Calling the bluff

 For a year and a half, ending last winter, I was constantly going to wireclub.com to participate in their Canada Chat chatroom. My strategy for going in was to be an aggressive joker, working my way to the top in terms of respectability. My name reflected this mission, and for about six months, I was doing pretty well. The world of chatrooms, I believe, is a ruthless area where people can say whatever they want, their identities hidden. Knowing what I know now, socializing with strangers in a chatroom (over the internet) is kind of a fruitless endeavor. I stay away from that now.

I was relatively open with my life in this room, and faced all kinds of put-downs. There was one chatter there, by the name of JehrBear, who was pretty hardcore. This chatter would be in the room continuously, every day, until the wee hours. I lamented my plight of having mental health issues, and she would go and tell me that I needed to "unalive" myself. This situation shows you how "toxic" the community is, if you can call it a community. I view it as internet alter-egos.

In any case, I was mentioning to people how I was having suicidal ideation and thoughts, and despite all this, JehrBear would constantly tell me to kill myself. Using the term "unalive" was a way of circumventing the automatic moderators who would catch other more accurate terms to describe one taking their own life. I also heard things from this chatter, in a predatory tone, of stuff like "you are too fat to fit in your coffin". Being a vulnerable person and having been in the chat internet community for over a year, as well as having shared details about my life, the slams that this chatter issued (not only to me, by the way) triggered me.

Even if it is behind a cloak of anonymity, telling someone to kill themselves in a chatroom, repeatedly (especially to someone with mental health issues already) is a pretty sadistic and damaging thing to do. When you enter the chatroom, you are connecting with others, and oftentimes, you don't know their life story. So when I went in there and shared that I was suicidal, I wasn't expecting to be told I needed to end my own life by a random girl in her twenties, whose life is clearly wireclub. I share this as a story and as a way of getting something off my chest.