By Joshua Chen
Back in 2019 I auditioned for the Southern California Vocal Association (SCVA) Honor Choir. It was a popular auditioned choir with children trying out from all parts of the Southern California region. Of the 614 that auditioned for it, only around 50% got in, so getting in kind of felt like I had been accepted into a secret club of some sort. Yes, a secret club of nerds, but a secret club nonetheless. But to be a part of the final roster that performed in front of the audience, the SCVA gave us all music to learn and perform to the judges with an octet. It wasn’t particularly hard, and you just had to learn the music, not know the fundamentals and the breathing patterns, but needless to say everyone was feeling the pressure.
I passed. But not everyone did.
It shouldn’t be that big of a deal. To even make it here, into the octets, is a feat. You made it past 50 percent of the people. You got here already, your nerves were just on fire or you just needed to clean out some stuff, et cetera et cetera.
Anxiety is… something else. One day you’ll be fine, the other you’ll feel the pressure of so many eyes on you, the embarrassment of failure while your peers are watching. It’s not just about the honor choir for you, now it becomes about your pride. You want to prove yourself, and perhaps you’ve spent weeks training it, but when the moment comes and the words won’t come out, and you start sweating, it’s suffocating.
And that’s exactly what happened to an unlucky auditionee.
He fainted.
And my schoolmates laughed.
A kid who fainted under the unbearable pressure, a kid with obvious mental health issues, who probably wanted to prove something, and now the people that he cared about, the people who he wanted to impress were now laughing at him.
Am I wrong for assuming the worst? Perhaps I’m exaggerating by saying him fainting is put there by the pressure he puts on himself. Maybe he wasn’t a human after all and instead a robot who doesn’t feel emotions and only fainted to garner sympathy toward him.
This keeps on happening. Back in late 2019 we mocked and laughed at popular streamer and Youtube star Desmond Daniel Amofah for faking his obvious mental illness, even going as far as to encourage him to actually do it. That man is now at the bottom of the Brooklyn Bridge. Just 2 weeks ago we lost another brilliant man and twitch streamer, Byron “Reckful” Bernstein to suicide, the replies egging him on. If you take a look at his past broadcast’s chat history, you’d find over 5000 comments telling him to kill himself, even after begging his viewers to stop.
It’s not only for influencers, too. Last year a 16 year old Malaysian girl ran a poll on whether to kill herself. 69% of the respondents voted yes, and so she ended her own life.
Is it just me, or do we need to actually stand up for the people who need us? Don’t we as humans need to be there for people as a friend instead of egging people to kill themselves? Maybe we need to make sure that they know that we understand them and that help is close by instead of laughing at their face and making them feel less than they actually are. Maybe that way we can actually do something and make someone’s life even a little bit better instead of adding another number to the suicide counter for 2020.
The experience affected me hard. Although I barely knew the kid, a lot of the things that he had to go through I saw in myself. I saw the need to please people and to impress them. I felt the pressure in him and when he fainted I felt the inescapable pang of failure again, the inescapable pain that followed. I felt it like it was mine, and in a way, it was. I know what that feeling was like, like when the world’s watching, all your practice and training has come down to this but then when the time comes you freeze. You wanted so hard just to be good and tell them that you’re not what they think you are but when you do you completely shut down. It hurts, because I know that when I look back and the roles had been switched, had I been the kid who fainted, they would still laugh.
It makes me angry every time I think about it. My entire life I feel that I have been trying to offer up support to the outcasts. I don’t want anyone to be left out. I’ve seen the countless avoidable deaths from celebrities and regular people. I’ve seen person after person be neglected for life, and I don’t want anybody to be like that. So I try and treat them well and be a little more sensitive, and the biggest frustration is that people just take that and throw it out the window like it’s nothing. They laugh at the mentally damaged person. They turn a blind eye to the person wanting to commit suicide. They’re not there when someone needs it. And so I’m the one who needs to clean up the mess that THEY made while they sit in their thrones of self confidence and bliss, surrounded by the house of friends, ignorant to the terrible things that they’ve done.
Maybe I’m judging people a little too harshly. Maybe I should know better and know that everyone’s human, and everyone makes mistakes. But when mistakes start actively hurting people’s mental state, when it turns to laughing at someone with mental health issues and making that person feel worse than it already is, maybe we should be more careful with our “mistakes”? Because these mistakes aren’t small anymore. When multiple people start feeling the need to hurt themselves over a stupid event or a bad opinion, we’re doing something terribly wrong.
A person’s insensitivity doesn’t get as bad as on the internet. It connects the world on an unprecedented level, where sending emails and trying to figure out the recipe to a chocolate cake takes milliseconds. But on the flip side of the coin it’s not real. Every email is just letters on a computer screen, and as much as you’d like to, you really can’t relate to someone’s profile picture and the words they write as if they were next to you. Here, you feel powerful. Here, you can say whatever you want. And so when that popular streaming star has the AUDACITY to say his/her own OPINION, you won’t hesitate to give him/her hell.
It shouldn’t be this way. In this internet era of outrage, we tell the people that have differing opinions than ours that they’re stupid and that their opinion is wrong while throwing a slew of personal insults at them. We actively try and insult them, and when they don’t change their mind we call them racist or misogynistic. Imagine how more effective it would be if we shared our opinions, instead of yelling at people that they’re stupid, tell them why you think they’re wrong and have them tell you why they think you’re wrong and creating new ideas.
The words “Free Speech” is sometimes thrown out as a justification for destructive criticism. I hear that freedom of speech means that your opinion can be subject to criticism. But freedom of speech never meant for you to send death threats to a person for having a bad opinion. It never meant for you to tell the person that they’re a terrible and racist person. Freedom of speech meant freedom of opinion. It was intended as the collaboration of opinions to reach a higher level of thinking.
In our race to prove that our opinions are more right than the other, arguments and debates have become a zero-sum game. If my opinion is right then your opinion must be wrong. The truth is actually more in the middle. There is always room for different opinions. When you sit down and talk about it, you might even be surprised at how similar your opinions are.
We need to stop promoting hatred. Every time you angrily lash out at someone over the internet a part of them feels an empty pit in their stomach open up more. Now imagine that pressure but with the entire world coming after you.
Let’s instead promote kindness. Let’s promote change. Instead of telling someone to go kill themselves let’s focus on why they feel that way and putting your own argument out there in the best possible way. Talk to each other and reach a higher understanding on, well, life in general.
Do it for the boy that fainted.
Do it for Etika, who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge.
Do it for Reckful, who was constantly egged on to kill himself on twitch.
Do it for the girl who killed herself over an instagram poll.
Do it for the 800,000 people that kill themselves every year.
Do it for the world. Let’s stop this zero — sum war that people wage against each other every year.
Let’s make the world a better place.
