Salutations, Friends!

And Welcome to my brief rant.

I blocked someone on blue sky the other day.

They made a post saying how “all dad of queer kids need to act like theirs. It’s easy. There’s no excuse for anything else.” And went on to tell a little story.

Then I scroll on to see them lashing out about people “trauma dumping” in the comments. Not only to accuse them of attention seeking, but also pathologizing them. Saying there’s some psychological reason people do it.

I hate this so much.

Let’s chat about why

• They opened this dialogue by making a post that begins with addressing universal behavior toward a queer child. They could have just said “Hey, this cute thing happened with my dad”. But generalizations get more clicks. So they made a post calling out good and unacceptable behavior with queer kids and got upset when people (a lot of whom may have struggled to find validation in this issues and thus resonate with it) continued the dialogue with examples from their life of unacceptable behavior. I genuinely can’t think of what one would expect comments to be under this post if not people talking about their experiences as a queer child with a parent. Like, either you were expecting people to kiss yours and your dad’s ass or you were shocked that an topic rife with abuse wasn’t sanitized for you.

• A thing I hate with the idea of trauma dumping is that there’s not room for the fact that traumatizing things are a normal life experience for many. The convo is literally about a very commonly abusive dynamic, and you acknowledge that the other end of the spectrum is there. But you seem so confused as to how trauma found its way to the conversation. Confused as to why someone would dare bring that up. But that is literally someone’s life. I genuinely think a lot of people have never thought through what it would actually look like for someone to “get over” trauma. You can process, work through, and heal all your want, but the question of why I didn’t got to school dances as a kid has an answer related to trauma and that doesn’t change in polite company. Hell, I’ve had people get awkward after they asked why I don’t talk to my family. I genuinely think the issue here is people not having the slightest capability to engage with the slightest example of an unaesthetic existence. So it forces a lot of people who have a life with trauma at every turn and inside every memory to constantly be picking ourselves apart to make sure we don’t say something taboo even if that taboo is simply a part of who we are.

Finally,

• The audacity to start saying there’s something wrong with them mentally deserves nothing but the swiftest “fuck you”. People being so quick to derogatorily diagnose people for any and every undesirable trait is white supremacist, imperialist bullshit. I’ve talked about it before with regards to the person saying who you are when you’re drunk is who you are, and you need therapy for it. And I will say it again. That shit needs to be deprogrammed and y’all need to decolonize how you perceive the mental health institution.

That’s all I have to say for now.

Until next time,

Valedictions, friends.