Sickness in Joy
People find pleasure in a lot of different things: there are as many sources of joy in this world as there are individual human beings. For me, my main sources of pleasure are being creative, spending time with my friends, having coffee with my dad, watching TV with my girlfriend, going to anime conventions with my best friend, petting our two kitties with my mom, and losing myself in the music I love. Most of the things I adore in this life have something to do with the people who are the closest to me, and most of the things I despise have something to do with me being by myself. I think that says a lot about the sort of relationships I cultivate with those I love versus the fractured relationship I am forced to have with myself.
But when it comes to the ways other people in this world find their pleasure, there are a few that have never made any sense to me. One of them is being a proud, self-proclaimed abuser online.
confession.
Over the years I have spent on the wonderful world of the interwebs, I have come across this specific type of person way more times than I can count. They have usually been ones to give me a piece of their minds without me asking for it, but I have also witnessed them doing the same to someone else than myself. Usually even that has led to me becoming a target of sorts, because if there’s one thing I hate in this world, it’s being a silent bystander in a situation of any kind of abuse.
As I’m sure most of you are aware, there is usually no way to reason with these people. You are only wasting your breath by trying to make them change their minds. It’s a terrible situation for someone like myself to be in, because I just can’t let these people continue doing what they’ve done to me to someone else. That is why I have tried to come up with more creative ways to get my message to them, most of which nowadays happens in the form of my art.
I have tried my absolute hardest to understand the kind of mindset these people have. I’ve always found it relatively easy to put myself in the situation of someone else, no matter what kind of person we are talking about. But this very specific breed of individuals online is one I simply cannot wrap my mind around. Because what kind of a person says they derive genuine pleasure and enjoyment from traumatizing strangers on the internet?
I know that for a lot of people, this might seem like a completely pointless endeavor, and I wouldn’t blame you for feeling that way. But because of the way my life was completely destroyed by these individuals, I cannot help but go back to trying to understand their level of thinking, just for the sake of making an impact on them. No matter what kind of way I end up leaving this world in, I cannot for the life of me give up on the quest of trying to see life from the perspective of those who abused me, simply because I believe there might be some answers to the infinite questions of how do we make sure this doesn’t happen again in that mindset of theirs. I might be naive for feeling that way, but I don’t think that in itself is a bad quality to have. This world needs more childlike energy, anyways.
But until I find the answers to these questions, I will continue speaking up for other victims and myself, calling out the abusive behavior we have normalized in online spaces just because “this is the internet, what did you expect”. We have to take a moment to realize that victims of online abuse have ended up taking their own lives because of what has been done to them, that we are left with feeling uneasy wherever we decide to go in the online world. And unlike how things were in the 2000´s, now you cannot escape the internet by just “logging off”. That shit follows you to your workplace, to your home, to your family and friends. Reputations get forever tarnished, and people lose their jobs and lives. That is the real impact of cyberbullying.
And now, it is finally time for us to talk about it at length.
Logging in,
ichigonya
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