#but when the entire point of a character gets erased in favor of “pathetic little meowmeow” ification

[the-sufferer]

I don't know what it is about media that is supposed to be interpreted in a certain way and the weird woobification it attracts out of nowhere.. It always confuses me-

It's like, a gritty piece of media releases and suddenly there is a million cat ear headphones edits of that one character everyone has decided is the baby girl of the fanbase.

[aces-to-apples]

Your Reputation Precedes You

A response to “On Fandom Racism (and That Conlang People Are Talking About)” because lmao that cowardly bitch just hates getting feedback from people that she can’t then harass into oblivion

i.e. God I Wish I Could Use The Tag Fandom Wank Without The Titty Police Nerfing My Post

-

To be frank, I'm not here because I think you or any of your little cronies are going to change your minds. If the 'name' wasn't a giveaway, your group of ~likeminded individuals~ have quite the reputation for espousing ableist, antisemitic, and, yes, racist views under wafer-thin the veneer of "calling out racism." I think we both know that what you're actually doing is using the relative anonymity of the internet and progressive language to abuse, harass, and bully fans that you personally disagree with. You and your group are toxic, hateful, and utterly pathetic, using many peoples' genuine desire to avoid accidentally causing harm and twisting it into this horrid parade of submissiveness to You, The One And Only Arbiter Of Truth And Justice In Fandom. Never mind that you have derided autistic people as lacking compassion and empathy, that you've used racist colonizer dogwhistles to describe a fictional culture based heavily on real live Maori culture, that you've mocked the idea of characters having PTSD, or that vital mental health services are anything more than "talking about your feelings with friends uwu." Let's just ignore that you have ridiculed the idea of adults in positions of power exerting that power over children in harmful and abusive ways, that creating transformative fan-content that doesn't adhere to the spirit of canon or wishes of the original author garners derision and hatefulness from you, and that you've used classic abuser tactics in order to gaslight people in your orbit into behaving more submissively towards you in order to avoid more verbal abuse.

Let's toss all of that crucial context aside in favor of only what you've written here.

What you've written here is nearly 3,000 entire words based on, at best—though, admittedly, based on your previous behavior, I am actually not willing to extend to you an iota of good faith—fallacious reasoning. You posit that a constructed language, to be used by a fictional religious group located in an entirely different galaxy than our own, is othering, racist in general, and anti-Asian specifically. This appears based in several suppositions, the first being that a language unknown by the reader will, by nature, cause the reader to feel alienated from the characters and therefore less sympathetic, empathetic, and caring towards the characters. That idea is patently ridiculous and, I believe, says far more about your ability to connect to a character speaking an unfamiliar language than any kind of overarching truth about media and the human condition. New things are interesting; new things are fun; the human brain is wired from birth to be fascinated with new things, to want to take them apart, find out how they work, and enjoy both the process and the results.

The second supposition this fallacy is based upon appears to be that to move away from the blatant Orientalism of Star Wars is inherently anti-Asian. While I find it... frankly, a little bit sad that you cling so viciously to the Orientalist, appropriative roots of Star Wars as some form of genuine representation, that's really none of my business. If you feel that a Muslim-coded character bombing a temple and becoming a terrorist and a Sith, a white woman wearing Mongolian wedding garb, a species of decadent slug-like gangsters smoking out of hookahs and keeping attractive young women chained at their feet (as it were), a species of greedy money-grubbers with exaggerated features and offensively stereotypical "Asian" accents, and an indigenous people wearing modesty garb based on the Bedu people and treated by most characters as well as the narrative as mindless animals deserving of murder and genocide are appropriate representation of the many, varied, and beautiful cultures around the world upon which they were "based," then that is very much your business. Until you pull shit like this. Until you accuse other fans, who wish to move away from such offensive coding and stereotypes, of erasing Asian culture from Star Wars. Then it becomes everyone's business, especially when you are targeting a loving and enthusiastic group of fans who are pouring their hearts and souls into creating an inventive and non-appropriative alternative to canon.

Which leads into the third supposition, that a patently racist, misogynistic white man in the 1970s, and then again in the 1990s, intended his universe to be an accurate and respectful portrayal of the various cultures he stole from. I understand that for your group of toxic bullies, the term "Death of the Author" holds no real meaning, but the simple fact of the matter is that George Lucas based his white-centered space adventure on Samurai movies while removing the cultural context that gave them any meaning, because he liked the idea of swords and noble warriors in space. He based the Force and the Jedi Order on belief systems such as Taoism and Buddhism, but only on the surface, without putting any real effort into into portraying them earnestly or accurately. He consistently disrespected both characters of color and characters coded to be a certain race, ethnicity, culture, or religion, and likewise disrespected and stole from the cultures upon which he based them. He was, and continues to be, a racist white man who wrote a racist story. His universe has Orientalism baked into its every facet, and the idea that fans who wish to move away from this and interrogate and transform the text into something better than what it is are racist is not only laughable, but incredibly disingenuous and insidious.

