(no subject)

[emerald_skies]

Oh internets, I am so ragingly, boilingly angry at so many things today it's actually kind of impressive.

First of all, my fucking above!neighbors are blaring their music (as you do) WITH THEIR WINDOWS OPEN.



The only reason I'm not calling the fucking cops as we speak is because it's been a bad couple of days in brain chemistry land and I want to consult Le Boyfriend to make sure I'm not overreacting before I do anything rash.

Second of all, I've seen some appallingly ignorant, asshole-ish, straight-up infuriating comments about those gay kids who killed themselves, Spirit Day in their honor, and so on.



To the people who decided to use these tragedies as an excuse to air their latent homophobia ("maybe if they'd kept their mouths shut", "they deserved it", etc.), or feel like "it's just teenage angst", or that "plenty of people kill themselves every year, what makes these kids so special?" or any other rage-inducing permutation thereof...

I severely doubt you've ever attempted to take your own life or even considered it if you legitimately feel this way.


For one thing, it's a pretty intrinsic trait of the human condition to have a strong will to live -- seriously, people's instincts of self-preservation are usually pretty strident when properly pressed. Hopefully, this might give you some idea of how much a person has to go through in order to undermine that. When a person becomes suicidal, there is such a soul-crushing feeling of emptiness and loneliness, and there's so much of it that it starts to overwhelm one's natural will to live.

No one deserves to feel that way. Ever. No matter who they are or what they do or how they live.


For another, these kids were so, so young. One of them was 13, for fuck's sake. Being a teenager* in general can be a terribly lonely feeling; you aren't quite sure who you are yet, you feel like absolutely no one understands you (even though plenty of other teenagers are going through similar things), and it's just a weird, nebulous transitional sort of phase in life. Which happens to be scary as fuck for whoever's experiencing it. And on top of that, most people are still hammering down their concept of the long-term future in their teen years, so a lot of them don't know that it won't always be so bad.

Also, cliché as it sounds, a person's teenage years are full of so much potential -- it's one of the side effects of the fact that most of them are still in the process of figuring out who they are and who they want to be. The problem is, it's really easy to get caught up enough in day-to-day shit (see previous point re: no concept of long-term) that they don't even see it. If other people start telling them that who they are/who they want to be is stupid or otherwise not okay, then how the fuck are they supposed to realize all that potential?

* - I'm just talking about average teenagers for the moment, I'll get to the fact that the kids who killed themselves were in a different position than most in the next paragraph


Now, this is the part where I can't really speak from experience because I'm straight (at least in practice) and cis-gendered. I'm gonna try to address it anyway and I just hope I don't wind up insulting anyone by getting any details wrong.

Consider all the weighty shit I just mentioned. Now throw in being in a minority/marginalized/controversial group (in this case, LGBT) on top of that. That's probably pretty fucking scary in itself, to find yourself realizing that you either are or might be in a position that has the real potential to make your friends, your family, and/or a large part of society revile you as a person. Or, at the very least, give you very odd looks or treat you as some sort of curiosity. I can't even fathom how much extra pressure that would put on a person, let alone a young person, even though a few of my friends are LGBT and have told me some about it.


So, people who feel that these poor kids were selfish/cowardly/deserving of death/insignificant by comparison to people with "real" problems/etc., go back and read all of that over again. I'll wait.

If you still feel like you did at the start of this rant, without even a flicker of consideration for what it must've been like for the people involved, then I am legitimately astonished (and not in the good way). It must be a very strange feeling to have a heart made out of solid fucking rock.



I hope that made at least some sort of sense, I've been pretty emotional for the last couple of days and it probably bled over into what I was saying. I apologize in advance if I accidentally insulted anyone due to poor phrasing. Point it out to me if so and I'll correct it ASAP -- I checked it over as carefully as I could but I could have conceivably missed something.

Sorry about the srs bznss post, folks, I just had a lot of proverbial poison I needed to bleed out of my system. See the previous post for something a bit more light-hearted (such as Glee reaction posts).

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"Understanding is a two-way street..." -- Eleanor Roosevelt

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Cheers.