#would I rather talk about my stupid emotions yeah but drawing vent art using my favorite character is easier so y'know

[rosesart11]

quick little vent using Grace

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Post Type: Vent and Explanation

Ok everyone I'd like to talk about something important today.

At least, it's important to me.....

tw: Harassments & Bullying, Emotional Distress, Sexualitization by minors, venting

So we all know how some fandoms can be full of some pretty toxic fans, right? Well, I'd just like to take some time to tell you all about one of the most negative experiences I've had in a rather big fandom, before I make some stupid comment to set someone off.

Please read this all the way through, it's important to me that everyone understands where I'm coming from.

Ok, so back when I was about....mmm 16/17 I was fairly obsessed with Hetalia, I had been an off-and-on fan of it for about 7 years. So, when I started using Instagram for posting art, I attracted quite a few people from the fandom due to my fanart of it.

I had made some friends, and was invited to quite a few group chats with people who were....fairly younger than me. Ages ranging from 12 to 18, I was fairly still awkward at the whole "socializing" thing, as I am now. So I had made friends with these kids, got into editing video of the fandom due to a friend and then later quick, yada yada, y'know the whole shabang.

Let me tell you, the experiences of the first groupchat I was in was absolutely disgusting, like it had started off pretty normal and everything but it was just a downward spiral of these kids sending dozens and dozens of images of rule 34 and talking about sex constantly. When I would get home from school I would get hundreds of notifications from these kids just going off about every sick thing you could possibly imagine. Now me not knowing how most kids are online, I would just play along despite being uncomfortable, y'know I'd never send anything nsfw or anything but I'd make jokes.

Later along the lines, and like 20 new groupchats later, we have new members come in and out like usual. I become close with a single individual in particular. It was an utter mistake for me to have been nice to any of these people in the first place.

For the sake of this explanation, let's call this person Blue. So, Blue and I become friends, I learn a lot about and get a feel for what they're like. I realize that Blue has been dealing with depression for several years due to bullying. At their school, they were harrassed a lot due to both their gender and ethnicity, y'know due to racism. Couple of weeks go by, nothing really bad (that I knew about yet) had happened.

Started talking to the group's "leader" of sorts, let's call them Red. Well I thought was Red was pretty nice for a while, they would occasionally be mean as what I thought was jokes at the time. Come to find out that this kid hated me, was jealous of me because I had more followers than them (among other things) and basically caused me to be cancelled in the Hetalia fandom altogether due to a few things happening which I'll explain next.

Ok, so first thing I have to explain is that Blue had made a pretty remarkable statement to me about our friendship. One that set off some pretty big fucking red flags I might add. Something along the lines of "If it wasn't for you, I'd be alone." Now let me tell you, to hear that out of someone older than me, was scary. So what did I do? I tried to be nice and make sure that the others in my group made sure to check up on them.

Well, it didn't end up going so well with me. It caused a really big fight between me and Red to happen. So, yeah, I left the groupchat, I didn't even think to take pictures. I was still friends with most of them at that point. So yeah, wasn't a good day at all.

I ended up drawing some vent art after a few weeks, when I was once again brought back into the group only for these kids to intentionally act disgusting in front of me again. Another fight broke out, I separated myself from most of the people in the group.

Was contacted by the first person that tried to help me, let's call them Izzy. Izzy had shown me these texts Red had sent about me, calling me petty, obsessed with their best friend (That I was mad that they had other friends other than me), brought up the age of my boyfriend at the time (which was none of their fucking business!) and was accusing me of manipulating everyone in their group to believe my "sob stories". And by sob stories she means all of the fucking people she sent after me to harrass me, send me gore, and tell me to off myself, Red had told all of these people that I was the one harrassing them, "bullying" as they called it.

This whole thing went on for months and months and little by little I started to understand that one, I shouldn't have shared my vent art with anyone, because they contained song lyric bits that no one else other than me understood in context. I had explained the meaning to this "friend" "Heidi" but apparently she didn't show that explanation to the group bc Red told her I was talking shit behind her back.

