Goodbye Lindsay

People like to say that we can’t change what happens to us, and that we can only control how we respond to it.

Bullshit.

Human beings are animals, and our emotional brains are highly adept at influencing us, while our intellectual reasoning often bends to the will of our emotions. There is no action without emotional response: indeed, even the ability to resist our initial urge is an emotional response to a response.

A person cannot control whether or not they ‘shit blood’ or whether they become a ‘ghost’ in response to trauma.

It’s infuriating that the very people who need to read Lindsay’s words in her Goodbye letter to YouTube are the ones who laugh and loudly proclaim that they won’t waste their time on her. Of course, they will read it privately, but they’ll make an obnoxious show of ignoring it.

Despite disavowing parasocial relationships in general, it’s impossible to read Lindsay’s words and not worry for her safety. We all understand that not truly knowing a famous person doesn’t change the way we feel about them. In some ways, our relationships to figures like Lindsay Ellis feel just as real as those we form with people in our real lives, if for no other reason than interpersonal relationships can feel distant too: most relationships have a parasocial element.