as small as a world and as large as alone

3:52pm July 22, 2014

lichgem:

youneedacat:

lichgem:

I’m beyond exhausted with the attitude that the only reason I could possibly exist publicly as a mentally ill person is because I’m trying to get attention or something

Instead of maybe I just want to BE and not have to hide a huge aspect of my life out of terror

Everyone who makes judgments about who’s ‘real’ or not is inevitably forcing lots of mentally ill people to go stealth and I don’t think that’s unintentional. Their vitriol is directed at US, make no mistake. Not just ‘fakers,’ since people will decide we’re ‘fake’ for any old reason.

Totally agreed.  And their logic about who is a faker makes no sense at all anyway.  Like, “You’re a faker if you put it in your URL and don’t talk about it.”  Why would a faker do that?  A faker would be talking about it.  Not that it fucking matters, because it’s better for there to be some fakers  out there, than it is for there to be people calling people fake who aren’t.  But seriously, the logic makes no sense.

Or, ‘you’re a faker because REAL mentally ill people are too ashamed to talk about it.’ Which is baffling on so many levels. How are they supposed to know what ‘real mentally ill people’ do or don’t do? For one, they can’t speak for an entire group of people, and secondly, how are they supposed to know if they keep automatically dismissing every mentally ill person who doesn’t do what they expect them to do as ‘fake’?

Also, who the hell made mentally ill people ashamed to talk about our lives, hmm? 

Or, ‘you don’t really have depression because you act cheerful sometimes.’ I am pretty sure depressed people who are NEVER cheerful are in the minority.

Everyone thinks they’re such an expert on mental illness, no need to actually listen to people experiencing it. Sigh.

When I was in the psych system I got hit by this double whammy:

1.  "People in REAL psychological agony are in too much agony to talk about it.  You talk about it, so it can’t be that bad.“

2.  "How were we supposed to know you were experiencing psychological agony?  You didn’t talk about it.”

Made me want to slam my head on things as hard as I could.  Actually, I did that sometimes.  Didn’t help.  Basically, the entire thing was a ploy to get me to shut up.  As far as I could tell.  "People in real pain don’t talk about it, they suffer silently… how were we to know you were in real pain if you didn’t tell us!?“  I mean seriously isn’t that the definition of a double bind?

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