These kids searched up and listened to the song instead, coming to the conclusion that I was a stalker, and that I was stalking Blue in particular. So, what do these kids do? They send someone new to spy on me and add me to groupchats even though I had Red blocked at that point. Red was continuously saying rude things to piss me off that I couldn't see until the others screenshoted and sent to me. Things about my kin (N. Italy), basically making fun of me through the use of my comfort character.

The kid they sent to spy on me started out as one of those kids that harrassed me and then turned into a "fake friend" that pretended to know what I meant. Call them Japan because that's the kin they used all the time. Well, me and my dumbass said some rather mean things about Red, mostly because I was fucking pissed about how this 13 year old was acting. Japan sent all of that info back but continued to pretend to be on my side the entire time until the very end when they told me they were done with me shitting on their friends. I let you know he and others were part of a secret discord that he let me know about to make himself look better to me, as well as let me know when I followed one of these kid's multiple fake accounts, to which the kids went crazy over.

Kid on the fake account told me that I should be apologizing to Red for all that I did and to stop stalking Blue. At this point I was fucking done with all of it, I apologized to Red but outed Japan in the process due to this kid pissing me off to the max.

To say the least, I had the worst panic attack I ever have had in the history of my life, to the point where I was literally shaking. I was cursing and screaming to the point that my neighbors could hear me. I had tried to explain everything to my grandmother and it led to me not being able to use social media for a course of 6 months, and multiple therapy visits. I slept on the floor in front of my grandparents bed that night because I felt too sick being alone in my bedroom, the shaking wouldn't stop.

6 months later, I think everything is fine, what do these kids go and do? They make a hate post about me taking several dozen of my texts out of context, claiming I was misgendering and harrassing Red, stalking Blue, and generally an overall shit human being by showing everyone my vent art along with it as "evidence".

So yeah, a lot of people blocked me, I had to change my account to private, get a new separate account as my safe space (which was later leaked to these kids yet again) and on and on it went, they even made a "draw this in your style" contest depicting my Italy-insert chasing after Blue's insert (America) holding a tan folder with the words "New BF" on it. Finally some miracle happened when my lovely friend Tree had decided to actually ask for my side of the story instead of just blocking me like their friends told them to.

So I told them, and god bless them, they revealed to me that another one of the people in the group that I felt I could actually trust (Canada Kin) was just relaying information back to Red all along, and was actively encouraging that they push this process out for a longer period of time just to make me feel even worse. Canada called themselves a sadist in the texts to Red, who didn't even know that they were on Red's side until the last minute. So, basically Tree exposed everyone involved in Red's ultimate scheme to make my life a living nightmare, they had planned to send dozens of people after me to send me images of gore, rule 34, and death threats. I was able to block everyone involved! And since 2019, that was the end of it.

Thank god! Others weren't so lucky, but I am glad to say that I have been able to move past it all, even though it still triggers the hell out of me. I still like Hetalia but I just can't interact with the fandom, I still feel pretty paranoid that these pre-teens are going to come after me for revenge or something.

So yeah.....That's pretty much it...

Thanks for reading all the way to the end...

- Treat

I had been reminded of all of this when @shuichiswritingcorner had mentioned America from Hetalia, and I just wanted to make sure that everyone knew that while I'm somewhat feeling better about the fandom, it still triggers me at times. It was just a really bad experience that left me feeling very distrusting of people in general.

[ms-demeanor]

I appreciate your positivity posts a lot, but there are a couple things that make me instinctively angry when i see them One, it really frustrates me that i cannot be good at everything. I know it may sound kinda stupid, but i feel jealous when i see people learning skills i know I'll never master cause they arent a priority over other skills im already working on Two, when im angry/frustrated and i see positivity, it only makes me angrier None of this is your fault, just needed to vent a little

(This post requires a table of contents)

Frustration that you can’t be good at everything - A

Frustration with positivity - B

Do I contradict myself? Kinda but not really - C

Ah-ha, but I have fooled us all - D

A

That doesn’t sound stupid at all, it actually sounds exactly like the insta-rage that I get from being bad at something or from hearing “anybody can do X.”

