You know that whole trope where like, the protagonists get teleported up into the aliens’ spaceship or base or whatever and the alien appears to them only it doesn’t appear as it really looks like but rather, since it doesn’t want to scare the protagonists, it takes the form of something we find familiar and pleasing and is like, “I look like your dad or whatever–is this form okay?” Like I think about that trope a lot and I think like, what if the alien couldn’t pick out a form via telepathy and only had earth media to try and decide what form would scare its human guests least and be accepted almost immediately and honestly the more I think about it the more options for what form that might be are just really fun to me.
“I have chosen the form of your earth playwright and composer Lin-Manuel Miranda–do not be afraid. I come in peace.”
“Greetings. I am Glofnorbo of the cloud you call the ‘Pegasus Nebula.’ I have scanned your earth media from afar and empirically decided that you would find the form of the one known as Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson most pleasing. I have come to confer with your leaders.”
“Do not be panic. I come in peace. I have assumed the form of your insectoid demigoddess ‘Hatsune Miku’ so that we may communicate peacefully without my true form horrifying you.”
“It was decided that I would assume the form of your ‘Mister Rogers’ in order to best welcome your world to the galactic neighborhood without frightening your kind.”
“…So did your colleague take on the form of Jack Black for that reason too?”
“No, that is the actual Jack Black. We do not know how to make him leave.”
i wanna give a shout out to all lgbt people who thought they were another identity before realizing they were something else. lesbians realizing they’re trans men, bi/pan people realizing they’re a lesbian/gay, binary trans people realizing they’re genderfluid, etc. even if you don’t know if your current identity is the final stop, even if you think it’s a “phase”, or you don’t know what label fits you best, you’re on a journey to self discovery, every step matters, it shapes you into the person you are or aspire to be, and you’re not fake or a bad person for figuring things out.
the whole “mermaids are all colourful and friendly and wear seashells as clothes and collect sparkly things and sing to the fish” is definitely appealing, 10/10, but let’s be realistic for a sec.
the ocean is scary as shit.
as humans, we have only explored about 5% of the ocean. meaning, we have seen very, very little of what lives in the ocean.
in that mere 5% we know about, while we have found some awesome stuff (coral reefs, starfish, dolphins, fish that glow!!!), we have found some absolute fucking monsters. huge sharks, giant squids, eels, some pretty freaky fish, the list goes on.
so, let’s be realistic.
you’re gonna look me in the eyes and tell me that all mermaids are dainty little figures with brightly coloured tails, long, flowing hair, big blue eyes and perfect white teeth? no. way.
show me the mermaids that live in the deepest parts of the ocean, of places man has never, and will never, get to. show me mermaids who hunt in packs, who don’t sing, but rather shrill and screech, or are so silent that you don’t notice them until it’s too late. show me the mermaids with grey, silver, multicolour, scaly skin and eyes that glow yellow in the dark and teeth that make great whites look friendly. show me the mermaids with coral and plankton and barnacles growing on their skin, with kelp in their hair.
give me mermaids who can camouflage into their enviorment, who can shoot ink, who can electrocute unsuspecting prey. give me giant mermaids with tails like eels or like jellyfish or like sharks, that will kill anything they see, that can cause tsunamis with a wave of their hands. give me mermaids who are ripped, with no hair, with fangs. give me mermaids with armour similar to crabs, with flesh harder than rock, with nails like talons. give me mermaids that have hidden themselves away from man in the furthest reaches of the depths, who have slowly evolved to look more monster than girl.
bring me the mermaids that no one wants to acknowledge, the ones that fuel nightmares and folk tales and urban legends.
bring me the diversity, the reality, of the ocean into mermaids.
i put off making this post for a while because i didn’t want to ruin anyone’s fun or be a buzzkill, but it’s about time i did. i want to talk about cryptid/UFO/paranormal/conspiracy theory screencaps and jokes, which have become pretty mainstream as a part of tumblr culture, and how as a schizophrenic person that’s been increasingly alienating and difficult to deal with.
i’m talking about posts about flat-earthers, i’m talking about “relatable” anxiety posts about plastering your wall with newspaper cutouts and red string like a conspiracy theorist, i’m talking about text posts where people joke about putting tape over their webcam so the FBI can’t spy on them, and most importantly i’m talking about posts like these:
these posts are all screencaps from real people’s blogs and websites or comments on forums. and they’re being passed around, uncredited, without any caption or context. not only are all of these things stripped of any credit or source or information about who the original creator was, they’re selective segments of the most “out-there” “crazy” stuff these people say, posted as either an aesthetic thing or as a tongue-in-cheek joke. and as someone who has genuinely been someone like this, who spent my early teens on websites like this reading stuff and posting it myself, it’s really hurtful to see these people treaded so dehumanizingly by a community that claims to care about psychotic people.
