Andy, who is well known for his fauxpologies, lectures people on how to apologize and take responsibility for their actions without making excuses.
Alright, so now that I’m slightly calmer:
This thread sucks.
The most important way that it sucks is, obviously and as previously stated, the Fucking Audacity of This Man. Especially because, in lecturing people about how to take responsibility, he completely fails to actually take responsibility for any of his actions. Notably, although he calls himself a “former very shitty person,” his “naked” thread fails entirely to mention the actual horrific shit he did.
Without context (which his twitter followers presumably mostly do not have), the natural reading of this thread is that all of Andy’s “shitty” behavior was lying and making excuses about work that he half-assed and procrastinated on because of his ADHD. I do not believe that people who have done terrible things need to be constantly bringing them up and apologizing for them. But calling this a “naked thread” about his past mistakes and what he’s learned from them only serves as a continuation of his pattern of glossing over and refusing to take actual responsibility for his past.
This is made all the more offensive by the last few tweets in the thread. He (correctly) identifies that sometimes people will feel compelled to apologize for and justify their behavior when they didn’t do anything wrong. He again (correctly) identifies that this behavior can have many causes. He carefully does not state, but (correctly) implies that one of the reasons for this behavior can be because the person apologizing is a victim of domestic abuse. Then, with full plausible deniability, he does not state, but very clearly implies, that his past bad behavior was because he was the victim of domestic abuse.
This is unconscionable. One of his long-running narratives has been that everything bad he did with Bit of Earth was to please Abbey, because he was so afraid of disappointing her. The fact that he is continuing this narrative is outrageous. That fact that he does it in such a way to (continue) to imply that he is the real victim, especially in the context of a thread allegedly about taking responsibility, reveals that he is still the same “very shitty person.”
With all that said, even if we take this thread at face value, ignoring all of Andy’s history: it still sucks. Like his many regurgitated social justice takes, the framework of the discussion is correct. And it’s a topic that I really care about: the distinction between reasons and excuses (or as I prefer, explanations and excuses), what it means to take responsibility, how to apologize, how to move on and improve, especially when the explanation for a harmful behavior is related, at least in part, to mental illness/disability/neurodivergence. Broadly speaking, Andy isn’t wrong…but in the particulars, he is (offensively) wrong in some very important ways. It’s like his old traced art. He isn’t saying anything original, but instead tracing over the work and explanations other people have provided to match his fandom self-serving narrative. But because he is only tracing, recreating the aesthetics, he reveals he doesn’t understand (or care to convey) the underlying anatomy of the argument. That process leads to fundamental flaws in his final project. But unlike bad art, here he is arguably doing something more dangerous: providing advice on really important, and sensitive, topics.
Reblogging for this amazing and well written commentary. "Aesthetic regurgitation of responsibility" might be the best description of Andy's drivel I've ever heard.
