one sentence, but I won't suffer from losing this plate anyway, since this is only a 7/10 who texts me way too fucking much." But I slowly experienced disrespect and bitchiness I had never seen from said plate, the difference was night/day; didn't contact again.

Despite my lesson, I can't help but notice that weakness only breeds contempt in certain individuals. Perhaps it has to do with their relationship to you, but I'm not sure if it's only that. You might as well plan for a plate/girlfriend to lose respect for you, but it's a maybe with co-workers and supposed friends. People's personalities can just completely suck I guess? I'm a decently good-looking person, the role was a romantic lead ffs but I am too skinny, not-tall, and despite my efforts pretty feminine to be alpha. I bring this up because someone brought it to my attention that they might have been envious prior and were now reveling in my slippage, which felt great to consider but I think is a stretch. Do people just get off on watching people fail when it's in their own industry, despite it being a subjective industry where one actor falling doesn't ensure someone else's success by absolutely any means?

I probably only care because I want to hamster that my plate and this other guy who suddenly acted like little bitches to me are actually weak for having done so. But my more-beta days consisted of me feels-sharing a fair amount, so it's not like it's the first time I open up and am just now learning the consequences of dicks; I wanna know, who are these low people that move into dick mode when you do stuff like that? Moving forward, I know I should focus on simply not showing weakness to, ideally, anyone, by building inner strength, instead of figuring out who I can dump my feels onto in a time of emergency. But don't we all have to know who to go to when shit gets real?

I'm going to go ahead and give non-mutually-exclusive potential answers to my own question but would love feedback.

  • They feel threatened by [edit] feel anxious about others' displays of weakness because they themselves are weak.
  • They are taking out contempt on you for letting them down.
  • They feel better than you because you're in their industry and they can project their own failures and self-doubts onto you now.
  • They were thinking/feeling what anyone else would think/feel but they are just more overt and not covert.