a huge amount of these are just literally detailing common psychosis symptoms. for example, this post has almost 300 notes, mainly from aesthetic blogs:
feeling like your thoughts are being broadcasted, overheard, played out loud etc. is an incredibly common symptom of schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders. this isn’t creepy, “paranormal”, or fun, this is a snippet of something a real human being who was scared and not getting the help they needed said on the internet in hopes of finding that help there. and this type of aestheticizing and demonizing (literally demonizing, in some cases) of psychosis actively contributes to people feeling like monsters or freaks. even if content like this is being initially found and posted by people who genuinely relate or run in these circles, the majority of people circulating these posts are simply doing so because they think it’s cool or edgy or whatever, and as someone who experiences symptoms like these on a daily basis it makes me feel like i can’t talk about my genuine and harmless lived experiences without scaring people, being laughed at, or being seen as some sort of cool inhuman abnormality to be studied. and those are all ways that psychotic people have been made to feel, unfairly, for a very very long time.
i’ve ever reblogged those posts, but it was with the perception that the other people posting and reblogging them also had my experiences. i saw other people reblogging this stuff and felt like having a paranormal conspiracy theorist phase at age 11 where you spent time actually reading and posting on forums and websites like that was a funny relatable thing, the same way that having a deviantart emo phase was. and i thought those posts were made like that – from the perspective of people going, “oh, we’ve all been there!”. but they aren’t. even if it’s not intentional, the attitude people have about the paranormal and conspiracy theories on here is this weird, ironic, voyeuristic joke. and having to slowly realize that – that people were laughing at me, not with me – felt really bad.
people reblog posts that are screencaps of real, actual people talking about how afraid they are that they’re possessed by demons or how aliens are sending them messages, and most of the people reblogging those posts have never actually been “crazy” like that. maybe they relate on some level, maybe they feel like it’s like they’re possessed by a demon because of how emotional they get sometimes, whatever. but i’ve been hospitalized against my will because of the significant physical damage i’ve done to by body trying to “get the demon out of me”, i’ve been made to take antipsychotic medication i didn’t want to take because i thought everyone outside was an alien in disguise and i couldn’t leave the house. and when i felt like that and had no idea what was so different about me or what was wrong, i spent time on websites like this because it was the only place other people shared my experiences, understood me and believed me. and now i have to be on edge every time i use this website because i’m scared something i wrote on my blog when i was a teenager desperately trying to process having untreated early-onset schizophrenia is going to show up on my dashboard as a creepy “weird internet” relic, as if people like us aren’t still using the internet, seeing those things get tossed around like jokes or bad creepypastas.
i can’t look at posts like these without thinking about who the people that made them originally are, where they are now, and if they’re safe, and it’s really unnerving that this doesn’t seem to be the case for a lot of people. apparently, there are psychotic people who are deserving of respect, empathy and compassion, and then there are funny, crazy, weirdos who are fine to poke fun at or treat like horror movie monsters in the making. there are people on the “schizo-spectrum” who are human beings, and there are lunatics and dangerous psychos and the type of people who yell nonsense on busses and street corners. and that isn’t new, treating schizophrenic people like literal demons or prophets or scientific experiments isn’t new. it’s something that’s happened to us since before joan of arc was burned alive, it’s something that keeps people who are suffering from getting the help they need, and it’s something that gets psychotic people murdered by their families to this day.
i understand that lots of genuinely schizophrenic or psychotic people reblog posts like this too as a way of aestheticizing their own lives and feelings, and i absolutely ever have, but i’m stopping. this type of stuff can’t just be “fun” for me, and i think that’s probably the case for a lot of other people too. following blogs like this is a shitty coping mechanism the same way following gore/self-harm/pro anorexia blogs is. frankly put, it makes my symptoms worse, it makes me feel like a freak, and it makes me feel like everyone else reblogging these posts feels that way about me too.
i would encourage everyone, no matter who they are, to re-evaluate their relationships with content like this. i’m by no means saying we all need to stop watching the x-files or blogging about cryptids and ghosts, i love that stuff a lot and i think it’s very possible to engage with those topics in a completely fine way. but this is a really insensitive, dehumanizing, and unsympathetic way of treating people, it’s disrespectful of the actual human beings who are like this because of who they are and it’s alienating and unhealthy for the people like them who see it. i want everyone to remember that schizophrenic people are real, we’re on this website and out in the real world, and you need to take that into consideration if you ever want to contribute to making the world safer for people with mental illnesses.
