In times of late hours, after spending times searching through the tags on tumblr, breaking occasionally out of the fandom tags, I find myself sitting and questioning, with no official means to express my thoughts. Not anymore. I should probably establish now, that I love Tumblr. Compared to Facebook which is old hat, and Twitter, which terrifies me, Tumblr is the place as one such user put "a home for misfits, the people who don't quite ever belong". I place myself firmly into that category, and in that a find a strange sort of contentment. I feel that I sometimes, am alone in this. It was on one of these trips where I was speaking to someone who I feel I know quite closely, who writes about her depression. She is of course, not alone in this. Go on to Tumblr and search in the tags "depression", "cutting", "suicidal", and you'll find 100s of people who identify with her. I personally, have never reached such a low. I am proud to say, that never once have I contemplated slicing my skin, or killing myself, but I know people who have. People who I was once close to, and who have drifted apart, and people who I feel very much connected to. Suicide is not the taboo at which it once was, and whilst this in itself is a positive thing, it is at the same time a wholly negative thing. People feel, dare I say it, too content with the concept of suicide. There is not so much a fear of death as a whole, rather more a welcoming of it. I'm not saying we should return to the middle ages, but at a point where such things as sitting up at 3am to talk someone down from doing something stupid becomes a common place, and expected, I feel there is something truly wrong with society.
And such comes to my thought. I know more people who cut, than those who don't. And I have to ask why? Why, when these people have so much going for them, do they feel that the only answer is to stain their skin with a knife, to get a small relief from a burning hot pain. It is, a psychologist would say: to gain a sense of control. I see it far more simply: there is too much pressure.
Let me explain, turn on your television, and go to your TV guide. Now tell me how many shows portray "constructed realism". I talk of course, of the shows such as TOWIE, MIC, Jersey Shore...they portray the ideal to some people, but is it real? Now, turn to a magazine. Each picture, asides from the deliberately unflattering ones, will have been edited, highlighted and turned into something fake. Is that real? Clearly not. Turn now to the newspaper, to every single unflattering article of "Binge Britain". To the wave of knife crime we had a few years ago. That...is that real? It's come from the newspaper, surely it must be more real than the television. And yet, this is where the struggle really comes into play. As a teenager, I am stereotyped. On a daily basis. People will look at me, because of my age, and they'll assume: that I drink, that I smoke, that I carry weapons or I go around with 'dangerous' people. This is of course, preposterous, I'm a white middle class teenager from a south London suburb, do you really think I'm going to "shank" you in a dark corner?
Please. And yet that won't stop people believing I will. Here's some cold hard facts for you nay sayers who believe that teenagers spend every weekend getting drunk in parks. The highest amount of people being taken into hospitals and police cells for being drunk are not as you believe the young under-30s. No here's some cold water for you, you the professional, who deem me to be unsatisfactory and dangerous, are actually far more likely to be drinking than me. And that's fact.
You will of course deny this, but it's true. It won't be featured in a newspaper however, just in the back of research bids and alcohol statistics. It won't be printed, because it won't be liked. But of course, to blacksheep anyone under 30, has now become a common thing. And why?
Because the media says so.
Tell a child they're special when they're young and they'll accept it straight away. Tell a teenager there's something special about them, and they will not believe. That's the reality of the situation. A situation that is so out of hand that people believe it is okay to assume the complete untrue. And, leading back to my original point: I will never live up to someones expectation. But the pressure? Oh that's so overwhelming it hurts. And when you, you the adult who tells me that "these are the best years of your life", and who says "they understand". Stop. Just stop. You don't understand, because times change and people change but you will never be judged the way I am. You will never know how it is to be looked down simply because of the way you dress, you will never be asked to leave an area because you're wearing a certain outfit and you're with your friends. You cannot know how it feels to be us, and that's not your fault, but you simply cannot. And when you say you can, you're setting yourself up to fail.
And in the end, sometimes, just sometimes, I understand why people cut. Because it's a frightening world. And people judge. And sometimes, just sometimes, it's that selfish lash out, that small bit of control. But it means the world. Before you can change a person and help them, something must be established. A mutual understanding. And right now? That's simply never going to happen.
