There are always fads going around with teenagers. Bell bottom jeans, Air Supply, whatever people thought fashion was in 2004. The list could go on and on. Teenagers change their minds so quickly about almost everything, which is why you might hear parents saying, "It's just a phase," when their teen dyes their hair black and pierces their own lip.
Obviously, in this age of technology, there are a lot of trends that come and go. You see teenagers with a new phone every week and some new social media that you totally have to check out. But with all these things, there come some bad trends as well. A current trend is self hate. Teenagers--girls, mostly-- are going through this phase where it's tragically beautiful to be sad and hurting and view photos of self mutilation as strong and pretty. We live in an age where social awkwardness is cute and quirky, where it's cool to not want to go outside, where serious mental disorders are twisted around and romanticized to the point where being sad and starving yourself or cutting yourself or hating yourself is poetic. We live in a society where other people's depression can be put down because some people deserve to be more sad than you. At my last school, two of my friends would compare their tragedies with one another and with others in the school, saying things like, "She has no right to be depressed. My father is dead but she's only failing a class. She doesn't have a right to be upset."
We've come to a time where teenagers are bombarded with so much stimuli that it's easy for kids my age to slip into depression and people see it as some beautiful thing, a poor soul who needs saving. Nowadays self love is equated to being conceited or selfish or cocky, so we take all of our love and put it into other things so we don't realize how sad we are. To quote a spoken word poem by Cheyanne Lynn, "If I ask you what you love the answers will likely roll off your tongue. You love to read, you love to write, you love to sing, you love dogs, tattoos, music, your mom, your brother, your father, your sister, your best friend.
How long would this list have to go on and on for before you said 'I love myself?'"
What people don't realize is that, unfortunately, we don't live in a world written by John Green and some amazing person isn't going to come along and heal our scars and save us from the pits of despair that we've come to know as home. People romanticize self loathing as if it's wonderful to be sad, with products on the market like shirts that say, "Eat Less." It's played off like a joke, like it's funny to be anti-social and stay in on the internet all day because hating everything is cool. Teenagers don't realize that they're playing with a dangerous notion; they expect a hero to be written into their story and think that they're beautiful despite their scars and then everything will be okay. They don't realize that they have to save themselves from their inner demons because someone else can't do it for them.
I don't know how long this trend will last but all I can say is that I hope it's over soon. Self hatred isn't poetic or tragically beautiful and life shouldn't be a competition for who can be the most miserable. Romanticizing things like suicide and loathing is dangerous, because before people have a chance to realize that they have to save themselves, they could be too far gone to ever come back.
