My good friend shared this link the other day and it stuck with me. It is not an easy read. I felt sick while reading it and cried afterwards. One of the ways to describe this article is that it is about teen suicide particularly related to gay bashing in a particularly conservative educational climate.
It brought up a lot for me. The cruelty of middle school, high school, adulthood, politics. . . The difficulty we have as humans to figure out who we are and let other people figure out who they are. . . The ease with which any one of us can feel threatened. . . I can’t figure out which part was most upsetting. The suicides. The culture. The seeming complacency. The values portrayed that are different than mine. The powerlessness and pain reflected in the people of all the groups represented.
In the end, one of the biggest points I took from this was that the policy about staying neutral basically made ‘gayness’ something that couldn’t even be talked about or addressed in public settings. Making a topic invisible is worse than polarizing it. It leaves people feeling alone, isolated, depressed, hopeless, guilty and shameful. I just looked up shame quickly and here was a little piece on it that captures the basic idea of the shame described in the article.
Related to getting through shame and coming to a little more acceptance, I tend to think that naming things, talking about them, and exploring why they create so many difficult feelings, is a good idea. Often, other people are feeling uncomfortable about the same things. Often, the things we are most ashamed of limit us the most in life.
