#suicidal rant

[jackkyb00]

(TW for the fact this is a suicidal rant!!)

Y’all ever have that one friend you love a lot and their separate friend group likes to involve you just to make sure you feel worthless and don’t deserve to live? I was messing around with his boyfriend because his boyfriend always lets me joke around weirdly and meanwhile my friend never commented on it. But he yaps about the stuff to his other friend group apparently and got friended like 5-6 times on discord just to be told to kill myself for something I said that I get allowed to. I really want to so.. I guess thanks for making the thoughts worse?? Sorry to rant about this but its feels safe to do it on tumblr since I don’t have many people I can talk to about this except my friend viper (aka poisonousnoodles) and my bf :(

[vexy-hexy]

Not to be all "ugh, my parents don't understand me 😡😡😡" emo teen (especially since I'm 21), but they really don't

IDK if it's my autism or something, but if I can't achieve my dream job, I would probably kill myself LOL

Like, I'm already struggling with the thought of living past 35, so thinking about how I may have to work a job I hate for years sounds like the straw that will break the camels back

[xoxohannas-world]

girls dealing with academia and an ed, i see you and i love you its going to be ok <3

[angelicsweetheartsposts]

Is it bad that I crave more?

[cherries-in-wine]

𝑷𝒂𝒓𝒂𝒍𝒍𝒆𝒍𝒔 𝒃𝒆𝒕𝒘𝒆𝒆𝒏 𝒍𝒐𝒍𝒊𝒕𝒂 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒗𝒊𝒓𝒈𝒊𝒏 𝒔𝒖𝒊𝒄𝒊𝒅𝒆𝒔 ‧₊ ☁️⋅♡ ࣪ ִֶָ☾.

People call Vladimir Nabokov a disgusting creep for writing from the perspective of a pedophile when in reality if you read the book, Humbert Humbert is not likeable in the slightest. He's an unreliable narrator that's so stuck in his own delusions that he can't see how miserable dolores is because of him. Nabokov is a great writer and lolita is really well written. It's a great satire in the sense that it's pathetic to see Humbert Humbert think he's sooo charming and these "nymphets" are soooo in love with him. Dolores' trauma is obvious to any competent reader, I don't know how people are so charmed by Humbert Humbert that they can't see how dolores' defiance which he refers to as "teenage rebellion" or "tantrums" is a very apparent cry for help. Lolita is a Gothic horror, a cautionary tale. It's a genius work of art and what's most horrific about it is how society reacted to it, how it's so normalised to sexualise little girls that blatant pedophilia is interpreted as a tragic love story. Nabokov himself referred to dolores as his "poor little girl". He had a lot of empathy for her and it must be so heartbreaking to see her getting sexualised.

When I first read the virgin suicides i thought it was a great work of satire. I adore the Lisbon girls with all my heart, I see a part of myself in all of them by varying degrees. The boys who claimed they loved these girls, only saw them as some fantasy. Even in death they never truly respected any of these girls. How when they found Cecelia's diary, instead of trying to make sense of why she killed herself, they selfishly searched for their own names. I loved the irony of the boys claiming they loved these girls when they didn't know anything about them. It showed how their "love" was really shallow and surface level. I thought Jeffrey Eugenides really understood me in that sense. But in reality he didn't mean any of the things the boys did to be interpreted as satire. According to him, peaking through windows, stealing used tampons, joking about groping dead girls, these grown men still picturing those little girls years later while they had sex with their wives etc was supposed to show that teenage boys are not disgusting horny dogs, but romantic softies (if anything this made me think teenage boys are much more repulsive than i thought). According to Eugenides the book is satire, but in the sense that you never know what was going through a person's head when they committed suicide and you can't make sense of it no matter how hard you try. Everything about how the boys viewed the girls was not satire and was to be taken at face value. This really broke my heart, an author who i thought really did get me and understood me, ended up making me feel watched instead of seen.

It's so interesting how lolita which is supposed to be from the perspective of an unreliable narrator was taken at face value and the virgin suicides which was to be taken at face value was perceived as satire.

