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Wibta for writing my friend a letter rather than talking to her in person?
Tw, self harm.
So I (21f) have a friend who we'll call Button (20f) who I have been good friends with since we were 7. Button is a lovely person but unfortunately she suffers with a lot of mental and physical health issues. Due to some issues that happened when we were teenagers, which I won't get into, Button ended up cutting off all of her friends besides me and our other friend Sock (21f). Because of said mental health issues, Button has become extremely clingy and controlling over me and Sock as her friends. She's had break downs over us doing perfectly innocuous things (e.g., unexpectedly running into each other and deciding to get coffee together without her) and these breakdowns have involved self harm.
Button has recently been trying to make some new friends and has not been successful. The problem is that because she has been really isolated for a long time she doesn't know how to talk to people, and she's autistic which adds to her problems connecting with people. The ways that she has been going about trying to get close to people have been really counterproductive and have ended up pushing people away from her, e.g., starting conversations with people shes never met before with extremely traumatic stories and not recognising that people are uncomfortable so she just keeps going and going, and social media stalking. She would be a lot more successful making friends if she didn't do those things, she is a genuine, funny, brilliant person when you get to know her, but she's inadvertently scaring people off from ever getting close enough to her to know that.
The problem is that she takes even the most gentle criticism extremely poorly. I want her to be happy, and I know what some of the problems are and we can work to resolve them together, but we can't do that if she doesn't know what they are. I've tried to talk to her in person about stuff before and she just started hysterically scream-crying and I never actually got to the core issue I wanted to discuss to begin with. I know if we have this discussion in person I will not get to say everything that needs to be said. Hence the idea for a letter. However, I'm worried this will set off another self harm episode if she thinks I'm writing her a letter because I hate her or something (which I truly do not, I'm really scared for her). If I talk to her in person then at least I will be there to deal with the fallout rather than have her be alone for it. If I leave it and don't talk to her she's going to continue to make the same mistakes with people and continue not to make friends and spiral further into self loathing over it, but I don't know if me considering writing a letter about it is a cowardly way of dealing with this situation on my end?
AITA for telling my friends I want to use they/them pronouns for a bad reason?
I (19F) am 100% a cis girl, but never really felt like I was "allowed" to be girly or feminine because of a lot of internal and external sexism and misogyny in my house growing up. No one ever really acknowledged the fact that I was a girl, unless it was in a negative sense. I was also homeschooled, so that made things worse because limited social interaction and stuff.
Now that I'm older and have a lot more connection with people through the internet, I'm a lot more comfortable with my identity and genuinely love being perceived as a girl. I understand the gender euphoria trans people feel when someone uses she/her pronouns for me. I also feel a hint of disappointment when people I don't know use they/them for me online (e.g. "prev knows their stuff").
With context out of the way, what actually happened was a few weeks ago. I went through a depressive episode, which came with the usual feelings of not ever deserving good things in life or happiness of any kind, and that no one cared/should care about me. As part of that, I withdrew from my friends for a couple days, leaving our discord server and blocking all of them (I know I shouldn't have done that, we worked it out). When I finally returned, I told them in vague terms that things were rough, I was a mess, and I wanted to start using they/them. I'm the only cis person in the group of 8 people so no one batted an eye about my request and just went along with it.
Here's where I might be the ah: the only reason I asked that is because I thought I didn't deserve to feel good about myself in any way, including my gender. My friends don't know I was asking them for help in basically punishing myself. I know if they'd known they would never go along with it. I also feel like an ah for using my privilege of being cis and having accepting friends to punish myself when there's real people in the world suffering because people refuse to gender them correctly.
Additional details that might be relevant: my friends are great, we met online about two years ago in a bigger server and grew closer and made our own small server not too long after. They know about my mental health issues and have helped me a lot. Almost everyone I know irl is transphobic and homophobic, so my reference for what is offensive and what isn't is kinda off. I still live with my family and they're by no means bad people. I'm also in the process of finding a therapist.
Remember when cas died and sam was like I have to give dean Special Little Treats so he won’t kill himself and dean was like why are you giving me Special Little Treats and sam was like ah ! So that you won’t kill yourself because cas is dead. Would you like a Breakfast beer?