As I said, I am not writing this to change your mind, because I truly believe that you already know that "cOnLaNgS aRe RaCiSt" is a ridiculous statement. The way you've comported yourself in fandom spaces thus far has shown to me that you are nothing more than a bully who knows that the anti-racist movement in fandom can be co-opted for your benefit. If you tout your Asian heritage and use the right language, make the "right" accusations and take advantage of white guilt and white ignorance, you can have dozens of people falling at your feet, begging for forgiveness, for absolution. And I think that gives you a thrill. So, no, none of this will change your mind because none of this is genuinely about racism—it's about power, it's about control, it's about fandom being the only space where you have some.

So I'm writing this for the creators of this wonderful conlang, which has been crafted by multiple people including people of color, who don't deserve this nonsensical vitriol, and for the fans reading this manipulative hate-fest, wondering if they really are Evil Racists because they don't participate in fandom the way you think they should.

Here it is: fandom has a lot of racism, antisemitism, misogyny, queerphobia, ableism, etc. baked into it. Unfortunately, such is the nature of living and growing up in societies and cultures that have the same. The important thing is to independently educate yourself on those issues and think critically about them—not "think critically" as in "to criticize" them, but to analyze, evaluate, pick apart, examine, and reconstruct them again in order to come to a well thought-out conclusion. Read this well-articulated attack on a group of fans who have always welcomed feedback and participation, are open about their backgrounds, their strengths and weaknesses, and wonder who is actually being genuine.

Is it the open and enthusiastic group who ask for the participation of others in this labor of love? Or is it the ringleader of a group of well-known bullies who have manipulated, gaslit, and then subsequently love-bomb people who did not simply roll over at the slightest hint of dominance? The ones who spent hours upon hours tearing apart, mocking, deriding, and falsely accusing authors of fanworks and metatextual works of various bigotries and -isms, knowing that those evaluations were spurious and meant only to cause harm, not genuine examinations of the works themselves or even presumed authorial intent. The ones who made their own, quote-unquote, community so negative and toxic that even after the departure of a large portion of them, including this author in particular, that community still has a reputation for being hateful, toxic, and full of mean-spirited harassers who will never look critically about their own behavior but only ever point fingers at others. The ones who are so very determined to cause misery wherever they go that as soon as their usual victims are no longer immediately available, they will turn on each other at the slightest hint of weakness.

This entire piece of (fan)work is misinformed at the most generous, disingenuous at the most objective, and downright spiteful when we get right into it. The creators of Dai Bendu, along with various other works, series, and fan events that these people personally dislike, have been targeted because it is so much easier to harass, bully, and use progressive language as a weapon against them, than it is to put any effort into making fandom spaces more informed, more positive, more respectful.

As someone rather eloquently put it, community is not a fucking spectator sport. You want a better community, you gotta work at it. And conversely, what you put into your community is what you'll get out of it. This author and their friends have put a lot of hate into their communities, and now they're toxic cesspools that people stay well away from, for fear of contracting some terrible form of harassment poisoning.

Congrats, Ri, you've gotten just what you wanted: adoring crowds listening to you spout your absolutely heinous personal views purely to live out some kind of power fantasy, and the rest of us staying well away, because fuck knows nothing kind, helpful, or in good faith has ever come from Virdant or her echo-chamber of petty, spiteful assholes.

No love, bad night.

P.S. Everyone actually in the Dai Bendu server knows your ass got kicked because you didn’t say shit for a full thirty days and ignored the announcement that inactive members would be culled. You ain’t cute pretending like it’s because you were ~*~Silenced~*~ after ~*~Valiantly~*~ attempting to call out racism. We see you.