The director of Lolita didn't get her at all, even he thought she was some kind of a seductress instead of a child that was abused repeatedly. While the virgin suicides movie was so much better than the book, Sofia Coppola, the director, understood the Lisbon girls so well and she did them justice.

[uncanny-tranny]

I've talked before about how the way people treat suicide can be unintentionally devastating to the suicidal person, but I don't think I really ever said how to avoid that.

Speaking about suicide in how selfish it "is" ("think about how you'll transfer your pain to your loved ones!") might seem like a way to put logical sense into the suicidal person, but, honestly? It runs the risk of massively increasing their shame and guilt about being suicidal. Suicide is not inherently a revenge fantasy or a way to "get back" at someone's loved ones, so when the suicidal person is treated like a criminal of a "crime" they haven't even committed yet, you can imagine how unhelpful that can become.

Instead, if you want to point out how cherished your person is, frame their relationships as something they can keep fostering.

"Your cat will miss you :(!!!!" becomes "you and your cat seem close, right? I'm sure it's beautiful having a close friend like that!" and maybe include ways that they and their cat are close and meaningful to each other, tailored to that relationship.

That's only one example, but when you shift the focus away from why that person should repent and feel guilty for being suicidal, you can instead focus on why they would live for that reason. See how you can frame that as a positive? Whatever is keeping that person tethered should never be used as a bludgeon, I think, because then you're taking away why they're living, the positivity of why they are here. Whatever they are here for should be remembered often and honoured.

[jude-us]

Today I’m think about how harmful and deliberate the invisibity of trans men and mascs is. In pretending we don’t exist and have never existed we are denied a community and a history. Young trans boys grow up thinking they’re completely alone contributing to the insanely high rates of suicide we have. (A study by the American Academy of Pediatrics showed that more then half of trans male teenagers have attempted suicide. Link)

Older trans men are denied healthcare especially “woman’s healthcare.” that they need and even though we have higher rates of assault then cis men and woman we are denied recourses for safety and recovery. Link

It’s so harmful and exhausting to watch this invisibility even happen in our own communities.

[misaswif3]

i think i just have to come to terms with the fact that i actually have nobody. i have close friends but they’re enjoying their lives and i don’t want to ruin that. i’m in a big city all by myself hundreds of miles away from home and nobody here would ever notice if i was gone. the whole reason im here is for art and i can’t even fucking do that all i do is spend all my free time in my room watching tv and i want to reach out to my best friend so bad but she’s living her own life and i don’t want to ruin that. i genuinely don’t know what to do anymore i don’t want to exist. i just want it all to stop. i wish i was never born

[rockettequeen]

hot girls feel like everyone is mad at them rn

[floweypilled]

Chara: I dont know why you keep me around . Id be better use to you dead

Asriel: NO YOU WOULDNT! First of all youre the only kid down here who knows how pokemon cards work

[anghraine]

i just finished rereading lotr for the first time since i was nine and like i knew the movies did the whole steward's house dirty but The Movies Did The Whole Steward's House So Goddamn Dirty. i know this is not a revelation to you but i had to get it off my chest to someone who understands

I know it took me awhile to respond BUT NOT OUT OF DISAGREEMENT. They really, really did, and so many people are so insistent on Peter Jackson as the One True Arbiter of Tolkien's Vision that the shitty film interpretations of the House of Húrin are also completely inescapable.

I really do feel that there are understandable concessions to the medium and limitations of time etc and then there's whatever the hell that was. The point where Gandalf is calling them "lesser men" and using "steward" as a term of contempt (???????) and clobbering Denethor over the head where the devoutly Catholic Tolkien handled Denethor's despair and suicide with far more sympathy and care ... it's just so bad and there's nothing about film as a medium that requires it to be.

They had limited screen time, sure, and Faramir and Boromir and Denethor are not the most central characters, true—but there's also so much screen time wasted on indulgent bullshit like the skulls cascade and Frodo sending Sam away and so on. I don't remotely buy the justification that handling them so badly was somehow unavoidable and couldn't possibly have been done better for some reason.

