gothicprep:

if this isn’t 100% coherent i’m sorry but i know i’m gonna end up ranting about it, most likely

coldsuggestion was a personal blog that was primarily about coping with being in an abusive relationship with a man and coping w the trauma from it, and it’s explicitly stated on the blog but a lot of people didn’t really understand that? i mean, i don’t think it was entirely a bad thing that it got attention. like i remember when it first started getting a lot of reblogs, a lot of other survivors who i follow were reacting very positively to the fact that it was validating their experiences, & it empowered a few of them to start talking openly that it was something that they’d dealt with and how it affected them, etc etc. and i guess it doesn’t seem like a huge deal from the outside looking in, but being able to talk about abuse openly & knowing that someone else gets it can really make coping with it so much less alienating. & all this shit aside, i’m glad that people were able to read those posts and find some catharsis in having those feelings put into words. the nature of abuse makes it so difficult to make someone else understand how it affected you when they just don’t know…. seeing that given airtime was comforting for me and a lot of people and i wish more people would have left it alone.

i think the first really big indicator that there were a lot of people who weren’t reading it in context was when the blog got an ask that was like “why are all these posts so heterosexual?” which was, like, incredibly inappropriate. then misandry accusations started flying. & then other people started riding the content wave and creating submission blogs with similar urls… and conceptually that was kind of a grey area imo because obviously i’m all for creating a dialogue about abuse & healing, but none of the other suggestion blogs ever seemed to have an emphasis on being a space for abuse survivors to support one another or anything like that & a lot of the people running these blogs just laughed it off when the original creator of coldsuggestion voiced discomfort with what they were doing. and then people started making parody blogs with the intent to ridicule the people running these blogs, because tumblr hates feelings and shit. and then urban outfitters or something contacted coldsuggestion about making t shirts because she had a “strong hold on a niche demographic” and that was, understandably, The Last Straw.

one of the coldsuggestion posts says something about how abuse destroys everything you have, along with your ability to really communicate that to anyone, and since the blog was abandoned, i’ve always found it ironic in the worst kind of way. you create a space because no one understands your voice, only to have it decontextualized, and be left in a position once again where no one understands. and when viewing it thru the lens of being another survivor it jst drives home a really depressing message about how, really, people don’t seem to be capable of understanding how you feel unless they’ve been through something similar themselves. & maybe it’s me overreading and being dramatic but it makes me sad