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The Internet & Its Double Standards
Over the years I’ve been posting my art online and worked to become a worthy advocate for bullying trauma and abuse, I have encountered countless ways the internet likes to turn its back to victims of bullying, making them feel like they are the problem. This is obviously true for all victims of any abuse, but there are aspects to this issue that make bullying victims a unique target of such demeaning treatment. For this particular instance of poor online behavior, I want to explore the concept of “the perfect victim” and the insane standards it places onto victims of bullying.
“I’m Fine, So You Should Be Too”
Over the years, I have become exhaustingly aware of the reasons people at large have for not viewing bullying as a particularly traumatizing experience. It’s been well over three years that I have been working on the art project, and in those three years, I have learned more about trauma invalidation from total strangers online than I ever had in the years that came before that. One of these tired arguments that have been used against me on a personal level as well as other victims of bullying I have had the pleasure of meeting has been the following:
“I was bullied too, and I’m not ‘traumatized’, ‘chronically ill’, or ‘disabled’ like you claim to be. You need to get over it.”
Sickness in Joy
People find pleasure in a lot of different things: there are as many sources of joy in this world as there are individual human beings. For me, my main sources of pleasure are being creative, spending time with my friends, having coffee with my dad, watching TV with my girlfriend, going to anime conventions with my best friend, petting our two kitties with my mom, and losing myself in the music I love. Most of the things I adore in this life have something to do with the people who are the closest to me, and most of the things I despise have something to do with me being by myself. I think that says a lot about the sort of relationships I cultivate with those I love versus the fractured relationship I am forced to have with myself.
But when it comes to the ways other people in this world find their pleasure, there are a few that have never made any sense to me. One of them is being a proud, self-proclaimed abuser online.
Open Your Eyes
Working on this CHAPTER has brought back a lot of memories of being neglected by the system, both the educational and the healthcare. Granted, that is what this story has been about for the most part, but that knowledge doesn’t take away from the Pain of being reminded how fucking difficult it has been to just, you know, be noticed and helped like I’ve needed to be. But I think at its very core, this feeling of being let down systematically by those who were supposed to protect me really focuses on the way teachers and other educators have decided to completely shut their eyes from the abuse.
First Time I Opened Up
When I was 12 years old, my parents took me so see a psychologist for the first time. I was having constant night terrors, not being able to fall asleep, and the fear of being watched by someone unknown in the shadows of my dark room made me chronically paranoid. I heard every single noise in the apartment complexes my parents lived in and thought that it was always someone walking in the apartment when there was no one there except for me and my furbaby. The night terrors got so bad that I started to suffer from insomnia, and that’s when my parents knew they had to step in, and they took me to the family counselor office to see a psychologist who specialized in working with children.
Pills For The Empty Nights
Mental health is a complicated facet of the human existence. You can’t treat it as its stand-alone part of health, but you have to remember that conditions affecting one’s mental health are also something to be considered in physical health. Many psychiatric illnesses also have an impact on the way you feel on a somatic level, and since the brain is an organ that can get sick just like any other organ, it makes sense that there are medications out there to help with the mental anguish caused by the illnesses of the brain.
Cowardice
My elementary school teacher used to come talk to me whenever we would run into each other downtown. Even after several years had gone by since my time in school, she would always strike up a conversation with me when I was still living with my mom. I never particularly enjoyed those conversations for reasons you might be aware of if you’ve been following my journey and the project for a while — this elementary classroom teacher is one of the many adults who are responsible for the absolute negligence of my safety when I was in school.
Life Update: New Year, New Life
As time has gone on and I have continued to work on this project, I’ve made several Life Update posts on the new year that has just been starting. For the longest time, even before the time of Death On A Paper, I have felt like New Years is just another pointless holiday to celebrate for the tradition of it, not for anything substantial that it brings to my life. It is true that through mental illness, disability, and trauma I have become a relatively cynical person: the things other people find joy in have not been joyous for me in ages, simply because I haven’t been able to see the point in any of it.
But now, I am seeing a change of the tides in my life as I can finally see some sort of purpose to the celebration of the new year.
Anti-Bullying Effort
Over the years, my frustration toward anti-bullying labor as we know it has grown stronger and stronger. After indulging myself in a lot of academic reading on bullying as a form of abuse and the multitude of tactics meant to help resolving abuse situations, I have become very aware of the lackluster state of what we call anti-bullying. Having the knowledge on a theoretical level has helped me understand the way I was neglected to hell and back as a Kid, especially by adults who were supposed to be there to protect me where most of the abuse was happening.
Teachers in schools.
Mental Illness? Forget It, You’re Poor!
A lot of extremely unfortunate and downright ridiculous things have happened with the Finnish healthcare system in the last six months. Looking at the state of this country and how it continues to neglect its most vulnerable is becoming more and more painful by the day: I struggle to recognize this place as the beautiful country I have grown to know and love. It genuinely feels like the welfare system is being torn apart right in front of our eyes by the greedy right-wing politicians who only care about making the richer under the guise of “fixing the national economy”.