~Me Too

~Originally posted 22 November 2017~

I’ve posted before about how I make it a point to keep my mouth shut when it comes to polarizing issues. Eventually I’ll make a post about exactly why I do this. But today isn’t that day. In fact, today isn’t one of those days when I’m able to shut my mouth and “stay in my lane” either. And seeing as how I haven’t had a good rant in a while… Take a seat.

I feel like one day I woke up and saw #MeToo all over the internet and the next day the internet was full of victim shaming. Which, honestly, it’s whatever. The internet is dumb, and people post dumb things on it pretty often. But then, I randomly had multiple people talk to me about it in real life. You know the thing where people talk to you as if they already somehow know that you both feel the same way about an issue? Yea, they were those conversations. For me, normally, it depends on the person. If we are close I’ll politely tell them that I disagree and we’ll have a debate. If not, I’ll just go “I know what you mean” or some other form of acknowledgement without actually agreeing.

So, this #MeToo thing… Well, Me Too. Eventually I’ll work up the guts to write and publish a post about it, but it’s going to be hard. Fortunately / unfortunately my mind decided to erase the majority of these instances from my memory, as you can imagine I’m not really in a rush to dig them back up. And I can count one one hand how many people know about this time in my life, so there’s that. Yea….. Let me get back to my original point.

Victim shaming, really? The most common thing that I hear is that since it has taken so long for someone to speak out that it must mean that their story is either fabricated or is something that they have already gotten over and chose to bring up now in order to gain some sort of underserved attention. I honestly don’t have the time or patience to get into/argue just how incredibly stupid this way of thinking is, but I will say that it is in fact STUPID. EVERYONE has been involved in something at one point in time or another that they would rather not make public. Something that -under the right circumstances- they will let others know about when they feel comfortable enough to do so. Just because you are not empathetic enough to relate someone else’s unpleasant past and how they deal with it to your own does not make their situation or how they chose to handle it any less valid.

I get that me saying “me too” earlier might have thrown some of you for a loop. And some of you might have it in your mind that things like this only happen to or only effect women. It’s sad that we live in a world that things like this happen to anyone. It’s sad that we live in a world where it’s assumed that things like this only happen to certain types of people. It’s sad that we live in a world where we search for reasons to discredit people when they express something that we can not fully understand or relate to.

Ok… I’m finding myself getting more and more upset as I continue to write/revise this so I’m going to go ahead and end my rant here. It’s all just, sad.

Until next time, silence yourself before choosing to silence others.