There’s simply no way you don’t know people struggling right now. Whether you want to consider the levels of anxiety and depression a disorder or a natural reaction to the state of the world today, we would all do well with more compassion and grace.
A lot more. People are dying without it.
I suspect that he is on to something. It’s hard to create a community of people caring for one another when our workplaces demand constant availability, and our culture rewards people who are singularly focused on career or commercial success. This reminds me of something I wrote about early risers and their productivity a few years ago. I thought it was weird that in a profile of these “very successful” men, every one of them talked about getting up early to start working, planning out their days, sending emails to their team so they’d be waiting for them when they got to the office, etc.
What was missing from every single person interviewed in the story? There was no mention of a family. None of these men talked about having breakfast with a spouse, taking their kids to school, etc. None of them mentioned having friends. Their entire goal was to get a head start on work so they could get ahead. And here we were, writing glowing profiles and encouraging everyone to live like this.
I think back to my childhood and the sexual and physical violence I was subjected to. I struggle with anxiety because my brain is always going back to that time – a time when I was not safe! The things my brain learned then weren’t a failure of mental health; they were survival instincts. They were healthy reactions to an unsafe environment. My current challenge is unlearning them now that I am no longer in that unsafe environment. Asking me to do that while I was unsafe would have been dumb. The anxiety was trying to keep me alive.
The use of AI is a new twist. It’s not enough to tell young boys not to send explicit selfies; they also need to understand that someone may use AI to create an explicit image of them regardless. Education must include societal-wide awareness that an image may not be what it appears to be. That has to be part of this. The extortionist’s main weapon is the shame of having explicit photos of their victim out among their friends and family. Shame is powerful. When we live in a world where anyone with an internet connection and a photo of your face can turn that into an explicit image of you, we need to eliminate the shame. There’s no shame to be had for someone else’s bad actions.
The central question of the article below is a good one: Why Do victims of nonsexual violent crimes usually involve authorities while most rape survivors remain silent? Most of the article is about adult sexual assault, but she points out that children who are sexually abused face this same question for similar reasons. Those reasons…
Even just the headline made me think of those days when I was in my 20s, dealing with the trauma and shame of my childhood and the major depression that I was not getting proper treatment for. I didn’t take care of myself. I didn’t even meet the basic needs of sleep, food, etc., because, in my mind, I wasn’t worth it. I didn’t deserve to live a healthy, content life. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand what self-care was or why it was necessary; I lacked a belief that I deserved it.
