What romanticises mental illness, abuse or men who assault women — ignorance, callowness, naivety or silliness. If you have never been there, a situation may look like something you can make fun of or talk about in flippant ways. To those who have been there, they can tell you about the special corner of hell it was.
But I can tell you, what you’re doing when you pretend: “situation is what make people what they are and they should be thankful for their past”. You risk stripping what they went through of the seriousness they actually warrant. There is nothing inspiring about anxiously watching the night melt into the morning or being hyperaware of your body and nitpicking everything around it to avoid judgment. There is nothing enchanting about sometimes having to question whether or your reality is even real.
If you already haven’t caught on to where you are going wrong, here’s what removing the old stigma while building a new one looks like.
Saying things like, “Everyone has to face abuse at some point in time, real life begins out of your comfort zone.”
What are you trying to say? Making abuse victims feel like trapped animals who don’t know they’re trapped and force happiness on them on receiving the smallest amount of breadcrumbs because they are starving? Or are you trying to train them to lower their expectations to such a level that they are actually satisfied with those crumbs?
Talking about how you are thankful for your ‘bullies’ in your growing-up years as they ‘toughened’ you up and prepared you for life.
I understand you have managed to turn around bad situations in your favour, but do you really need to glamorise bullying and give credit to your abusers? If you think you deserve to be ragged or bullied to become a ‘better person’, please get help immediately.
When you say, “My life would be so much easier if I was attracted to multiple genders. If only I were gay.”
Congratulations! You’ve just successfully invalidated the struggles of queer people who are harassed, abused and even killed for being who they are by saying that being gay would help solve your dating problems.
Saying “Shouldn’t self-love correlate to health? Media plays a powerful influence in acceptance, normalising obesity, when in fact obesity is a disease as well as an epidemic.”
Concern-trolling because your definition of body positivity fits a narrow, straight-size mould is not cool. You can do better.
Using words like ‘depression’, ‘anxiety’ ‘PTSD’ or ‘OCD’ as punchlines for self-depreciative jokes or excuses for poor behaviour and reducing art about mental illnesses to a #sadday post on Instagram.
You find it hard to regard any mental disorder as an illness in the first place, don’t you? It’s just a mindset, isn’t it? Something that the individual can snap out from wherever they want to? Shed it like a fur coat and hang it up in their closet until they want it again?
Why is it so hard to understand that reality does not call for over-normalisation or glamorisation of issues rather it calls for acknowledgement? A false portrayal is worse than no portrayal.
People don’t understand that every human being on the planet is entitled to negative emotions and experiences. People don’t understand the distance they put between themselves and these people by trivialising what they go through. The need for understanding is greater than fake empathy.
Treat people with kindness <3