Trauma Doesn't Make You Stronger

 If there is one place in this world that pretty much everyone can agree on that they never want to go to, it's probably a psychiatric facility. The stigma and shame of being admitted to the psych ward is very strong even to this day, no matter how much progress the Western society has made in terms of accepting and normalizing mental illnesses. You can have depression and anxiety, maybe even some traumagenic illnesses or eating disorders, but you can NEVER be so sick that you would absolutely have to go to the PSYCH WARD. Anything but that! You would rather even immerse yourself in your suffering, because the thought of hospitalization is so terrifying and shameful.  As per almost every type of discourse and debate in online spaces, I think what we tend to forget and ignore is the fact that health care for mental health is very different in different countries. The vast majority of the English-spoken discourse around staying at a psychiatric facility comes from the United Sta...

 Isn't it funny how people who don't know you and your story seem to have the strongest opinions on your life? It is always those who think they know better than they do who feel the need to let you know that, in fact, your traumatic experiences are not "real abuse". For years, I struggled to understand why this kept on happening to me, no matter the circumstances. People who have met me once make insane assumptions on my trauma based on nothing – or at least, that's what it always felt like to me.  Today, I think I finally understand what those people use as a baseline for this evaluation.  The overwhelming lack of awareness and knowledge on the real meaning of 'bullying' as a descriptor of abuse is the problem here. Whenever I voice my concerns on the traumatizing nature of bullying as a specific form of abuse, I am almost always, without a fail, met with some variation of the following statement: "Bullying is not real abuse." final argument. B...

 The history of medicine is very fascinating. I'm not claiming to be the most knowledgeable on it – and with my non-existent credentials, it would be insulting to say such a thing – but I am intrigued by the small bits of information I have managed to gather up in my noggin. Did you know that heroin was used as a cough medicine in the 1800's? Or that cocaine was used as a "wonder drug" of sorts, claimed to be able to cure depression, alcoholism, and impotence? Many of the now-deemed toxic chemicals were once used as medication for health problems. And of course, we can't forget lobotomy.  My mother has asthma, and both of my parents have type 2 diabetes. For mom, her conditions were caused by genetics and terrible working conditions in a so-called mould school (we have a lot of those in Finland). For my dad, his diabetes is self-inflicted: his alcoholism caused him to be hospitalized due to pancreatitis six times, and over the decades, his pancreas suffered greatl...

 Humor is a very complicated and confusing thing. If I were to ever continue my university studies in linguistics, I think I would potentially pick a phenomenon somehow related to humor as a rhetorical device. It is used in countless different ways, in situations that are more or less applicable to a humorous conversation. These factors, too, are more or less defined by the parties involved in the discussion. This kind of subjectivity makes humor an impossible thing to define in an exact manner, because what someone else might deem as the joke of the century might be an incredibly offensive thing to say to someone else.  Unfortunately, though, in the context of this blog article, this kind of academic analysis is not possible (nor the end-goal, for that matter), so we are going to have to simplify things a little bit. I can admit that there are objective and analytic factors to the problem of humor as a rhetorical device, particularly from the perspective of linguistics. And a...

 When we are talking about child abuse and childhood trauma, a term that gets brought up very frequently is "growing environment" . Time and time again, it has been stated that the kind of growing environment a child has during their formative years has a huge effect on the kind of person they will become when they step into their adulthood. A safe growing environment provides a sense of security, instills trust in your parents and other seniors, feelings of being cared of and loved. Those experiences are important in the development of self-esteem and healthy self-image, as well as feeling like you can trust the people around you, and if something were to happen with them, you'd be equipped to defend yourself and get that sense of security back.  An unsafe growing environment, on the other hand, is perfect for the child to develop trust issues and experience chronic fear and anxiety due to the constant feeling of insecurity and threat around them. A child who grows up in...

 A big part of my trauma invalidation has consisted of other people exploiting the word meant to describe the abuse I went through and by extension making it almost impossible for me to be taken seriously as a victim. Because of how generally unknown the actual definition of the word is, it's very easy to just take it and use it however you want to. This is one of the reasons awareness and education on bullying is so important and should be a mandatory inclusion in the curriculum of basic education at the very least. Because when you don't know what a word means, it's very easy to misuse it, y'know? While I do understand where this level of ignorance is coming from most of the time, I still think it is necessary to hold these people accountable for their actions. It is their words that make the entire thing look like a joke to so many outsiders, because they use it in situations where they want to personally benefit from the concept of bullying somehow. This conversati...

 Language is a wonderful thing for a variety of reasons, but one of my favorite things about it has always been how we as people can utilize language outside of its original confinements. The creative potential language has is entirely comparable to that of a blank page and a pencil, or an empty canvas on a drawing software. Language is merely a tool that human beings have developed in time to communicate with each other, themselves, as well as in order to express themselves in ways exceeding the necessities of conversing. Literature is as much as of an art form as illustration or painting; in Finnish, we sometimes even call literature "sanataide", translating to "word art".  But since the definitions exist, there must be some kind of a reason for them, right?  In order to fully describe and explain the phenomenon of hyperboles and exaggerations in different situations compared to the original definition of the words that are being used, I would have to go on a long...