Trauma Doesn't Make You Stronger

 Victims of all kinds have always had to defend their status as victims. They've always had to fight for the right to declare that they were wronged by other people, with no justification. Oftentimes, it is particularly those people that have not experienced any form of abuse who feel the most strongly about the victim label: no one becomes a victim for no reason, which means you must have done something to deserve it, or at the very least, to instigate the abuse! There is no such thing as the perfect victim, that is true. But as much as the victim is not exempt of human imperfection, as much is the perpetrator at fault for victimizing someone in the first place. Two things can be true at the same time, remember that.  Bullying is an interesting form of abuse, because it seems like everyone always has an excuse, a justification for it. Sure, there are a lot of people out there who still think being sexually assaulted is the fault of the woman of dressing too provocatively, but the

 Violence is never an act of love. It's a myth that we have been force-fed, especially women and female-presenting people. That the reason that boy is being mean to you is that he just likes you. We've been conditioned to expect violent behavior out of the people closest to us. Almost everyone has some type of experience this with this, I'm pretty sure.  In Finnish, there's this saying that translates to "it's out of love that the horse kicks you, after all" . I remember hearing it for the first time in kindergarten, though it was in elementary when the phrase was actually directed at me. Funnily enough, it was always about boys – that if there is a boy in your group or class that is "giving you a hard time", it's because he has a crush on you. As a lesbian, this doesn't really affect me in any way. The same statement was never aired about girls, though. I wonder if there is a reason for that.  i just like you a lot.   "If I bully y

 When you were a child, did you have an imaginary friend? Someone completely fictitious that you had created in your mind to keep you company? Kids are extremely creative and they have a wild imagination, and imaginary friends are one manifestation of that creativity. It is all part of the play of pretend, which used to be my favorite kind of play. Typically, imaginary friends are characters the child has created for themself to play with when they're alone. They are a placeholder of an actual friend, and even though the child can become very "close" with their imaginary friend, they are usually able to realize that the friend is not real, that it's just the product of their own imagination.  Sometimes, though, that imaginary friend can become one of the only "people" the child can confine to, can rely on for comfort and safety and just company. That's when the line between fiction and reality gets a bit muddled.  When I was still in university studying