I dislike certain choices made with Boromir, though there are some good points as well—there's a lack of subtlety in the foreshadowing that feels a bit like being repeatedly clubbed over the head rather than organically developing over time, but he does have some good moments as well that feel very Boromir. Movie Faramir, meanwhile, is so fundamentally dissimilar from Tolkien's in both TTT and ROTK that I feel he might as well be an OC, and one I don't find interesting or likable. I've always been deeply unconvinced by the justifications of the films' approach to him as the only workable one for the character. But then when you add to that the films' treatment of Denethor and the IMO completely unjustifiable handling of something as weighty as suicide, it just feels like there's a contempt for this family and their people built into the films' narrative that is hard to escape, either while watching it or in Tolkien fandom for the last 20 years.

[crismakesstuff]

I’m really sick and tired of seeing people reduce nolan down to:

1. He’s actually hitler, he’s a racist and sexist and hates every minority + viltrum is magakkk /srs

2. He’s an UwU wife guy babygirl guys!! He said he misses his wife so this clears him of all bad he’s done !!

All of you are wrong and I’m taking him away from everyone until y’all learn how to do media literacy correctly, you people treat nolan the way you should fucking treat homelander the actual canon racist and sexist pig! some of you r even deluded enough to think they would be homeboys ! NO

[nymphet-doll]

[paloma-ascends-into-hellfire]

people love their ghostly, frail anorexic friend until her hair thins and she looks genuinely skeletal, or until she throws up or binges.

people love their hyper adhd friend until he forgets your birthday because he was daydreaming.

people love their quiet, honest autistic friend until they shut down, or visibly stim, or are a bit too blunt, or they weird out your other friends.

people love their tidy ocd friend until she tells you about her intrusive thoughts or trichotillomania (how the fuck do you spell that)

people love their sad-boy depressed friend until he shows you his sh scars or gets admitted to a psych ward or you’re scared he’ll actually kill himself.

people love their gay friends till they get a partner before you.

people love their trans friends until they’re a bit too out there, or they don’t quite pass.

people love their brown friend until he brings up colonialism.

people love their disabled friends until their disability impacts them.

people love their fat friend until she starts loving herself.

people love you unless you don't fit into their boxes.

[queerly-autistic]

You really can't engage meaningfully with Ed's story in S2 without firmly centring his mental illness and suicidality, because that's inherently what the story is: it's the story of a man having a severe mental breakdown and going to increasingly erratic extremes in order to achieve his end goal, which is to not be alive anymore...and then it's the story of his recovery from that.

And so much of my frustration with the way I see this being talked about (or, in many cases, not being talked about) reflects my more general frustration with how we talk about mental illness and neurodivergence, so buckle in because this got long (also I am going to be discussing suicide here, as well as very brief mentions of psychosis and ocd, so please take care). There's this trend when we talk about mental health: we go 'oh mental illness isn't an excuse' or 'mental illness doesn't make you do bad things' or variations thereof. These are, in my opinion, some of the worst things to ever happen to the discourse around mental illness. It's reductive. Absolutely mental illness can lead you to do things that you would not have otherwise done, even things that you would be absolutely appalled by, if you were mentally well. What do you think mental illness is if it's not something that impacts your brain and how your brain functions? If your mental illness doesn't directly lead to problematic behaviour, then that's fantastic, but that experience is not universal. It's not an 'excuse' - it's an explanation for certain behaviours that's vitally important to acknowledge and understand in order to try and mitigate harm.

There's also this thing that happens with discourse around mental illness where we assume that what you do in the grips of mental illness is reflective of something that's innate inside you. You were violent whilst in the middle of psychosis? Oh, it's because you're an innately abusive person and this just reveals who you really are. You have Tourette's and one of your tics is a racial slur? Oh, it's because you're an innately racist person and this just reveals who you really are. Your OCD is rooted in a fear that you're going to murder your family? Oh, it's because you inherently do want to murder your family and this just reveals who you really are. It's bullshit. What you do in your mentally ill state is not some deep philosophical reflection of your true character, and the idea that it is is something that causes really deep, dangerous harm to mentally ill and neurodivergent people.

