Fears

I read a quote last night that was incredibly meaningful to me. After reading it I started to think more and more about what this quote means to me, what it may mean to many others. This is the quote by Sigmund Freud: “Human beings are funny. They long to be with the person they love but refuse to admit openly. Some are afraid to show even the slightest sign of affection because of fear. Fear that their feelings may not be recognized, or even worse, returned. But one thing about human beings puzzles me the most is their conscious effort to be connected with the object of their affection even if it kills them slowly within.”

When I read that quote I couldn’t help but think how true it is, most of all how accurate it is in today’s society. People being attracted to others, dating and relationships. People trying to express their feelings, if they like you or you like them. And I think that one of the biggest problems in today’s society is that nobody says how they feel. We’re taught in society to hold it all inside, that expressing how we feel is bad. They’re sad, or you’re sad but we don’t cry. We’re happy but we don’t sing or we don’t dance. We’re angry but we don’t scream. Because if we do, if we do any of those things, we feel ashamed. I think that it is one of the very worst feelings in the world, to hold everything in, but even I do it. So pretty much everybody walks around with their heads down, and nobody sees how beautiful the sky really is.

Seriously we all fear different things, but when you get down to it, we all fear the same things. For example, I am afraid of being rejected by my mother, father, family, and friends. I’m really, truly afraid of losing my family, because I had what some would call a “hard” birth. My mother had pre-eclampsia, a medical condition characterized by high blood pressure related to birth, and as a consequence, I was born two pounds seven ounces. I was a premature baby, and I’m constantly reminded that I could have died, so that means I should be happy being who I am: a girl. To me that seems like terrible logic. So what if I want to be a boy, in what way does that detrimentally affect my parents in any way at all?

Also I am afraid of losing my family in Scotland. I don’t really know them. Most of them are Catholics, and I just wonder if that could skew their opinion of me. I mean they seemed to accept gay and lesbian people, but I don’t know how they would accept a female to male transgender. It scares me that they may not want anything to do with me just because of who I am.

I am afraid of regretting my transition, when I’m older. More specifically I am afraid that when I look in the mirror, I won’t be able to recognize myself. Not just physically but emotionally too. I’m afraid of waking up, taking a shower, and looking in the mirror and going “who the hell are you?”

I am really afraid of always being different. Like being in a room full of people and just knowing that I’m the different one and that I will always be the different one in that room. I guess I’m afraid of being everybody else’s entertainment, something to look at, because in my mind I am incapable of truly being myself.

Alright, well that was my rant for the day. I hope you all have a lovely day. And if you feel so inclined let me know what you are afraid of. Oh and on the non-emotional side, I am really afraid of spiders. Ugh even thinking about them creeps me out.

Amanda Todd: Got What Was Coming?

So you’re going to have to deal with my incoherent thoughts because I’m exhausted from constant lack of sleep. Nonetheless I couldn’t stop thinking about this story I keep hearing over and over again. And I know it’s kind of late for me to comment on the whole situation, but I’m going to anyway, because I feel inclined to address something that really pisses me off.

So if you haven’t heard the story of Amanda Todd, she was a girl who trusted a guy whom she thought liked her. Now this is a scenario where girls want guys to approve of them for their body and guys take advantage of them. This guy takes advantage of Amanda, whom Amanda wanted approval from, and this guy gains her trust and then asks for “nudes” or naked photos. In this case this girl makes the mistake of giving these photos to that guy, which he eventually uses to blackmail her, he spread the images around school and it got so bad that the police became involved. What is really disgusting out of all of this is that there is a Facebook page dedicated to the photo that was released. This is a very real type of bullying that exists all over the world, and I am not going to sit here a tell you why bullying should not happen, I think my audience is smart enough to know that I believe that bullying is wrong. That being said I am not making this post to talk about bullying; I’m making this blog to call out the scum, the disgusting pricks who think that somehow this suicide was deserved. 

I don’t even know where to begin with this, I am not a professional at anything, really, but certainly not in understanding depression, however I do suffer from clinical depression so I have an understanding, no matter how slight, of depression. I can relate to people with depression and I know that it takes a lot of strength to commit suicide. Let me tell you that, sure people can sit behind a screen and judge you nine ways to Sunday because you have depression, or you are struggling with suicidal thoughts, but so many people don’t understand others who are struggling with depression or suicidal ideation. It is completely over looked by so many people, they’re judged as being weird or bizarre or whatever, when in reality you have no idea on how depression works in people. So this girl became extremely depressed from all the bullying, and when she committed suicide, there have been people going around saying that this suicide was deserved, because this girl made such a heinous mistake (which I agree she made a mistake in trusting this guy.) But there are people saying that if she hadn’t made this mistake she wouldn’t have killed herself. In other words her committing suicide is her fault. I’m sitting here at my computer thinking “you’ve got to be kidding me.”

Every single person reading this post has made a mistake at some point in their life, you, me, Joe Blow from Kokomo, all of us has made at least one mistake in our lives. Just because you make a mistake, and this was a bad mistake on Amanda’s part, but that in no way says that she deserves to die, or that she deserves to kill herself. I’ve made some pretty bad mistakes in my life but do I deserve to kill myself because of it? No. People make mistakes, and if people learn from those mistakes, that is what matters. But no, no, she committed suicide because of all the bullying and all the nonsense bullshit she had to put up with for so long. There are scum, there are tool-bags out there who justify her suicide by saying she deserved it. I see and hear the phrase “she had it coming” when talking about Amanda Todd, people think that if you’re going to show your boobs to a guy you think loves and cares for you, and you want to be validated by the guy, and he takes advantage of you, that you deserve to die. No that is false; you do not deserve that at all, ever. No one deserves, no matter what mistake you have made, no one deserves to go through bullying and being completely humiliated by that mistake. Especially being told that they had it coming, that they deserved it. I can’t even understand the people who think that, you have zero concept of depression or bullying. In fact I would accuse you of being a bully yourself, if you think that Amanda Todd “had it coming.”

I mean I know we are a messed up society but what bugs me even more about this story is that bullying is getting ALL of the attention. “We shouldn’t bully, we shouldn’t bully” and I agree but nothing is stressed, nothing is focused on reaching to the people who are being bullied. That’s the problem! Yes bullying is a nationwide problem in The United States. Bullying happens, it’s wrong, it’s disgusting, and I agree with that. But what I don’t agree with is giving bullying all the attention, when I think we should be reaching out and help people who are victims of bullying. Watch Amanda Todd’s video, I watched it and I cried, my eyes got all watery and I got all emotional. Not that emotions are bad, but do you know why I cried? Because I could understand what she was saying. I understand bullying happens and it is not something to be taken lightly. But to you people out there who think Amanda Todd deserved what happened to her, let me be the first to tell you that you are in fact one of the bullies. You are no different from the people who black mailed her, and who put her in this area of her life where she had the strength, that’s right the strength, to commit suicide. I do not believe that suicide is always a cowardly act. I know people who don’t understand depression, or wanting to commit suicide, and they will say it’s cowardly. But the true coward, is the person who won’t reach out to someone else who is hurting. And that is all I have to say.