Have you ever had an idea so big you didn’t know what to do with it?
I don’t even know how to explain this, but I’ll give it my best shot.
Recent circumstances have made me realize just how much the issue of cutting surrounds my life. My best friend. Three other friends. My boyfriend. Plenty of people I’ve met here. A couple nights ago I lay awake thinking this over, and I started to get angry. Now I have felt so much empathy and love for anyone in this situation, but it almost never occured to me before to be angry. Not that I was angry at the people of course; I was angry at cutting, at the disease that was destroying so many. And I knew I had to do anything I could to kill this monster.
The next morning I woke up a lot less sure of myself and a lot more confused as to how I could do anything. I decided to do soem research and just go from there. And I found out about a possible cause of cutting called an “invalidating environment.” I knew cutting could be caused by neglect or abuse, but not this. Basically an invalidating environment is formed when a person can’t express their emotions without ridicule or belittlement of some sort. The environment says your emotions aren’t important, or you’re weak for giving into them, or you need to shut up and stop complaining. And when people can’t talk about their emotions they find other outlets. Like cutting.
It made so much sense that I started writing about it, and well…it doesn’t make much sense but here is what I wrote.
“An invalidating environment, huh?
Hello, welcome to America, where everything is pretty on the outside and screaming in agony on the inside.
Invalidation is a survival technique caused by the notion of a DOG EAT DOG world, where if weakness is exposed it will be attacked, where SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST is the only law.
Invalidation means covering everything up. Those who invalidate your emotions will tell you to stop being so pessimistic, to get off your lazy ***, to stop manipulating them with your uneccessary tantrums. Why? Because they are afraid. Because their life is supposed to be perfect and pretty to everyone around them and YOU are disrupting their beautiful facade.
Destroy it. Rip down these veils. Show the world your pain, throw your heart out on the line. Let people see the scars, whether on your skin or in your mind, because either way THEY ARE REAL.
Because either way EVERYONE ELSE has them.
They may not admit it. They still think they can fool you, still think if they put all their pain in one tiny box of their mind and keep those slashes under wristbands and long sleeves that they can pull off an image of PERFECTION.
Well get this through your thick heads America: NO ONE IS PERFECT.
Despite the stupidity of invalidaton, this is not a violent search for revenge. This is not “We’ll make them sorry when they see how much they’ve hurt us,” oh no. We do this because of COMPASSION. We force people to see that PAIN IS REAL because of LOVE.
When your emotions are invalidated, you will QUESTION them. You will QUESTION yourself. You will QUESTION everything. What if the world is right? What if I’m just LAZY or WEAK or a BABY? What if my feelings are somehow WRONG?
We’re here to say NO EMOTION, in and of itself, is WRONG. There is no need to CONTROL or DENY them. It is WHAT WE DO with emotion, or what emotion causes us to do, that can be wrong. We don’t want anyone to think, even for a moment, that EMOTION is a WEAKNESS.
So FEEL. And if anyone should give you crap about that, just call their bluff. Just tell them what they already know.
YOU BLEED THE SAME AS I DO.”
It felt powerful when I was writing it. Meaningful. But looking back I don’t even know what half of it means. Who the heck is “we”? And what’s with all the caps lock abuse? Now it just seems overdramatic and silly to me. I just don’t know what to do with it. I feel like the ideas here could be condensed into a song or poem, or expanded into an entire revolution. But I’m no musician and I’m no leader. I feel like the idea are bigger than I am and I’ll only butcher them. To some extent I feel like what I’ve already written is already a butchering of what I really wanted to say.
Can anyone help me figure out what I’m suppposed to do with this? Or at least convince me to let it go? I don’t want to give up on it but I don’t think I can make use of it either, which is rather confusing. At least read it and maybe gain something from it and then it won’t have been a total waste.
This open post was written 4 months, 1 week ago | V/U/S: 197, 12, 5 | Edit Post | Leave a reply | Report Post
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Since writing this post hopelikefire4 may have helped people, but has not within the last 4 days. hopelikefire4 is a verified member, has been around for 8 months, 3 weeks and has 18 posts and 192 replies to their name.
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