[rhowena]

Pile of stuff concerning what happened to Loki between Thor and The Avengers

Originally posted on r/FanTheories

https://inforapid.org/webapp/webapp.php?shareddb=IAxUFHnwkGJSYMj9OFbT8mRl5goHm9SC2qHbWw4knO1cng5qI5Wrg48nP1MdgbWlJmHj6UpwbN343IqnstQUwxIIO01M5Rvb

As it does not escape my notice that I’ve created a digital version of this meme, some navigation help for anyone who needs it:

Mouse over/tap an item or relation to view its description

For items with the yellow ‘Note’ label, select the node and then 'Notes on Item’ in the side menu to view an additional notes page

If an item has a globe icon it the top-left corner, click it to open a webpage

'Adjust View’ in the side menu has controls to zoom in/out, increase/decrease the distance between items, and filter items or relations by category

Relations (and items) are color-coded by type: solid green lines are for in-universe evidence (light green connects evidence to the theory it supports, while dark green connects pieces of evidence that should be looked at together), purple dotted lines denote parallels, and dark red lines mark cases of “one of these things is not like the other”

And an overview of the theories contained therein:

First, the central piece of tinfoil around which all other tinfoil is arrayed: remember how, at the end of the first Thor, Loki was pathologically obsessed with gaining his father’s approval? And how, when he next showed up after vanishing for an entire year, he’d gotten mixed up with a guy who keeps a menagerie of adopted children? And how, during his argument with Thor on the mountaintop, he said this?

Loki: Did you mourn? Thor: We all did. Our father– Loki: Your father. He did tell you my true parentage, did he not?

Loki: I’ve seen worlds you’ve never known about! I have grown, Odinson, in my exile. I have seen the true power of the Tesseract and when I wield it—

Tom Hiddleston: There’s a bit where Thor says, “We all mourned! Our father…” and Loki interrupts him and says, “YOUR father.” And it’s that sense of 'don’t include me in this anymore. I have no relation or connection to you.’ It’s his way of saying 'I’ve let go, I’m gone, I’m on the outside of the fence, I’m happy here, I don’t want to come back in.’

If I may take a minute to get out some of my extremely complicated feelings on this, while there’s a bunch more evidence in favor of Loki having been another of Thanos’s children that can be viewed on the mind map, I want to highlight this pair of quotes because it’s everything implied by the words “Your father” that makes it into a devastating punch in the stomach which draws on both halves of Loki’s Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds characterization: his genuine love for his family is his primary redeeming quality and that he forswore it like this puts the terrible moment when he first knelt before Thanos and pledged himself to the Mad Titan’s service firmly into archetypal Faustian sell-your-soul territory, but when you consider the straits he was in at the time and the implication that Thanos initially ensnared him not through promises of power but by preying on him emotionally, it’s a very human kind of tragic mistake.

The other mitigating factor is that based on everything we’ve heard from Thanos’s other children, it’s a safe bet that he did in fact do unspeakably horrible things to Loki too – indeed, noticing the resemblance between the existing theories about Loki having been tortured/brainwashed and Gamora’s “He took me, tortured me, turned me into a weapon” was what prompted the above realization in the first place. (It’s reminiscent of Theon’s storyline in ASOIAF/GOT: yeah, he betrayed his adoptive family and did some generally awful stuff, but no one deserves what happened to him.) It also bears emphasizing that accountability cuts both ways: one of the key takeaways from the previous bullet point is that the suffering Loki went through doesn’t absolve him of responsibility for his villainous actions, but the other side of the coin is that Loki’s partial complicity doesn’t absolve Thanos of responsibility for the choice he made to take a broken, desperate young man who’d just lost everything and turn him into the rabid animal we saw during The Avengers, and I dearly hope that exploring the rich font of psychological horror that is that time period will erase any remaining doubt that Thanos’s claims of acting For The Greater Good are nothing but empty, egotistical, self-righteous posturing and everyone in the audience who insists on taking them at face value is being duped just as Loki was.

Stephen: No. I mean, come on. Look at your face. Dormammu made you a murderer. Just how good can his kingdom be?

As for where this is all going, I believe there’s a good chance that the Loki Disney+ series will be where they finally address this as a. the split timeline Loki the series will be following is still fresh from his time with Thanos and it will therefore have to explain what happened if we’re to understand the kind of headspace that he’s in at that moment and b. Tom Hiddleston has revealed that the series will also clarify whether or not Loki really is dead in the main timeline, and everything I have so far indicates that understanding the nature of his original pact with Thanos is essential to understanding both Loki’s choice to die and Thanos’s choice to kill him (see the 'Pledge of fidelity’ and 'Limited use’ notes pages on the mind map). Character-wise, I think one of the points of emphasis will be that Loki’s death in Infinity War doesn’t wrap up his story as neatly as it may appear to on the surface; truly completing his redemption arc will require him to confront this part of his past in full, and with it his guilt over everything he’s done and his fear that he’s wrecked his life and relationship with his family so thoroughly that he can never, ever fix them.

