In The World Of @sosadtoday — Are You Depressed Or Addicted To Attention?

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I don’t find anything funny about sadness. I don’t think a person can be sad to the point of hilarity. A person can be sad to the point of self-harm and suicide. I take every feeling seriously, and I believe in feeling real emotions — not emulating them. “Relaxing and being able to laugh at things” is bullshit — it doesn’t change the mental problems you deal with, it just puts a wall between you and your issues, so that a wrecking ball can’t come along to break it down when you’re not being authentic about what is wrong with you.

Depression is not a joke, it never has been. If you’re using your transparent sadness and pain to spill black paint all over the blank canvas that you are, it’s not an admirable quality. It is pathetic.

Depression kills people. Truly depressed people have little control over their depression. As you’re reading this, a teenager, an adult, an elderly person is gearing up to end their life because they know in their gut that the sadness and depression has hit a point where they can’t handle being alive anymore.

Twitter is a landscape covered by clouds of irony and satire. I’m really sick of seeing millennials (born in the 90s) poking fun at their apparent “depression.”

A Twitter account called so sad today (followed by celebs like Miley Cyrus) is basically an ironic/ satiric feed that uses sadness as a device for passive victimizing and self-deprecation.

It trivializes the pain that many depressives feel — the ones who’d never use it as an identity badge on their social media accounts, who’d never publicly identify with such hopelessness. When you follow and constantly read and feed this “lol” mindset, you start to adopt it. You tweet “lol my dog just died” and everyone reads it numbingly and nobody cares.

I always find it ironic that the people I know who retweet these accounts are the ones who fail to react to anything with any emotion. They’re completely unemotionally responsive and just say “meh” to things, like dead-inside robots who aren’t programmed for emotional awareness.

This is frustrating. I happen to believe anyone who tells me they are depressed or sad. Why would anyone lie about that? I have told many people things that have happened to me and nobody has believed me, and it didn’t feel good. Why would I treat someone that way?

Mental illness is not glamorous. It’s a struggle and a lifestyle that one does not choose. It’s not a cool accessory to human individuality. It’s an internal battle that comes in many different shapes and forms, and causes millions of people all around to suffer unexplainable pain everyday.

Accounts like @sosadtoday make it difficult to point out what is authentic pain and what’s synthetic, manufactured.

Are you depressed or are you just addicted to attention?

You’re the only one who knows the answer to that.