Therapy Tactics (self-harming) - How TV Saved Me: Don't try this at home (part 2)

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.

How TV Saved Me: Tune in to find out (part 1)

I always felt different. Too different. I had so many secrets but no one to share them with. No one I trusted. I don’t think I knew more than a hundred people until I left for NYC. I think I’ve more than tripled the number of Facebook friends in just these three or four years of college. So my only outlet pre-internet/social media boom, was tv shows. But back then they still didn’t have a lot a diversity. There was no one I could really relate to. So what I have to say in this post might sound completely stupid, but this is how TV saved my life.

So by now you know I was suicidal since I was about 11 and entering the 6th grade. TV was my life. The life I wanted. The life I couldn’t have. TV was my escape from this miserable reality. I still kept up with whatever superheroes shows were on. I think Teen Titans was still big and Smallville was in its prime. But I was also totally a Disney kid. If it was on Disney, I wanted to watch it. Same with Nickelodeon. I also watched a lot of (probably too much) detective murder mystery shows. Now like I said this was before Netflix had online streaming. You know when Blockbuster was still big (if you’re old enough to remember that; damn I’m getting old). Anyways you had to wait a week and stay tuned at that “same Bat-time” on that same “Bat-channel” if you wanted to see the next episode. If you missed it, that was it. You had to wait for the right re-run if you wanted to catch up (so archaic and medieval, right?). Before the DVR we used a VCR with tapes that you had to rewind to watch or else you’ll run out of tape, and then there was the danger of recording over something you haven’t watched yet.

Ok so here’s where you might start judging me.