sufjansontag:

sufjansontag:

i am so tired of radical vulnerability discourse that locates empowerment in divulging personal pain and i really worry about the implications of a young creative culture where your influence and your popularity and your follower count is implicitly tied to your willingness to talk about your personal trauma, your willingness to let thousands and thousands of strangers know what happened to you, your willingness to make your most private pain public. 

like i really worry that our culture is commodifying trauma? a band i really like, led by a young woman about my age, they released a song in early 2015 that was quite clearly about sexual assault. and it was a great song, and it earned a very deserved warm reception, but interviewers would persistently ask the lead singer if it was “a personal account,” and she would always say that it was an observation on rape culture and leave it at that. and then about a year later she released a personal essay saying that, yes, it was about her own experience of sexual assault, and then there was another wave of secondary clickbait-y thinkpieces congratulating her for being so brave and so open.

so we have a great song addressing sexual assault, which can more than stand on its own as a piece of art. and we have a young woman who, after a year of getting the same question from reporters, says, “i was raped; the song is about me.” and then we have another wave of reporters coming in to write identical stories repeating her words, calling her brave, and collecting ad revenue.

and that’s what i mean: for every act of personal disclosure of trauma, there is this weird media apparatus that feeds on publicizing that trauma and collecting fat stacks of ad money. publications are taking what might be an empowering process for some people and they’re incentivizing and monetizing public trauma disclosure. it’s deeply fucked up.

so like. you don’t owe the world the story of your trauma. you don’t need to make your grieving and healing a public process. you are not less courageous or less creative or less empowered because you choose to go through something privately. and you should be very wary of publications that traffic in underpaying marginalized young people to describe their trauma in detail. imo.

i wrote this post four years ago and apparently it’s been getting notes recently. the really disheartening thing is that this phenomenon has not only intensified in the years since i wrote it, but actually gotten worse. there is an expectation now that you must disclose your own personal history of trauma in order to make any art at all about trauma, or else be treated as a suspect interloper - e.g., wendy ortiz’s shameful false accusation of plagiarism against kate elizabeth russell, which ultimately forced russell to publicly disclose her own history of CSA. even the personal essay industrial complex at its mid-2010s peak was never so draconian. 

and, of course, when i wrote this post, i was talking about the phenomenon of “publications that traffic in underpaying marginalized young people to describe their trauma in detail.” a lot of these publications no longer exist, and the personal essay boom is no longer in full swing. which, regrettably, means that marginalized young people are now just expected to publicly disclose their trauma on social media without any compensation whatsoever in the service of dedication to some amorphous “movement.”

anyway. to reiterate. you do not owe thousands and thousands of strangers the story of your trauma. you are allowed to grieve and heal in private. you are not failing any movement if you choose to do this. if you do choose to make art about your trauma, you don’t owe anyone the “real story” behind your art. imo.