11:38am July 20, 2015

Kind of uncomfortable because

funereal-disease:

madeofpatterns:

People are like “everyone needs to stop telling me to eat ice cream״ about depression.

But the only post I can think of that talks about that is one I wrote. And that post isn’t about not having to do anything. It’s about how to survive when you’re so low on spoons that you’re regularly failing to eat anything close to enough.

And like, I agree that telling people not to do things is a problem. But that’s not remotely what I said.

I haven’t seen your post about that, so you can rest assured that my contribution to that thread, at least, was not about your post. It’s not really a specific post that I take issue with - it’s this general attitude I see a lot on tumblr that you have to stay fragile, stay broken, stay corruptible. Like suffering is somehow noble. And that bothers me a lot.

I definitely see that regarding triggers and responses to them.

I really dislike that attitude (bolding is mine in the above quote). I see different versions of it in different places, but all of them bother me immensely. And whenever I try to talk about ways to get out of suffering and other unpleasant situations, or try to speak out against an influential but small group of people who encourage the worshipping of self-pity, then people think I’m telling them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and stop listening. (I once wrote a very long, heartfelt post about the way the chronic illness community sometimes encourages people to dwell on our suffering in really destructive ways, and had the entire thing reduced to “bootstraps!” by someone who admitted they hadn’t actually read the post in its entirety.)

One problem with trying to talk about these things, though, is that people who are genuinely stuck in bad situations will think I’m talking about them, and worry and guilt themselves when that’s the last possible thing on my mind – and then the people who really need to hear what I’m saying don’t even register the fact that I’m talking about them. So lots of innocent bystanders get upset and worried, and the people causing most of the problem don’t even notice.

Oh and when I talk about worshipping self-pity, I’m talking about something incredibly specific. I’m not talking about being depressed. I’m not even talking about being stuck in self-pity and not being able to find your way out (or not realizing that it’s self-pity). I’m talking about people who turn it into a high art form and encourage others to do so as well – which is incredibly toxic to anyone actually struggling with a bad situation. There’s a difference, and it’s possible to discern that difference, and people act like it’s not possible and that nobody should say anything about it lest we accidentally get it wrong.

Notes: