Trauma Doesn't Make You Stronger

 Many a time you hear people talk about the struggles of having a loved one who's mentally ill; how challenging it is for the family and friends to live with the constant stress and pressure of someone really important fighting their inner demons. There's a lot of support groups meant for family and friends of the mentally ill, where they can share their experiences and sympathize with each other. Offering such support to those who have a mentally ill loved one is an important part of preventative mental health care. It is, evidently, very common that mental illness spreads its poisonous tentacles around the entire family and friend group if it's not taken care of. Mentally ill parents have mentally ill children – especially when the illness goes untreated for too long.  So a part of me can't really fault the people who put an emphasis on the struggles that the close ones of the mentally ill face. It's all done in the name of preventative mental health care, which i...

 The year was 2017 when I started cutting myself. I was a second year student in higher secondary school, 17 years old. The autumn of that year was when I first noticed myself getting bad: the first symptoms of depression, soul-crushing anxiety, dissociation in math class – and the overwhelming urge to rip my skin apart.  The concept of self-harm was not new to me, for I had spent a great deal of time on the internet by that point. I knew there were a lot of people who did that to themselves, and that there were as many different reasons for that kind of behavior. Still, it never really clicked with me, until I was in that situation myself. I guess it's one of those things that you won't understand til it happens to you. In 2017, I was diagnosed with depression and anxiety. I got my first antidepressants, I am still on that pill five years later. I remember feeling confused: I knew there was something wrong with me, but I couldn't put a finger on it, and being on meds felt ...

 "Have you considered doing everyone a favor and killing yourself?" People say all kinds of weird shit online. Sometimes, the anonymity of a nickname is really tempting, and you feel like you can say basically anything to anybody. Usually, there tend to be two reasons for that: the first one is the feeling of being liberated from the consequences of your own actions, and the other one is the idea that the things you say online can't cause actual harm. You can always close the computer and log off. The things people say to you online will stay there: they don't have a lasting impact on your life, and they aren't following you around on the streets. The internet is relatively often considered an entity disconnected from reality. When I was a kid, we were always talking about our online lives and IRL lives. IRL as an abbreviation has probably been lost in MySpace times, but it served as the distinguisher of the life that wasn't real and the life that was. Those w...

 "So, you said that you've experienced childhood trauma, right? It doesn't seem like it comes from your home, though, because as far as I've understood it, you're relatively close with your parents. So what do you mean when you say 'childhood trauma'?" This summer, I spent a total of five weeks at the psych ward, and the previous quote is what my psychiatrist asked me the first time I met him after signing in. The nurses had told him that I was living with my parents and that my relationship with them was healthy and fulfilling, so obviously, he was a bit confused. How could I claim that I had childhood trauma when clearly my childhood home had been a safe environment for me to grow in, when I still kept in touch with my parents and chose to live with them in my current situation? What could that childhood trauma be then? ⋅•⋅⋅•⋅⊰⋅•⋅⋅•⋅⋅•⋅⋅•⋅∙∘☽༓☾∘∙•⋅⋅⋅•⋅⋅⊰⋅•⋅⋅•⋅⋅•⋅⋅•⋅ In conversations, childhood trauma is usually synonymous with familial trauma or sexu...

 Trauma survivors are often called things like 'dwellers' by people who don't understand what having mental trauma actually means. "Don't dwell on the past, you should focus on the present!" "I mean yeah, the fact that that happened to you sucks, but why are you so focused on something that is in the past? You can't change it." You know those sentences, you've heard them hundreds of times. The idea that you could still be hurting because of something that happened to you years ago is very foreign to people who've had the fortune of not having to deal with immense amounts of trauma in their childhood. But for some reason, these are also the people who claim to know the most about your situation. When they aren't downright victimblaming the traumatized, they're treating the post-traumatic symptoms as something that the person themself is responsible for. That it's a conscious decision to stay stuck on events that took place year...

 The world is unjust, we all know that – especially those of us who've had to suffer more than most people. It is really hard to find justice in a world that is so divided, polarized, filled with so much evil and malice. But sometimes, that is not good enough of a reason for us. Sometimes we need more than that, a guilty party, someone to put the blame on. When it comes to abuse, the one who should be blamed for their terrible actions is always the abuser. They have wronged you, they have hurt you, done unjustified things to you because they were abusing their power over you. It's a power play, a competition between a rookie and a champion. But why are you having that competition in the first place? What made the abuser choose you? There has to be a reason for their actions. They could have chosen anyone else, anyone in the family, in the workplace, in the classroom. So why were you the one they aimed for? All survivors of abuse go through a phase of self-blame. Depending on th...

 Hello again. The first post of November is a kind of a life update, following the almost three-week break I took of writing and making art. Posts like this won't become a regular occurrence: my focus isn't really to go over the current events of my life, but whenever a little explanation is required, like in the face of a sudden hiatus, I will be giving you a tiny update on what I have been up to recently. You will find all posts like this one under the label ' life updates' . Pretty much all of November up until yesterday I spent with my girlfriend who I hadn't seen in six months. She lives in the United States, and because I live in Finland, our relationship is as long-distance as it gets. I visited her last May, and this was her second time visiting me in Finland. This is not the way things will stay for us though, because she is planning on moving to Finland relatively soon, possibly during the next year. There are several reasons for that decision, and I am no...