So, now that that's over with, back to Ed.

Ed was behaving in ways that were acknowledged in canon as being extremely out of character whilst in the midst of a severe breakdown. Fang himself said that he'd 'never' seen Ed behave this way; even Izzy, who actively pushed for Ed to embody the extremes of his Blackbeard persona, ended up concerned because it became so extreme and out of character that it was impossible not to be concerned by it. The crew who mutinied on Izzy within a day didn't mutiny on him for months, not until their lives literally depended on it, because it's heavily insinuated that they were hoping he would get better. Because this wasn't the Ed that they knew (the Ed that we came to know in S1 - an inherently soft man who is caught in a culture of violence and is tired of it).

The show wasn't subtle about this. It didn't bury the lead. As well as the constant reminders that he was acting out of character in increasingly alarming ways, this was very clearly depicted as a breakdown, an almost total collapse of Ed's mental health. We saw Ed detached and numb and completely dissociated from the world around him. We saw him in private moments of despair, breaking down. We saw him behaving erratically in the grips of mania. We saw him display absolutely textbook warning signs of someone whose made the decision to die by suicide. We saw him smile and say 'finally' at the moment when he knew he was going to die.

The show basically painted a giant neon sign over his head flashing 'THIS MAN IS EXTREMELY UNWELL' in bright lights, and if you miss that, then it's because you're deliberately avoiding looking properly.

(And, important to note, that most of the people that I've watched the show with outside of fandom discourse absolutely took away from these episodes what the show was intending - they saw how unwell Ed was, they were devastated for him, and they desperately wanted him to get better.)

When Ed steered the ship into the storm, and threatened to put a cannonball through the mast, his clear goal was to create a situation where the crew had no choice but to kill him. I've seen people describe this scene as Ed 'trying to hurt the crew', and I think that's very much a misrepresentation of what the show was depicting. It was very blatantly a suicide attempt. He wanted to die, and he didn't care what he had to do in order for him to achieve that goal. That doesn't make it good behaviour, and it doesn't mean people didn't get hurt, but it does make it a very different situation than if causing harm had been his main intent.

There is a fundamental difference between 'he is doing this because he explicitly wants to cause harm to the people around him' and 'he's doing this because he's suicidal and beyond the point of being able to rationally consider who might be getting hurt in the process of ensuring that he ends up dead'. One of those is a bad person who enjoys causing pain - and the other is a deeply unwell person who can be supported and helped to recover and be better (and should be, for the good of themselves and the people around them).

And on that note, the failure to engage with this as a mental health story is also, I think, why I've seen some people get so upset about the show not doing Ed's redemption arc 'right' - because this isn't a redemption arc, and it's not trying to be. One day I'll do a separate post about how much I love that the show explicitly rejected a carceral approach, opting to essentially put him through community rehabilitation rather than punishing him, and even mocking punitive prescriptive measures (that rubbish youtuber apology speech was supposed to be rubbish and unhelpful), but that's one for another day.

The fact is that the show is telling a story about mental illness, and that inherently means that Ed's arc is a recovery arc, not a redemption arc. And if you're expecting a redemption arc, then you've fundamentally misunderstood the story that they're telling (and the revolutionary kindness at the heart of the show).

I have a lot of feelings about this because I genuinely believe that it was one of the best depictions of mental illness and suicidality that I've ever seen. Within the confines of it being a half hour, eight episode comedy show, they told a story about mental illness that was surprisingly realistic (with the obvious fantastical over the top elements of it being a pirate show - and piracy is explicitly depicted as a culture where violence is heavily normalised), and that didn't shy away from the messier, darker, more complex elements of mental illness (particularly of being suicidal).

And then, most importantly, after all that, the show took me gently by the hand said 'you are not defined by what you do in your lowest moment - you can make amends, you can recover, you are still loved, and you are worth saving'.

[jenniferchecksbitch]