i’m still stuck on something from that post reply.
young folks (dear god, the whiplash i just gave myself saying that), do not get trapped in the “shut up and get to work unless you’ve got real problems, only then can you complain” mindset.
this is not some 30something patronizing nonsense, this is me warning you from the grave of my 20s.
the entire decade of my own youth that i lost to a crippling depression that went not only untreated, but ignored, dismissed, and minimized by me because i spent most of that same period of time 100% certain that i had no right to complain, didn’t deserve to ask for help, just wasn’t doing enough or trying hard enough, because i didn’t have real problems.
i had real fucking problems, huge problems, and i deserved help, i needed help, and maybe if i’d thought i could safely complain about some of the things that were wrong with me and with my life, maybe, just maybe i might have gotten that help so much sooner. maybe someone would have seen how deep in the drowning tar i had sunk and reached out for me, and maybe i would have believed i deserved to take their hand.
that i deserved to be reached out to, and that accepting or asking for help wasn’t stealing sympathy or resources i hadn’t met the bar of suffering to earn.
i bludgeoned myself so consistently and severely with the perception that my problems weren’t legitimate enough to deserve to call attention to or complain about or get help for that it became a kind of self harm.
i didn’t ask for help, or figure out how to help myself. i made myself worse with vicious self-abuse about how i was lazy and pathetic and not strong enough and not as good as other people, even when they suffered harder or were challenged by “real” problems.
i didn’t even properly examine what was wrong with my life, present or past, because even looking at it all closely enough felt like a farce, a performance, a pretense and a lie that there was anything there that deserved to be looked at.
intense, crippling depression and anxiety, trauma and a history of abuse, ptsd, physical health issues.
all of that i dug a shallow grave for and buried with ten years of my own life as if it did not matter, because i had so internalized the blatantly damaging, sneering notion that only “real” problems matter, as if that were an objective bar of factual criteria that some people meet and some people don’t.
don’t get sucked into this trap. it will devour you if you are unwary.
and don’t weaponize it against anyone else either. don’t elbow someone else over the edge and feed on the schadenfreude of watching them drown and telling them to “suck it up and try harder, you don’t have any reason to complain, some people have real problems.”
i stand at almost 34 on the shallow grave i buried myself in during my twenties, furious and heartsick that i lost myself and my life when it should have been at its most vivid and full of possibility, and i am telling you:
don’t lie down in this dirt with me. don’t lie to yourself or to others. all problems matter, and you deserve not to fill your mouth with decay and shame for fear of being told yours aren’t enough to validate your suffering.
turnnoffyourmind
stormborns
gummygunk
tangentwithtanner
blakekathryn
ellievsbear
izzy806
