(also, I put this here because I don’t really want to get jumped on so much?)
I hate resumes. Hate. White-knuckled, hands-starting-to-shake, attack-bystanders-with-a-razor-blade hate.
No, I don’t mean the things you hand out to find a job, though I’m not mad fond of those, either. (I wish mine was a bit better, unemployed slob that I am.)
No, when I say resumes, I mean trauma resumes. What a weird thing to get mad about, right? The hell is a trauma resume? Let me start from the top.
Some yonks ago, I was a casual member of an online blog-group that I don’t care to link to, though it was an offshoot of a very successful one-man blog show that I still follow. It was, for want of a better word, extremely touchy-feely. It would link to people saying things like, ‘don’t forget that you are loved,’ and ‘we must hold together in the face of kyriarchial oppression,’ and ‘c-sections are another way that the system tries to control women’ and ‘these are the signs of shapist oppression’ and ‘Sucker Punch was a very empowering movie and men just don’t understand’ and ‘westerners practicing yoga is just another form of cultural imperialism.’ That sort of thing. Hugs and kisses and people going {{{{{{Username}}}}} and putting Trigger Warnings on everything.
(Ohh, don’t even get me goddamned started on those ruddy Trigger Warnings…)
But I digress. What this amounted to, for the most part, was a support group. As a man with no small amount of rancid brain-garbage, I was looking for that. I wanted a place where I could anonymously go monkey-fuck and people would say, ‘there there, SBP, it must have been very hard for you. You’re a real trooper.’ That sort of nonsense.
But no. To get to that golden land of lovebombs, you had to get some cred first. What do I mean by ‘cred?’ I mean, you can’t just rock up and say ‘I live in anguish and can’t seem to find a cause for it.’ You can’t just say ‘my parents didn’t give me the attention that I seemed to have needed.’ You can’t just say ‘hey, I got picked on all the time as a kid because I was… I dunno, kinda nerdy.’
No. To get admission to the exclusive club of People Who Have Real Problems (and, thusly, People Who Have Earned Moral Authority Thereform), you have to have some real deep Lifetime-movie shit in your past. Getting beat up every day by your papa, getting touched up every day by your step-papa, people throwing rocks at you and calling you a faggot… pathos! It sells! Even if you just get this stuff by proxy, that’s good enough - so long as you can touch the livewire of true anguish. And this attitude sickens me.
You know why? Because if you have regular access to a computer such that you can type out people’s names with lots of goddamn brackets around them, then you are in the top 80% of the human race, easy. I would rather be any person in the United States - no, straight up shit forward, I would rather be any human being in the United States, regardless of how lowly or put upon or how many Bloody Maries they can make out of their lonely tears every day, then work in a Congolese copper mine or drag a barge up the Mekong River or work as a porter in Karachi. If you can get 1,500 calories in your stomach a day, then you’re a member of the upper crust of the human race, and I strongly urge some tupping perspective when it comes to your mental anguish!
But you know what? That’s not the important thing. The important thing is that there is always someone out there, living in the mass writhing squalor of man’s inhumanity to man and the obsolescence of the human being, who has it worse. Even now, EVEN NOW, those porters in Karachi are telling each other, man, you don’t know how good you got it, we could be up in Afghanistan farming opium at gunpoint and we couldn’t even get out of the rain.
I don’t know how to end this rant, despite my best efforts. But I’m sick of the idea that only people with attractively dramatic problems are worthy of respect and sympathy. I really am.