This is how a Canadian show saved my life. Degrassi was one of the many, many shows I wasn’t allowed to watch. I also wasn’t allowed to go to movie theaters, not even to watch Winnie the fucking Pooh Bear. So because I knew my parents were simply wrong on that account, I decided I should throw out all the other rules too. Degrassi was on TeenNick so I saw all the commercial while watching regular Nick shows (also wasn’t allowed to watch Spongebob or Drake & Josh). So yeah, if case you didn’t know Degrassi is basically a high school soap drama, but shows real life problems and situations. It’s not Disneyfied to always have a magical happy ending. There’s a school shooting. Someone dies. The school mourns and it shows every stage of grief. A girl gets pregnant. We watch her struggle between choosing to keep the baby or have an abortion and how her friends and family react. So it is pretty hard to find a tv character that you can relate to 100%, but with so many characters I was able to relate to a few different characters that covered all my major bases. There were two bases that were not covered anywhere else in my limited knowledge of the whole world. One, there was a gay guy. Now days that’s not a huge surprise. Maybe not on Disney channel, but most shows now have at least one token gay character. Even Friends had a Lesbian wedding. But here was a gay guy about my age who struggled with coming out. His parents were homophobic. They kicked him out when they found out he was gay. I had that fear from the beginning. So that meant a lot to me to see someone facing the same real world shit I was dealing with. And they even follow his story with the all the normal struggles of dating. The same things you see on every show with straight people. It’s really not that different. It was refreshing to see that I have a chance at finding love and all its pain and suffering just like everyone else.
The second and more time sensitive and extremely controversial thing was seeing someone on screen self-harm. I hadn’t tried that yet.
The second and more time sensitive and extremely controversial thing was seeing someone on screen self-harm. I hadn’t tried that yet.