I know that sounds contradictory, considering that I’ve been saying “anybody can learn artistic skills with practice,” but I’ll explain in a sec.

Okay so I’m learning guitar right? Like, with all the hand-pain and dyspraxia and all I’m still giving it a go and it’s taking forever and it’s really frustrating.

It’s more frustrating because I realized I had to do it alone - if I’m practicing around people or a person is sitting next to me while I’m trying to learn a skill or get the fretting of a particular chord down or (especially this one) trying to memorize a sequence of notes and movements it’s. It’s extremely not pretty. It’s apparently very upsetting for the people who are around me when that happens.

I get furious with myself and I get frustrated because goddamnit fucking children can do this thing and I’m an adult and it’s a simple fucking sequence of five movements and I’m just getting it wrong because I’m a useless idiot.

It takes about four minutes with a guitar teacher or jamming with a friend for me to devolve into “attempt sequence > fuck sequence up > apologize > try again but now while more mad at myself > fuck it up worse > apologize > forget beginning of sequence > try really hard not to start calling myself a fucking idiot in front of a friend who really shouldn’t have to handle this.”

And when I do that it feels terrible. It feels bad, feels like my skills have regressed, makes me want to put the instrument down and not pick it up again.

The thing is, I do this with every skill that I’m learning. You should see me when I’m trying to learn a new version of some kind of software. It’s terrible. I’m at my absolute worst and lowest when I’m trying to find the new place Adobe has hidden a menu or what the new command is to format something in Word.

But here’s the deal: I know what this is when I’m doing it. This is emotional dysregulation.

Basically finding out that I have ADHD changed my life and got me to really start examining a lot of my reactions to things and the behavior patterns I’ve lived with for most of my life.

I experience an impulse to be furious when people are more skilled than I am, I AM furious when I feel like my skills aren’t where I think they should be. But neither of those things are actually good for helping me learn to do the thing and I’d much rather learn to do the thing than be angry about not being good enough at it.

I spend a fair amount of time in therapy. I have worked on recognizing when I have the impulse to do something that is going to be unhelpful or reactive and attempting to approach that impulse with other options.

That’s not easy! And it doesn’t come naturally! My first response to a lot of things is still anger or frustration or despair.

But since I *know* that’s my first impulse and I’ve learned enough about my own behavior to understand that my first impulse is frequently the wrong course of action (grounded in panic or whatever) I’ve been working on accepting that my first reaction is typically negative and moving on more quickly to other, more helpful reactions.

(this has been really fantastic for increasing my feelings of agency and control over my own life; acting on your panic response all the time isn’t good for your long term stability)

You know you can’t be good at everything, you know that it takes a long time to acquire skills. That doesn’t make it any less frustrating that you don’t have the skills that you want to have. So it’s understandable that your first reaction to the skills positivity posts would be negative, and it’s understandable if you want to sit in that negativity for a little bit.

It’s also understandable to mourn the skills that you could have had. “If I hadn’t stopped practicing guitar in my teens I could be so much better now.” “If I hadn’t had to get a job with such a long commute I could be drawing daily and I’d be so much farther along.” “If I hadn’t been discouraged by my parents I’d have had so much more practice with music.” “If I hadn’t gotten injured I’d be such a good dancer right now.”

There’s a perfect you that lives in your head and they’ve had all the opportunities you missed and got to keep practicing when you couldn’t and have all the money you don’t and sleep you keep missing. I get wanting to be that person. I get wanting what they want.

But the you in your head isn’t real and it’s sad if you’re ignoring how wonderful the real you is because you’re not perfect in the same ways.

