Your Trauma Is Valid
Isn't it funny how people who don't know you and your story seem to have the strongest opinions on your life? It is always those who think they know better than you do who feel the need to let you know that, in fact, your traumatic experiences are not "real abuse". For years, I struggled to understand why this kept on happening to me, no matter the circumstances. People who have met me once make insane assumptions on my trauma based on nothing – or at least, that's what it always felt like to me.
The Brain Is An Organ
The history of medicine is very fascinating. I'm not claiming to be the most knowledgeable on it – and with my non-existent credentials, it would be insulting to say such a thing – but I am intrigued by the small bits of information I have managed to gather up in my noggin. Did you know that heroin was used as a cough medicine in the 1800's? Or that cocaine was used as a "wonder drug" of sorts, claimed to be able to cure depression, alcoholism, and impotence? Many of the now-deemed toxic chemicals were once used as medication for health problems. And of course, we can't forget lobotomy.
Your Mental Illness Is My Joke!
Humor is a very complicated and confusing thing. If I were to ever continue my university studies in linguistics, I think I would potentially pick a phenomenon somehow related to humor as a rhetorical device. It is used in countless different ways, in situations that are more or less applicable to a humorous conversation. These factors, too, are more or less defined by the parties involved in the discussion. This kind of subjectivity makes humor an impossible thing to define in an exact manner, because what someone else might deem as the joke of the century might be an incredibly offensive thing to say to someone else.
"But School Doesn't Count"
When we are talking about child abuse and childhood trauma, a term that gets brought up very frequently is "growing environment". Time and time again, it has been stated that the kind of growing environment a child has during their formative years has a huge effect on the kind of person they will become when they step into their adulthood. A safe growing environment provides a sense of security, instills trust in your parents and other seniors, feelings of being cared of and loved. Those experiences are important in the development of self-esteem and healthy self-image, as well as feeling like you can trust the people around you, and if something were to happen with them, you'd be equipped to defend yourself and get that sense of security back.
Stop Taking What's Ours
A big part of my trauma invalidation has consisted of other people exploiting the word meant to describe the abuse I went through and by extension making it almost impossible for me to be taken seriously as a victim. Because of how generally unknown the actual definition of the word is, it's very easy to just take it and use it however you want to. This is one of the reasons awareness and education on bullying is so important and should be a mandatory inclusion in the curriculum of basic education at the very least. Because when you don't know what a word means, it's very easy to misuse it, y'know?
A Word With No Definition
Language is a wonderful thing for a variety of reasons, but one of my favorite things about it has always been how we as people can utilize language outside of its original confinements. The creative potential language has is entirely comparable to that of a blank page and a pencil, or an empty canvas on a drawing software. Language is merely a tool that human beings have developed in time to communicate with each other, themselves, as well as in order to express themselves in ways exceeding the necessities of conversing. Literature is as much as of an art form as illustration or painting; in Finnish, we sometimes even call literature "sanataide", translating to "word art".
Tough It Out, Bitch
It was around those very first times I went up to my teacher to tell her what kind of things my classmates were putting me through on a daily basis that I remember her giving me the ultimate solution to every one of my problems.
A Caricature
I absolutely despise the majority of representation bullying gets in the media. Every time I hear there's a new movie or TV show with bullying as a theme or major story component, I don't even want to have a look at it. It's extremely frustrating because somehow, I also manage to come across this content extremely often purely by accident.
Bullying Is Not Your Kink
It is strange how often I see people equating bullying to degradation. The internet is fantastic for this kind of rhetoric, especially in the form of memes. While irony dominates the humor and jokes of the online world, I find it interesting and also beneficial to analyze this kind of rhetoric as something more than just that. Because humor in itself is a rhetorical device that's used to convey different messages and tones – some more truthful than others. And in the case of these bullying/degradation jokes, I believe that there is at least some truth to them. Let's explore that thought here!
You Were An Easy Target
Victims of all kinds have always had to defend their status as victims. They've always had to fight for the right to declare that they were wronged by other people, with no justification. Oftentimes, it is particularly those people that have not experienced any form of abuse who feel the most strongly about the victim label: no one becomes a victim for no reason, which means you must have done something to deserve it, or at the very least, to instigate the abuse!