#it bothers me that so many people (also on tumblr) glorify smoke cigarettes.

[cat-eye-nebula]

Humans need to stop glorifying toxic smoke. Everything that you set on fire will create thousands of toxins in the smoke! People that create smoke are poisoning themselves and the air and therefore poison others (also children and animals!).

[monsterkissed]

ffs tumblr can you keep replies working right for 24 consecutive hours

jesus christ i wrote way too much and got off-topic basically immediately so forgive me, i’m putting this under a cut for all our sakes so the tl;dr is “true, but i think that’s something you can only judge when you know a person personally and pretty well at that, i don’t think you can make it a generalisation about entire swathes of ppl based on a tiny glimpse into their behaviours in an environment as artificial as a blogging site”

(also apologies vaguelydown this sounds way more confrontational than i meant it, mainly bc i kinda forgot this was a reply about 1.5 paragraphs in, i’m not even disagreeing with you i just get distracted basically immediately once i start writing shit)

well yeah exactly; if it’s not a thing people are consciously doing then treating it like one is... pointless? you can’t categorise it in the same way as say, “tumblr is too critical of X type of media” like that kind of withdrawn analysis from a position of superiority is counter-productive and just not really appropriate?

like i don’t see how saying “oh you’re just being anti-recovery bc you have an illness, don’t be that and you’ll be fine” is any different from “oh you’re just being anxious bc you have anxiety, so don’t and you won’t” like they’re not solutions bc reaching that point requires actually making progress towards helping the condition first you can’t skip that step

and it also assumes that people aren’t doing anything and i’m v suspect of any ideologies that assume the worst of ppl by default tbh. like i whinge about being mentally ill p much constantly, but i also spend huge amounts of time with therapists and doctors and groups and shit, i take my meds i write down all the positive affirmations bs and i don’t see any reason to assume other ppl aren’t doing their best too? good god if you can’t even vent on a blogging platform idek what ppl think this is like i’d rather that than ppl feel like they can’t talk about it at all

and you know honestly even if ppl don’t want to receive whatever treatment is being offered that’s kinda none of my business? like i threw tantrums when i was a teenager i’m not gonna deny anyone else their right to make bad decisions anymore than i’m gonna go around slapping cigarettes out of ppl’s mouths or demanding they take down their smoking selfies bc they’re ~romanticising~ it it’s their life. who am i to say what they can and can’t do or what’s possible or not i’m just some random fuck painting a picture of them in broad strokes from a few lines of tumblr post i read once if someone came telling me what to do with my life based on a thing i reblogged and stuck 8 words onto once i wouldn’t hold their advice in very high esteem myself. you gotta tackle ppl as individuals with different circumstances you gotta get into the nitty gritty of each bespoke person there’s not a single piece of advice that’s one size fits all to all of humanity that’s why working in mental health is really fucking hard and making tumblr posts telling ppl to shut up and go take a walk doesn’t feature on any of the entrance exams

and i’m not saying some ppl with mental health issues aren’t arseholes! i am an arsehole basically every day and i sigh and shake my head seeing ppl jump on other ppl’s positive posts and being major downers about it as much as anyone i think that’s pretty rude i just don’t think it constitutes some kind of health crisis. i honestly think it’s more of the wider social network thing of anonymity and a culture of normalising responding to even minor irritations (that don’t even deserve the label of “misdemeanour” at this point tbh) with public displays of snark and aggression bc the internet loves a bully and popularity is the only currency in plentiful supply rn

actual real life health crisises like the one in the uk bother me 100x more bc that is a genuine mental health epidemic caused by very real social and economic concerns that no amount of medication, therapy and positive thinking is gonna make go away and the ppl suffering from life-long illness bc of those issues are only gonna grow in number and there is nothing in our society that is equipped to deal with that, no matter how many private councillors we contract or how many glasses of water we tell them to take. when the other shoe drops there i want it to be common knowledge to ppl that sometimes even doing your very best is not enough and you can’t just hand them some pithy statement and then tell them not to whine about it lest they encourage whininess in others

like these things don’t happen in isolation we already have entire cultures irl that glorify the idea of treating mentally ill ppl like we don’t know shit, we have no insight into out conditions or even reality, and we need ppl to come set us right whether we want it or not. i am incredibly leery of anything that furthers that idea because it is as far removed from actual support as you can get and if that’s not convincing enough as an argument: i’ve not yet met a mentally ill person who could never clock when they were being condescended to and that is a very effective way of shutting down a person’s desire to cooperate. a lot of therapists adopt a very soft, open and gentle persona for a reason, even if most of them are very shit at it. you can’t expect a person to be level with you if you insist on talking down to them.

idk i just feel like there’s got to be a better way that lecturing ppl and denying their actual real life circumstances as if it’s as easy as just choosing to do something or not. like a “yeah that does sound like it sucks, are you asking my advice for what to do about it?” as opposed to a “no it doesn’t it’s just your fault for not trying hard enough and if you shut up about it it’ll be better for everybody”