So if you can, I’d recommend trying to see if there’s a positive response you can practice remembering when you get frustrated about your skills.

(for me it’s honestly just saying “the next best time to plant a tree is today” and remembering that I’ve got a long time to learn to do all the things I want to do. It’s not a race, and if I can’t get to something now I can try later.)

You’re great. You’re great and you’re trying hard and if you wouldn’t yell at your friend for not learning a skill or being good at something you shouldn’t yell at yourself either.

B

So when I was like, 17, I wrote a bit of poetry that went like this:

I’m a casual cynicwho prays for optimistsbut it’s hard for me to be onewhen I’m talking with my fists.

I am a very, very negative, pessimistic person. Optimism and positivity irritate the hell out of me.

The frustrating thing about positivity is that it largely feels like criticism. It feels like “if you can’t do X, Y, or Z it’s because you choose not to.”

And I sure as fuck can’t blame people for being negative. I’m negative and the world is shitty and everything is difficult and expensive. I really, really don’t think that people are choosing not to do what they want to do.

So when you hear “you can do it!” it’s a very natural response to go “yeah, easy for you to say, you don’t have a million things preventing you from doing it.”

Part of this is that your brain is a filthy liar and it thinks that skills are easy to acquire. Your brain is going “if anyone can do it and I haven’t it’s because I’m lazy and I suck.”

I would like you to remind your brain that it is a filthy liar.

(I would also like to remind people that negativity that exists to the point that generic positivity posts upset you or make you angry is a symptom of depression)

But the other thing is that you probably DO have a million legitimate things that are keeping you from Doing The Thing and when you’re seeing someone else say “Do the thing!” you’re just seeing the shiny thing, not their million things that were in the way too.

Doing shit is HARD. It’s exhausting. It involves opportunity cost. If I want to make fanart I have do dedicate time to that that gets taken away from somewhere else and you know what sometimes it’s just better for me and more in line with my desires to re-read a 100k slow-burn than it is to make a drawing of the characters.

But it’s also really important to recognize which kinds of positivity actually contain criticism.

My initial statement in the Gru comic was “Talent is bullshit, nurture your skills with practice & make the content you want to see in the world.” This was in reaction to a simply-drawn comic that expressed that you need talent to make fanart and not everybody has talent.

A lot of people have seen that as criticism.

I am. Really, really not attempting to criticize people with these posts.

But also, yeah, being told “woah, hey, just calm down” when you’re already pissed isn’t going to make anyone’s afternoon any better. And there’s not much I can do about that (and I know you don’t want me to, you said you were just venting).

C

“You hate positivity and yet you make positivity posts, interesting.”

So the brand of positivity posts I hate are the “If I can do it anyone can!” posts and here’s why:

Not everyone can be on a Roller Derby team.

Breaking my back and having to quit roller derby made me reassess a lot of my attitudes about the world.

If you point to a specific activity and say “if I can do this anyone can do this” you are wrong. There are a lot of people who aren’t going to be able to do a thing. If you say “If I can lose the babyweight within three weeks of giving birth anyone can” there are a lot of people who can’t do that thing and there is a kind of implicit criticism there. “If I can get over my scoliosis and lift weights anyone can,” is kind of saying that the people with scoliosis who can’t lift weights just aren’t making an effort.

“If I can do this anyone can” is wrong. It ignores the fact that people are all in unique circumstances and have different limitations. No, not anyone can. Not everyone can be on a Roller Derby team.

But what I’m saying in my posts isn’t “anyone can draw” it is “if you practice a skill you will improve at it, so if you want to improve at drawing you need to practice.”

And I’ve been very clear in admitting that not everyone can do this, due to time constraints and low energy and physical limitations.

The one deviation I’ve made from that is to come pretty close to saying “anyone can do art” and again, I consider that a bit different because “art” is a very broad category and I do believe that pretty much anyone can create things that I would consider art, even if that art isn’t traditional visual media. And again, any of those kinds of art would also improve with practice.

