For That Laid-Back Ignorance

Oct. 23, 2012 at 8:00pm with 26 notes

From Anonymous: This isn’t casual, but I needed to say it. Every day, I feel so stifled and lonely, because everyone around me gets extremely uncomfortable when I talk about the things I need to talk about. I can’t mention my mental illness, my race, my dysfunctional family, my suicidal thoughts, none of it because all I get is the other person looking around awkwardly and not knowing how to handle it.

I used to talk to a counselor at my school, except she left at the end of last year. She was a WoC, and I didn’t realize how averse my friends were to the topics of race and mental illness because she was there for me to talk to and she would understand.

My friends look at me weird any time I bring up that I’m not white, or that my parents and I are not on good terms (they all have very close supportive families, I am fairly certain my dad didn’t want me and while my mother certainly tries, there have been years of emotional abuse).

There is no support system at my school for these topics - I am working on starting up group therapy in order to have a safe space to talk about mental health with other students, but no such thing exists currently. Our diversity center is primarily concerned with “educating” non-PoC at my school about different cultures, through music and food programs, which is all well and good, but there is no safe space or community for students of color.

My only real remaining outlets were my best friend and tumblr. My best friend is going through a hard time right now, and I feel like I am bothering her and intruding when I talk to her.

And now tumblr isn’t even a safe space for me. I posted some thoughts I had about race and coverage of news stories involving PoC and I got told to stop making everything about race. As always, it’s one of those topics that I am just not allowed to talk about apparently.

Except every day I look in the mirror and hate myself, hate everything about me including the way my skin looks, the shape of my features, the hair on my body. I want to tear off my skin sometimes. I hate that I get called by the wrong name constantly, that the food I eat is made fun of by my friends all the time, that the culture I grew up in is both a joke and a threat to all that is moral and good. But I can’t talk about any of that. I can’t have a chance to vent and wonder if anyone out there understands, if anyone’s ever put pink lipstick on their purple-brown lips to make them “normal” and “pretty” and felt like shit afterwards. I just need to shut up and stop bringing race into it, stop bringing mental health into it, stop bringing up anything that is remotely negative. I can’t talk. Not in real life. And now not even on my blog.

I can’t just go write a post about how awful I feel and how I wish I were dead. I responded to that person’s insults and now I don’t feel comfortable talking about anything relating to race at all on my blog for fear that they will see it and have something to say. I have no one to call, no one who would understand, nothing. Flat out fucking ableism and racism is making me feel isolated and alone and making me afraid to speak, to the point where I want to kill myself for even daring to try in the first place.