The mind of a depressed shawol
I’ve seen this going on too much on both Tumblr and twitter these days, so I’ve decided to share a very personal view on the issue “how to grieve with the loss of jonghyun” to hopefully put some perspective on how a broken/sick mind possibly can work; TW suicide, selfharm, death
I do fully understand the concern some shawols have regarding too much negativity in our fandom spread around publicly. I do understand the strong determination to keep our sns as bright as possible to not intentionally hurt the shinee members if they do come across such posts. I do understand and I support this mindset.
But let me go in depth why that simply isn’t possible for some individuals
I’m depressed. I have a sick mind. I may not be in as bad condition as others, but, still a bad condition. I have been clean of self harm since late 2016. What do I do to prevent myself from self harming when the world hurts too much? I get that pain out elsewhere; I had a sideblog for years posting very disturbing stuff every time I felt like doing something stupid; a general idea of self harming is because you hurt so much on the inside, you have to hurt yourself on the outside to create balance.
Social media can, in fact, help you “hurt on the outside” more than people realize. You cannot ask someone to ‘close down all their sns if they’re hurting’ or ‘talk to someone privately instead’ when they are hurting this badly. Because you might just tell them to take away the one thing that possible keeps them from hurting themselves;
Is thi attention seeking? Yes. Do I seek attention when I post depressing stuff on my blog? Yes. Because a lot of us struggles with anxiety and self esteem issues, we are constantly seeking attention to get confirmation that we aren’t as unloveable and awful as our own mind tells us. We need validation, constantly. We need it in order to function. And sometimes we need to do that to a random, public audience, because talking to someone directly is too scary and too close to us as a person.
This is how it works for some people; that’s how it works for me most of the time. Some people are even more complex than I, so this is just one perspective to it, where there’s litterally hundreds of different cases as to how people deal with things the way they do, and why its necessary for them.
So I kindly ask, on everyone’s mission to protect shinee at all costs; please protect each other too. Don’t tell people what they should or should not do. Don’t tell them how to express their grieve or that they should stop doing it publicly. You have no idea what consequences that could have for someone.
If someone feels the need to voice out loud on their social media that SHINee was their only reason to keep on living, and that they can’t handle the thought of seeing them as just 4; please don’t tell them to go elsewhere with those feelings. Their feelings and cry outs for help are out publicly for a reason.
And this can be very hard to understand for some people; I’ve suffered from depression for a long time, and I still can’t understand the mindset of other depressed peoples sometimes. But we all need to be considerate and accept the fact that we don’t know what people are going through in their lives. And we don’t know what they need in order to keep going. And to blame, guilt, and lash out on people, because you think their ways of expressing themselves are annoying and against what you see as “a good fan” isn’t okay.
Everyone is stressing so much what we should do for shinee that we entirely forget what to do for ourselves.
This isn’t only about everyone ‘coping differently’ - it’s also about living differently. And I do agree that we should take care of people directly lashing out and bashing on SHINees decision - because their decision should be respected - but 80% of the time, people lash out on the wrong emtions. There’s a huge difference between feeling it needed to voice concern and pain and causing shinee harm directly.
People usually tend to think people are exaggerating when they say “shinee was my only reason to live” but you are in no position to decide whether this actually is the reality for someone else, you because it isn’t your reality.
Dont tell people to hide away their feelings. Don’t tell them to go elsewhere with their feelings, because they possibly have nowhere else to go.