justaoifethings

Man Up. I hate this expression with all my soul. We see men cry, and people snap Man up! What's that supposed to mean? Have no emotions? Be a rock? What does it mean to be a man? What is masculinity? Men have emotions. Men cry. Men want to look pretty (let's not make words gender specific, pretty, handsome, it's all the same). Men get stigma for caring about their clothes. Men get stigma for being mentally ill. Men have depression. Men have anorexia. Men have anxiety. Men get panic attacks. Men get depressive episodes. Men have mental breakdowns. Men starve themselves. Men get abused. Men kill themselves. Men are human. Men have emotions. Men suffer like women do. No man or woman should tell a man to man up. Because that's telling them to not be human. To not feel. To not think. And that's simply not fair. I remember seeing a man cry for the first time. That was odd for me, and it shouldn't have been. Why did media want to keep raw emotion away fr...

I feel consistently happy for the first time since... ever. I don't remember ever being consistently happy. I thought this time in my life would be awful. I'm in my final year of school, and I thought the pressures of looming exams would anger my anxiety. But it's not. This is also the first time in a long time that I've been consistently calm. I don't know what I did. I don't know what's different. I'm confused as to why I'm so happy and calm. I'm presuming I'm happy because I'm not anxious all the time. My anxiety has numbed greatly, having only had one panic attack in the past few months. I have no idea what caused that either. I wonder if it's because the life I've been planning for is just around the corner. I don't know why, but things got better. I suppose that is always the way of mental illness, if you give it time.

I feel as if I only wrote about a suicide, and here I am again, writing about another. It's devastating. Tears are in my eyes, and I did not know Cathriona. But her loss of life tugs at my heart. The fact she took her own life pummels it. I feel like I'm lost for words. Like Daniel Kyre and all the other people before her that committed suicide, they have done something irreversible. They have scarred their family and friends, most likely unintentionally. I can never say this enough, Depression corrupts the mind. Depression feeds you lies. Talk to people if you feel ending your life is a good option. Depression wants you to do this. It makes you feel it's right. But trust me, it is not. Cathriona is another light extinguished by her own hands. She isn't the first. And gut wrenchingly, she won't be the last. Right now, unimaginable amounts of people are contemplating suicide. People have killed themselves today, and just because they weren't in the ne...

You can't do that. I'm told this a lot by my mother. She's anxious, and she probably means it with all good intentions. But to me, it makes me feel like I'm not good enough. I feel like I can't wear the clothes I enjoy. I feel like I can't get the grades I need for the uni I've dreamed of going to. I feel like I can't be independent. I feel like I'm not good enough. In June, I'll be moving out. My boyfriend and I will be working part time whilst going to college, and she's insisting we won't be able to afford it. She insists we'll be too stressed. She insists we won't enjoy college. She insists You can't do that. She wants me to live in my grandmothers and for my boyfriend to live on his own, which angers me. Why should I live somewhere rent free when he struggles on his own? We want to live together. We've lived in different countries our entire relationship, and we want to live together now. We don't care...

If you are unfamiliar with my 'Dear Becky' series, a previous post entitled Dear Becky will fully inform you. Dear Becky You know what? Fuck you. Why are you so afraid of doing an experiment in class? You don't have the teacher you hate anymore. Why are you afraid of going into that class? The teacher is one of the most relaxed and laid backed teachers who actually gets a lot of work done - you should love him. You should be relaxed going into his class. New people and new things aren't scary. The prefect training is a pain in the face, but you're not missing important classes or classes that are hard to catch up on, like maths and history. You have a biology test on Friday, and that's ok. You've studied for ages. You've looked at exams questions. You studied, studied, and restudied chapters and are going to do the same before Friday and on Friday morning. You'll be fine. Maths is also fine. You're a little confused, but you've on...

Daniel Kyre was a part of a youtube group called Cyndago. Daniel Kyre is dead. Daniel Kyre tried to kill himself. I didn't know who Daniel Kyre was. I didn't know who Cyndago was. I had never watched their videos. I had never heard their names. But my heart grew heavy as I read what happened to him, and I can't imagine the pain his friends and family are going through. Daniel Kyre was a friend. Daniel Kyre was a son. Daniel Kyre was a brother. Daniel Kyre was a smile for hundreds of thousands of people who didn't personally know him. Daniel Kyre was depressed. Daniel Kyre had enough. Daniel Kyre didn't get the help he needed. Daniel Kyre did something irreversible. Daniel Kyre has impacted so many lives in a way I doubt he thought was possible. His father is heartbroken. His sister is heartbroken. His friends are heartbroken. Their lives won't ever be the same. Little things will remind them of Daniel. Daniel won't ever leave them, and ...

We are becoming desensitised at an alarming rate. We live in a world of famine, war, torture and cruelty, but it seems to pass over our heads. We are presented with images of starving kids on our televisions since childhood. We are told about mere skeletons of people who are dying horrific deaths since a young age. We are taught about war and famine when we were in primary school. We live in an age of mind blowing special effects and films and video games. We grow up with violent cartoons and toys modelled from weapons. How much of this does it take for a human to lose their sense of humanity? How much more do we need to forget that we're all people? We scorn Hitler for the mass murder of Jews, gypsies and the disabled. They're humans too, of course, and he deserves one of the worst names in history. But who's to say we're not as bad on an individual level? I watched as a Hungarian reporter tripped a man fleeing from a war torn country with a little girl in his arm...