CW: mention of cops, suicide, forcible commitment, sanity, mental breakdown
I think it’s really dangerous when people praise someone in activism or standing up against oppression as “brave”, or “strong”, at times, especially if it involves something not everyone can do like challenging cops, or doing a hunger strike. It creates a bar, whether we realize it or not, in our minds, and in the social consciousness, of ‘what brave people are capable of’, so anyone that falls short...well, yeah.
Also, those of us who have been called brave throughout our lives are often dealing with so much with few offering to help hold some of the burden, and so we constantly feel like we’re going to spill over; we constantly feel like we’re just one more day laced with layered oppression away from losing it. “Losing it” can mean many things, from retreating from the world for that day, to that week, to dropping out of school, quitting your job, having a very public mental health breakdown, committing suicide, getting forcibly committed, etc. There is always the fear of having to perform “bravery” and “sanity” and “able-bodiedness.” Do do more, be more, even if you’re always at a deficit of capacity. Even if you come last. Some might be saying, “Geez, it’s just calling someone brave!” But think about the ways in which adjectives place expectations of people...whether or not there are people in our lives holding us to an impossible standard, the very feeling of expectation can be enough to induce one, some, all, or more of the forms of “losing it.” It’s a shitty movie, so I won’t reference it directly, at least for now, but there was a character everyone was always praising as being brave and strong, and a she had a mental breakdown that no one expected. Years later she committed suicide (this was based on a real persxn btw). When her partner seemed totally at a loss as to why this had happened, one of their mutual friends said something to the effect of, “Think about it. No one’s that strong.”
