Hello!
I hope everyone is having a wonderful holiday season. This is a time to reflect on the past year that we have created for ourselves. I tell my kids every day, " you are the only one responsible for your happiness." I often have to remind myself of this truth when people leave mean comments on social media or there is drama on the site.
Unfortunately there has been quite a bit of both lately. I want to take this as an opportunity to learn and move forward stronger as individuals and as a community. We all make mistakes, are sometimes rude, and have bad days that lead us to act in ways that we are not proud of. It is how we handle our mistakes that define our unique character.
I want to use this moment to reaffirm what makes this place so special. SG celebrates individuality but we also command respect, self respect, respect for others but most certainly respect from our fellow SuicideGirls. We firmly believe what makes us unique is what makes us beautiful, inside and out and we celebrate that in one another. The SuicideGirls website is a moderated community, a place where we understand that not everyone gets along but we expect respectful disagreements. A friend once told me that you can't take back what you say, you can move on from it and ask for forgiveness but you can't take it back. It has made me think before I speak to everyone.
I wish that courtesy extended to the rules of social media but they don't. Trolling is ubiquitous. If we delete one asshat remark there are 10 that rise up to replace them. It is a bit like kicking the hornets nest, stirs up the whole hive of negative posters and often deleting one post can drum up 10 x - 100 x the negativity and any intervention on our part can make things worse. I totally wish there was something more that we could do but unfortunately we do not control facebook or instagram and have no say in users saying outrageously offensive things. Hopefully the social media scape will change one day and people will be civil to one another, but that might be wishful thinking as people can not even be civil to one another in person these days.
I am consistently overwhelmed with gratitude for all that I have been able to experience because of the amazing members of this community. Every day I see people opening up and being vulnerable in their blogs and the groups, respecting themselves while supporting one another, and learning to love themselves a little more. I hope we can continue to make a concerted effort to maintain this site as a place of respect, where people can have open discourse about heated topics, where women can share nude images of themselves and be celebrated, not brought down by asshat comments.
Let's all try to be a bit more kind and thoughtful with our words in 2019!
xoxo
-missy
