Over the years I’ve been posting my art online and worked to become a worthy advocate for bullying trauma and abuse, I have encountered countless ways the internet likes to turn its back to victims of bullying, making them feel like they are the problem. This is obviously true for all victims of any abuse, but there are aspects to this issue that make bullying victims a unique target of such demeaning treatment. For this particular instance of poor online behavior, I want to explore the concept of “the perfect victim” and the insane standards it places onto victims of bullying.

“I’m Fine, So You Should Be Too”

Over the years, I have become exhaustingly aware of the reasons people at large have for not viewing bullying as a particularly traumatizing experience. It’s been well over three years that I have been working on the art project, and in those three years, I have learned more about trauma invalidation from total strangers online than I ever had in the years that came before that. One of these tired arguments that have been used against me on a personal level as well as other victims of bullying I have had the pleasure of meeting has been the following:

“I was bullied too, and I’m not ‘traumatized’, ‘chronically ill’, or ‘disabled’ like you claim to be. You need to get over it.”

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.