Noelle-Anonymous

Pain and anger and stress and sadness are not the same for everyone; it changes. My pain is not your pain, my stressors are not your stressors, so stop trying to fucking compare them.

Telling me there is a soldier out there in the Middle East, sweating and fearing their own death around every corner, in response to me saying, "I'm stressed out" doesn't do shit. I've never been a soldier. I've never felt that. It has no bearing on my feelings, no bearing on my emotional strength, or lack thereof. Fuck you very much for trying to invalidate my feelings.

There is no universal scale for pain that goes from getting a paper cut to being a starving child in Africa, where your pain perpetually falls in the middle. And acting like there is, only furthers the pain. It alienates people. Why open up, why ask for help, when everyone is always pointing out that there is someone out there who has it much worse than you?

People are always told that there is someone out there worse off than you. But guess what? Depression strikes without warning and without prejudice. It strikes the rich, the poor, the fortunate, and the unfortunate. It doesn't hit one country more than another. It attacks without thought or planning.

When you say, "but there's someone out there who has it worse than you," to try to comfort someone, what you are doing is silencing them. You're saying they don't matter because their suffering doesn't reach the apex of some archaic form of measurement for grief. You're saying, fuck you, you're not miserable enough to warrant my help.

And yet people wonder why the suicide rate is so depressingly high.

~Noelle

It would be an explosion.

Because that's what my insides feel like

When I want to cry.

~Noelle