Loki: Can you? Can you wipe out that much red? […] Your ledger is dripping, it’s gushing red, and you think saving a man no more virtuous than yourself will change anything? This is the basest sentimentality. This is a child at prayer… PATHETIC! You lie and kill in the service of liars and killers. You pretend to be separate, to have your own code. Something that makes up for the horrors. But they are a part of you, and they will *never* go away!

An additional giant red flag indicating we really should be asking more questions about that time gap is a group of lines in The Avengers which reveal that Thanos taught Loki how to use the Tesseract.

The Other: The Tesseract has awakened. It is on a little world. A human world. They would wield its power, but our ally knows its workings as they never will.

The Other: You question us? You question HIM? He, who put the Scepter in your hand? Who gave you ancient knowledge and new purpose when you were cast out, defeated?

Loki: I’ve seen worlds you’ve never known about! I have grown, Odinson, in my exile. I have seen the true power of the Tesseract and when I wield it— Thor: Who showed you this power? Who controls the would-be king?

Sharing that kind of knowledge and power with someone as volatile as Loki strikes me as an monumentally terrible idea (and as much as I don’t want to be the person who throws a tantrum because their fanfic didn’t come true, I’m kinda salty that Thanos was defeated without it coming back to bite him in the ass), which leaves me wondering what Thanos hoped to gain that he believed would be worth the risks. My thoughts on that particular sub-puzzle are still somewhat hazy, but my basic sense is that there’s something weird going on between Loki and the Tesseract and wanting to exploit that connection is one of the reasons Thanos went to all the trouble of breaking him into submission.

Loki: So I am no more than another stolen relic, locked up here until you might have use of me?

The other reason for Thanos’s interest in Loki ties back to all that emotional twistiness I talked about earlier: he planned to leverage Loki’s anger and resentment towards his family in a bid to destroy Odin and Asgard from the inside.

Zemo: An empire toppled by its enemies can rise again. But one which crumbles from within? That’s dead… forever.

As a prelude to this, during The Avengers Thanos had additionally tasked Loki with killing Thor as a way to prove his loyalty and destroy the last remaining shreds of his own humanity, a test Loki failed because he still loved his brother too much.

Coulson: You’re going to lose. It’s in your nature. […] You lack conviction.

What’s more, Thanos anticipated this, and the Scepter’s influence over Loki was aimed at forcing him to go through with it if he refused.

Loki: I won’t touch Barton, not until I make him kill you! Slowly, intimately, in every way he knows you fear! And then he’ll wake, just long enough to see his good work, and when he screams, I’ll split his skull!

Lastly, even with Infinity War having established that Thanos simply gets off on emotional torture, that he would go out of his way to fuck with Odin personally by turning his second son against him leads me to believe there was a special hatred there stemming from some as-yet unrevealed history between the two. I mean, when I picture the alternate universe where Thanos shows up to attack Asgard with a corrupted Loki in tow like “You screwed up so badly that he chose me as a father figure over you” …that isn’t something you say to a complete stranger.

GRRM on writing villain POVs: That’s a comic book kind of thing, where the Red Skull gets up in the morning [and asks] “What evil can I do today?” Real people don’t think that way. We all think we’re heroes, we all think we’re good guys. We have our rationalizations when we do bad things. “Well, I had no choice,” or “It’s the best of several bad alternatives,” or “No it was actually good because God told me so,” or “I had to do it for my family.” We all have rationalizations for why we do shitty things or selfish things or cruel things. So when I’m writing from the viewpoint of one of my characters who has done these things, I try to have that in my head.

[locuas642]

Anime Concept with a little twist

your typical shonen highschool anime about the different clubs fighting each other because “the school believes in strenght over all else” (or the teachers are REALLYneglectful... or whatever). 

And so you have your typical anime protagonist who is a first year on his first day and discovers how messed up this school.

He quickly learns the rules of the school: the weak MUST obey the strong. the only way to protect yourself is to join a club. but most clubs are, themselves, subservient to other stronger clubs due to how weak they are. smaller clubs on the service of stronger clubs are called “protectorates” and they serve in exchange of receiving protection from clubs that would otherwise bully them.

of coruse, this means the stronger clubs take no qualms in exploiting their protectorates to do their bidding and bullying them.

And so the strongest club in the entire school, the one EVERYONE dreads, yet would want to join because of how much power it would entitle you to is, obviously, the Kendo club or something (or maybe the student council).

