This Ain't Good

A/N Unrelated to The Story

Okay, this is something serious and a lil sad, but it gets better. I never wanted to have an A/N be where a chapter should be, but I felt so passionate about this subject I wanted to. I didn't need to, but I felt I had to. This is roughly edited so sorry if some parts make no sense, just know I mean well.

This A/N discusses suicide, depression and self-harm, if you are not comfortable you do not need to read this, it has nothing to do with the story or plot of This Ain't Good. I am not a therapist, my advice probably won't help, and all my interpretations are based off of what I've personally learnt from my own experiences, my friends' experiences, and more. If anything, this is a rant about my feelings towards a fellow author and comments they've received that I have no affiliation with aside from reading their story, and then some. It starts off about the author, gets a bit personal (please don't pity me, I'm honestly doing pretty well), back to author, then talks to you. It's seriously mostly just me going on about something that happened to another author and I felt the need to address it because I've got a decent audience reading TAG so this information will reach a fair few people.

I was reading a fanfiction here on Wattpad and there was a part where one of the characters was harming himself. It wasn't overly descriptive and was fairly short, but the author put in a note saying they were uncomfortable writing that, which is fine. It's only natural to not like the feeling of writing about dark things that are real-world problems, it only means, in my opinion, the author feels more strongly about it. I do not like self-harm or any of that, but I can and do read stuff about it and I can and have written about it, but in no way support it.

Either way, the character was feeling blue and they cut themselves in the fictional story, after the paragraph there was an author's note saying "if any of you guys think like that please don't" which is really considerate, and I saw it as a really nice gesture. I saw next to that line there was nearly 200 comments and I thought they'd be things like "thank you for caring!" and things along the lines of that because if the author spent the time to write that one line that means so much, they obviously care. Instead the comments were filled with "lol, I can't stop", "wow now my depression is cured" (note the sarcasm) and more heartless and possibly true things.

Just looking at some of those comments :((( like, I get depression's bad, I've been in dark places too, but seriously... The author said something because they don't want you hurt or hurting and this -these-, imagine having all these dark comments in your notifications basically saying, "I don't care, I'm going to keep hurting myself even when I know that you care for my mental and physical wellbeing and safety.".

It's just... If I got these on my story I'd feel like trash seeing them knowing that I want to help people and I put out a message showing that I'd like to help and so many of my readers just said I couldn't :/ It'd just ruin my spirits and make me feel like all my efforts to help people are futile, especially when they respond like that to something so important.

I'd feel like a trash person if I commented anything like "I can't stop cutting even if you tell me to" on anyone's story, especially when the person is trying to be nice like the author was and is being. The author, I'm assuming, doesn't want people to be sad or depressed or hurt themselves and putting one sentence in like they did can change someone's perspective and how they think, to re-evaluate and pause what they're doing. One sentence can make a difference, but so can those hundreds of comments. After seeing and reading some appalling comments there, it just seems people don't take these genuine feelings seriously.

Put yourself in someone's shoes: they're depressed, they're not okay, they're having bad thoughts and doing bad things and then they see that one message from a complete stranger who cares. That stranger knows nothing about you or why you do what you do but they still care. They say clearly with no hidden intentions or connotations that they want you to stop thinking so negatively and to at least try stop hurting yourself because they care about you. They're not making you stop, and that request might not affect you at all, but they tried, and they tried in a really well-mannered fashion. Remember, you're in someone else's shoes, boots, slippers, whatever, right now. You could be a young child who's endured too much, a stressed teenager with strict parents, heck, even some insane serial killer that feels sad too sometimes and still reads stories written by children on Wattpad, and that author doesn't say "what's wrong with you?" or "are you okay?" because people lie. I lie a lot, as a defence mechanism, as a joke, for my own entertainment and so many more reasons. People lie more online because they can get away with it and no one will question these fake personas they build. That author just gave out a simple request to "please stop" because they care, and you can't lie to that, you either do it or don't.