D

The joke was on all of us all along, by the way. While I’m being pretty positive about the idea of practice and the fact that it will improve people’s performance at all skill levels there’s a secret:

That Gru post isn’t so much positive about practice as it is *incredibly* negative about the concept of talent.

Talent IS bullshit. There is a variable range of innate abilities that people can have that may jump-start a particular skill but proficiency in that skill is always going to be down to practice, not talent.

Talent was made up as a cover to explain the “brilliance” of people who had armies of laborers supporting them. I bet I’d be able to invent a lot of shit if I didn’t have to do laundry or worry about whether I was going to be able to afford both food and rent next month. Talent is a myth that pairs nicely with great man theory in that it is crap and I want people to understand that sucking at things for a long time is a part of not sucking at things eventually and also that you’re going to get a lot more done working with a group of motivated people than you are if you wait for one “talented genius” to change the world.

[pinkglitteringdemondildos]

im complaining because i need to vent and have no where else to do it kk good talk 

mmmmmm i REALLY dont want to draw anymore. its useless and i dont really get much out of it. to be honest most of the times i draw nowadays is because 1. someone wants me to 2. i want money. I haven’t drawn anything for fun in a while. i really just hate the feeling that failing at art gives me. Its so FRUSTRATING TO SEE THIS BEAUTIFUL THING IN YOUR HEAD AND NOT BE ABLE TO GET A SINGLE LINE DOWN THE WAY YOU WANT TO!!! I haven’t been proud of anything in a long time. This is just a waste of time and money for me. It’s not getting me anything and all it does is make me angry and depressed. There’s no good feelings to counteract it either. There’s no trade off that makes it worth it. I think I’m gonna give my tablet to my friend or sell it, I can’t do this anymore. It used to be therapeutic and now it makes me feel worse because i can’t stop comparing myself to people. Especially ones that are younger than me and better. I’ve practiced longer than theyve been alive. Fuck this. Fuck everything. I hate this, I hate that i cant just be happy. i hate that i compare myself to everything. I hate that i get upset when im not automatically good at something. i hate that everyone is better than me at everything i do. i just want to be the best at something, you know? something useful. and i hate that i feel this way. i hate everything. i want everyone and everything to leave me alone and let me rot in peace but the stupid world doesnt work like that. I wish people would have warned me about shit before burying me in it. i dont understand why i always have to feel some sort of negative emotion. when im not angry im sad, when im not sad im jealous, and when im not jealous im angry. its a fucking shitty cycle and i hate being a part of it and i cant break out of it no matter what i do. everything is so frustrating now. i just want everything to be manageable. not even everything. Just...something. I want to have control over something that isnt so fucking overwhelming i dont even know where to begin. i dont have fucking shit. i dont have anyone to go to that really gets me and i dont even have family to talk to and no one i have access to fuckin understands me. I know that sounds edgy but...everyone i know has such different experiences. i want someone who feels what i feel, y’kno. but its not gonna happen. nothing ever changes even when i try to fix it. and if it does change it just gets worse. im done. im done im done im done im done!! i hate feeling like shit. fucking medication doesnt even work. I fuckign hate everything. i want to not exist. i want every trace of me to be wiped from existence. no memories, none of my art or writing or assignments. i want every single reminder of me to be gone. i want to be gone. i want to be unconscious and unaware. i would literally rather be an emotionless robot because i dont have any positive feelings to lose anymore lmao. I haven’t been happy in a long fucking time. Yeah, ive laughed at jokes for a moment but 99% of the time im miserable and i want it to stop. i cant even get away from this shit in my fucking dreams. i hate it. i hate it i hate it i hate it i hate it i hate it I HATE IT I HATE IT I HATE IT I HATE IT I HATE IT I HATE IT I HATE IT I HATE IT I HATE IT I HATE IT