Obviously, the protagonist doesn’t want to deal with such a messed up system and refuses to join any club at all. but that means he is quickly bullied by everyone else, because they are weak, and isn’t part of some club that would encourage people to leave him alone. And so their first couple of days are hell. Not helped by the fact there are two jackasses in his class who managed to qualify for the kendo Club and now basically OWN the classroom.

But then one day they meet this mysterious stranger: the series female lead. You know the one, not the cheerful one but the cold one. Maybe with glasses and long hair. The one who is so stoic they seem uncaring, but are nice people inside.

She appears when she saves him from a bully (not one of the jackasses)

Anyways, she would be a second year and, as such, already knows how to handle herself. Altough she doesn’t quite fight them yet, because she simply points out that, unlike our protagonist, she IS part of a club already and even the weakest of clubs can beat the crap out of a single student by outnumbering them. And so the bully leaves.

But our protagonist is confused, why would a second-year be in the area of the first-years? that makes no sense.

And so she explains that she was doing what every club does every year: scouting for possible new members. But because she was looking for a very specific set of requirements, she usually just walks around the area while keeping an eye out for any possible candidate.

Though she does mention something among the lines of “since I was here, I had no choice but to intervene”

She leaves, but not before telling him that she meant it when she said that even the weakest of clubs is better than having no club and encourages him to join something, though she strongly advices him to avoid any of the martial-arts clubs, in particular those alligned with the Kendo Club, because they enforce the schools rule of “the weak must obey the strong” the harshest.

And our protagonist feels saddened by her words. Because even this person, who saved him when he needed it, is obviously in favor of this messed up system. And that they WILL have to join a club if they want to survive.

Meanwhile, there is this other character, who is the protagonist’s classmate, who has been trying to join one of the stronger clubs. Because even though he knows he would be bullied by the other members, at least he would be safer than on his own like with our protagonist. He is particularly interested in joining one of the martial arts based clubs.

The protagonist tells him what the older student told him, that those clubes where no good and he should go for soemthing else. but he doesn’t listen. It comes to a point when they have a fight and the student tells him the protaognist that they are not friends and to stick with his own business. Even accusing him that the REAL reason they are trying to persuade him to not to joing a club is because, then, they wouldn’t be the weakest person in the class

And so the protaognist leaves. andgry with their classmate and with themselves, because maybe he is right.

Then the next day, they discover the two jackasses bullying their friend in the corridors of the school.

Naturally, the protagonists asks what the hell is going on. and the jackasses inform them that they are simply “initiating”  him. Because he had asked them to put a good word for him in the kendo club. But the jackasses, being the jackasses that they are, decided to instead beat the crap out of him while sarcastically remarking that if he survives that, maybe there will be an open spot as the club’s training dummy. They are doing so with bamboo swords (obviously)

they also tell the protagonist to walk off.

and the protagonist does, recalling their friend’s words about leaving him alone. Even the friend can’t blame them, because he now realizes they had warned him this would happen but did not listen and, instead told them nasty things.

But then, the protagonist remembers the words from that girl “Since I was here, I had no choice but to intervene”.

they are there, when someone is in need of help. they could walk off, assume someone else would do something instead... but there is no certainty of that.

They only control what they choose to do. And right now, the only choices are either leaving and admiting the messed up system is right, or standing up and helping someone in need.

and so, there is no choice at all.

They try to stop the jackasses... and promptly get they crap beat out of them.

They see the friend taking the chance to escape, and the protagonist is only glad they could help a little.

Then the friend returns with some help: the girl from the other day.

She tells them to stop and leave the protagonist alone. But of course, these are jackasses who have only been in the school for like a week and believe that, since they are part of the Kendo club, they are automatically awesome and everyone else has to do what they say. and tell her as much.

She is unimpressed. Her club is not aligned with the Kendo Club nor it is a protectorate of the Kendo Club, thus she has no reason to care what they have to say.

Of course, these are jackasses and so they don’t care she is an older student, they charge in....... aaaand they don’t last even ten seconds against her.

They are clearly upset and claim that now the kendo club will take revenge over this, so she can say goodbye to whatever pathetic club she is in, because it will be completely erased. and they actually begin to gloat when another second year student, one we had met earlier when he was looking for recruits for the kendo club, shows up.

Initially, they expect him to crush the girl.

But he doesn’t. He simply informs her the Kendo Club will not take this as an attack due to the jackasses being first years and the fight happening outside the kendo club. So they agree to stop further hostilities.

 THe jackasses are shocked to discover, that girl wasn’t from some small fry club, but was a top ranking member of the kendo club’s biggest rival, strong enough for an all-out war to be unleshed if they decided to fight.

