I have a question.
Why is this (tw: suicide) a huge deal, but this and this is okay?
My proper response to that crap is this, but let me draw out a few pertinent quotes for you.
As someone who is borderline-suicidal in her daily life because of clinical depression, I do not have time for your bullshit, fandom. I am fighting my depression kicking and screaming and clawing, clinging to the very fucking edge of that abyss, and I do not need you adding weight to the load.
So many of us who become attached to fandoms enough to do things like write fic, roleplay, draw, and otherwise create for them? So so so many of us use this as an outlet because our real lives suck. In Meegan’s case, she was suffering from bullying in-person, and fandom should have been a safe space for her. Instead it became somewhere else she was being hurt, and she took her own life.
We failed her, as a fandom, collectively. We failed to provide her with a safe place to feel comfortable in her own skin, despite the fact that so many of us know exactly what she was going through, because we’ve been there. We failed to call people out on their shit when we saw it, and we failed to reach out when we could have done something.
If the minute I say
It had to do with my self-doubt, my trying to figure out how I was going to deal with wanting to play with people and not reaching out. It had to do with — frankly, with the damned dummystark situation and with my personal insanity.
honestly I get jumped on for using my illness as an excuse — well, thanks, you just made me want to repeat the cycle all over again. Why would I want to stick around a fandom, where I come to get away from that crap, that hits me with my illness like it’s something I can help?
I didn’t write that to say “dummystark drove me away”. Far from it. It was a horrible, stressful situation; I had a lot of doubts about my desirability as a friend and roleplayer, and I crawled into a hole and pulled it in after me. That was all me. And I gritted my teeth, took my meds, talked to my therapist, and decided that reaching out to people was important to me, as a writer, as a geekgirl, and as a roleplayer.
That other person died because stuff like what was said to me gets praised.
You can’t do that to me. I’ve been there. You can’t say anything to me I haven’t heard before, period. But I will be drawn and quartered, tarred and feathered and driven off tumblr and out of roleplaying before I stop calling people out on that shit. And what was said about me last night was bullshit.
Dishonor on your cow.