Later when they are alone with the girl, the protagonist tells her how her words inspired them and, after that, she asks them to join the club

The protagonist is confused, because they were pathetically weak in that fight. But then she tells them the “set of requirements” she meant was basically someone who would stand to bullies, no matter how desperate things seemed. Because her club was specifically created in defiance of the school’s rule: They exist to protect the weak. and they want people who believe in protecting the weak. 

Now, what is this club? the one that rivals the strongest club in the entire school? one specifically created in defiance of a disgusting belief that punishes the weak? that values everyone beyond their individual strenght?

It’s name is.... The Cooking Club

[broken-but-not-defeated]

Open letter to my Mother in Law, part two of six, my depression

L-

Depression is one of those illnesses that seems to get tossed around at any moment of sadness or stress. I never want to be one of those people that claims to have a bunch of mental illnesses, when really I am just feeling normal emotions. I know you have a history of depression, so I would like to remind you that my depression may not be the exact same as yours, but that doesn’t make it any less valid or real.

For as long as I can remember, I have cared far too much about what others think of me. I try to stop it from happening, but I don’t know how. People say things like “don’t let them effect you” and “know your worth” but those are far easier said than done. The way my brain works, I have not found a way to shut that part of it down. This has been a huge contribution to my depression.

I was bullied from elementary school all the way through high school. And it’s weird, because if you had asked me when I was younger if I had ever been bullied, I would have said no. It was done so subtly, by most of the people I had ever met, and I grew so used to it that I thought it was normal. I thought boys were supposed to insult me, punch me, stomp on my toes, pinch me, and pull my hair, because that was supposedly the way boys showed affection. I thought that girls were supposed to befriend you one day only to speak so poorly of you the next because girls are just caddy. I thought that the way you grew as a person was by taking the criticism of your peers and changing yourself to match what they wanted you to be. And in doing that, I created so many different versions of myself that I completely lost touch with who I actually was. In the most formative years of my life, I was a puppet.

Every aspect of my character was changed and molded by everyone around me. I was told that the clothes I wore were wrong, the colors that I liked were wrong, my hair was wrong, my weight was wrong, my wearing glasses was wrong, my not wearing makeup was wrong, the music I liked and the books I read were wrong, the way I talked was wrong, my entire personality was wrong. I was told that if I wanted anyone to like me, I had to change these things about myself. And when I did change, I was laughed at and excluded by everyone for being ‘fake’ and giving in to peer pressure. I was called fat, ugly, stupid, dumb, pathetic, worthless, and a waste of a life.

These things were told to me by the people I considered friends. It started when I was about 8, and it didn’t stop. I grew up believing that this was friendship.

When I started dating, I attracted only the guys who would lie to me, manipulate me, and cheat on me. I didn’t know any different, and these guys knew that they could treat me any way that they wanted and I would always come back for more. I thought that this was love.

I would change every little bit of myself to match what others wanted me to be. I would wake up hours before school to shower, do my hair and makeup, and obsess over the perfect outfit. For a while, I’m sure I seemed vain. I believed that if I dressed a certain way, if I followed the directions of others, that I would finally be accepted. But it never worked. I have hated the color pink for the majority of my life because I was publicly shamed and ridiculed for being an innocent, goody two shoes, girly girl. So I started wearing all black. But then I would be attacked for being a ‘poser’ and trying to fit in. I was never big on wearing makeup, but I started because I was told that it was the only thing that would hide how ugly I am. But I was picked apart daily for not applying it the right way. I would hide my body behind layers of clothes to hide the fat that people always loved to point out, but the more layers I would add, the fatter I apparently looked. I gave up on all the things I was passionate about in favor of things that were trendy and popular, and was yelled at for even trying. I gave up on myself just like everyone else did.

No matter what I did or tried to do, nothing would work. I didn’t even want friends, I just wanted to stop being a flashing neon target. So after a while, I just stopped trying altogether. I wouldn’t shower or brush my teeth. I wouldn’t change my clothes or comb my hair. I wasn’t what anyone wanted me to be, and I wasn’t myself. I was nothing, empty, and numb. My mom saw this as me being a bratty teenager who just didn’t care. She would force me to shower, she would comb my hair for me, and she would always say how sad it was that I wasn’t trying. I see her perspective. But what she didn’t see was the years of trying that got me nowhere.

Have you ever seen a scene in movies or tv shows, where a person is lying in bed after a hard day. As they try to fall asleep, holographic heads start appearing all around them, replaying things that have been said to them. The heads start spinning, and the more that appear, the more they talk over each other until it’s a screaming mess of gibberish. Those scenes are a very dramatized but accurate representation of what my mind likes to do to me every day.

There is a running list in my head of every bad thing that has ever been said to me. And each time something is added to that list, I can hear it in the person’s voice on a permanent loop. So many of them, constantly screaming at me. Like the one time a guy in 7th grade told me that I would be better off dead. For the longest time, I could hear him say it in my head over and over. But over time, I have forgotten what his voice sounds like. The words remain, but the voice fades. And when that happens, it is replaced with my own inner voice. So after years and years of being told all kinds of bad things about me, they have stayed with me. Never stopping, always there. But instead of some random guy repeating these things to me, it is now my own self. I have become my worst enemy, my biggest bully. Those people probably don’t even remember what they have said, but I cannot forget.

Now, anyone looking at this from the outside would clearly classify this as bullying. So, how was it that I would have said that I was never bullied? My brain has a way of making me think that I am crazy, that I am overreacting, and that nothing was really as bad as I made it seem. In my mind, the people around me were just reacting to me the way that anyone should. I made myself believe that I was the problem, that I was doing something wrong, and that therefore, I deserved it.

I had a full length mirror in my bedroom. I would take a dry erase marker and write on the mirror, from top to bottom, everything people said was wrong with me. In the end, it was so covered in writing that I couldn’t see myself anymore. I thought that I could fix each problem, one by one, and erase them, revealing my reflection as the person I was supposed to be. Maybe then, people would like me.

In 8th grade, I met a girl. She was new to our school, and quickly integrated into my group of friends at the time. We got to know each other really well, and I looked up to her. She was nice to me. One day, we were changing into our gym clothes, and I saw her body. From head to toe, she was covered in cuts and scars. I had heard of self harm before, but she just seemed so happy all the time, I never would have guessed. I asked her why she did it. She told me that whenever she was sad, she would do it to distract herself. It made her happy. And she was happy, or already appeared to be. Up until that point, I had never had any kind of coping mechanism. If it worked for her, maybe it would work for me too.

I went home that night after school, and self harmed for the first time. I was 13.

There is a lot of science behind why people self harm. It can be used as a distraction, a stress reliever, and even a physical representation of pain that cannot otherwise be seen. But it goes even deeper than that. When the human body experiences trauma, the brain sends out different chemicals and things to help the body heal. Some of those chemicals are also responsible for creating the emotion of happiness. So, by self harming, I fed my body more of those happy chemicals.

When someone thinks of addiction, they think of things like drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, and even caffeine. People rarely consider the fact that you can get addicted to the chemicals your body naturally produces. And that’s what happened to me. I was addicted.

I self harmed for three years. Most of the scars have faded by now, but some still remain. I started feeling suicidal. When I self harmed, I didn’t care if I lived or died. I did it because when I was thinking about the pain, nothing else in my head mattered. I did it because I didn’t feel like my emotions were real, but if there’s a scar, that meant that they were. I did it because it was all that I knew.

In high school, I dated a guy who made me want to be better, not for me, but for him. It was the same old stuff that had always been there, me changing for someone else, but it was disguised as love. I felt like I needed him, and that without him, life didn’t have worth. He made me promise that I would stop self harming, and I did. But it wasn’t because it was unhealthy of me to do, it was solely for him. I was 16.

One night, while I was filming a project for class with my friends, this guy and I got into a really bad fight. We were screaming at each other, saying anything and everything we could to hurt each other. The thing I was filming included a knife that I had to hold. In an effort to get the fighting to stop, I told him how tempted I was to self harm again. And it wasn’t a lie. I was extremely tempted and it was taking all of my strength not to. He called my parents and told them. This was the first they had ever heard of it, and they did not react well.

I was involuntarily put into therapy. My therapist was a perfect example of what not to do. She used me as a way to gain more clients, even calling my friends and my boyfriend during our sessions. Not to talk to them about me or with me, but to get them to come in and pay her more money. She did not care about me.

However, there were about two sessions where we actually talked about me and what I was going through. In those sessions, she taught me two things which have stuck with me, and which actually helped in my recovery.

1. My emotions and thoughts are valid and real, and nobody has the right to say otherwise. If I feel something, no matter what other people have to say about it, those emotions are mine and it is 100% okay to feel them.

2. In moments of crisis, when I feel like a relapse is inevitable, I need to know who my support system is, and how to get to them, as many of them as possible, as fast as possible.

I employed these things into my life immediately. My family and friends were trained, either by me or the therapist herself, how to help me. How to talk me down and get me to a place where I am thinking rationally. And it worked.

If I needed family support, I’d be surrounded by my parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins within the hour. If I needed friend support, I’d text my best friend and let him know where to meet me, and by the time I got there, he would be there along with all of our other friends. For the first time in a long time, maybe even the first time in my life, I felt real support. I was validated, understood, and helped. And when I met my husband, left the bad relationship I had been in, and got married, I was finally shown what real love is like. I saw what it was to be accepted. I started getting to know myself. I started healing.

So, when I packed my bags and moved across the country and away from my family and friends, I lost a huge part of the support that I had finally found. The people were still there for me, but I could only contact one at a time, and it could never be in person. I felt myself slipping again. The thoughts started coming back. I knew that I had to figure something out real quick.

As unconventional as it may seem, Facebook ended up being the answer. One post, and I could have upwards of 40 people, friends and family, commenting and supporting me. It was different, but successful. The same people who were trained how to help me could still help me. The support never went away, it just found a new platform.

That is, until THE post. You know the one.

I had gotten into a huge fight with your brother one night, and then you the next morning. Awful things were said about me, and with each one, the list in my head got longer, and the inner screaming got louder. I was in one of those crisis moments. One person was not enough to calm me down. I felt like I had nobody. I felt like I was crazy, like my emotions about the situation were over dramatic and not real. When I say that I needed support, I mean it. I NEEDED support. So I made a post.

In this post, I did not name you, your brother, or anyone else. I simply stated my thoughts on a certain topic. I vented. Anyone who didn’t know you or your brother had no idea who or what it was even about. All they knew was that I wasn’t right in my own head, and that I needed them. The comments were overwhelmingly positive. They said all the things they had been trained to. They validated me and my feelings. They made me feel like I wasn’t alone. These are people who have been in shoes very similar to yours, who have been on both your end of the argument and mine. They weren’t just my “little friends.” They were my support system. They were all I had.

But then your comments started flooding in. You called me immature, told me to grow up, defended yourself against me, and told me that it was all just a big miscommunication. You were a perfect echo of the part of my brain I was trying to silence. You said everything that I had already thought myself. And reading your comments, it was like all the rest disappeared. The positivity, gone. The support, gone. Your comments confirmed for me what I had spent so much time being afraid of, the fact that I was making it all up. I felt insane. I felt confused. I started second guessing myself, wondering if I had gotten it all wrong. I started believing that I was wrong, that I was the problem in all of this, that it was my fault, and that I deserved it. And just like that, my support system, my safety net, my coping mechanism, gone. That was almost two years ago.

I don’t post to Facebook anymore. It wasn’t immediate, but I did eventually relapse into self harm, because I didn’t know what else to do. I had made it 7 years. In the past year, things have been worse than they have ever been, but I am working hard every day to get better. The self harm, the suicidal ideation, I am working through it all and am doing better on my own each day. I am shopping around for a therapist that is affordable and good at their job, and I am making my way toward a permanent recovery. Not for anyone else this time, but for me.

I want you to know that I don’t blame anyone for any of this. Not you, not your brother, not my past relationships, not my past bullies. Yes, people have been awful to me, but the fact that my brain is the way that it is isn’t anyone’s fault. For people who are mentally healthy, a lot of this would have been a nonissue. But it is because I am not mentally healthy that things got as bad as they did. It is because I waited so long to reach out for help that things progressed so far.

You may be wondering how these things have lead to depression if they aren’t the direct cause. My brain is sick. It does not process information correctly. It has taken all of this and translated it into a language that only I know, one that makes me hate myself. My knowledge of myself and the way I see myself is skewed. Not because of others, but because of the way my brain has grown and developed. My experiences do not define who I am, but they are a part of my story. These experiences have been filtered through a web of depression, and hand delivered to me in an envelope that should have never existed. Having thick skin and letting things roll off your back is a lot easier when you aren’t mentally ill.

My depression is a demon that has taken over half of my brain. It makes me believe the worst lies about myself. It fixates on every single flaw that I have. It makes me feel like I am worthless, pathetic, and a waste of a life. It makes things like cleaning my room or taking a shower seem like climbing a mountain. There are days where I don’t have the energy to get out of bed. There are days where if I wake up and that’s the only thing I do that day, I consider that a success. I am a work in progress. I am meeting parts of myself for the first time, and learning how to accept myself for who I am. I am learning how to allow myself to feel emotion instead of repressing it or denying its existence. It is beyond difficult, but I know I can do it. I am not my depression, but I do have depression.

The next thing I want to talk about: my anxiety.