I Don’t NEED a Safe Space Because I Am My Own Safe Space

And here’s why you should become yours

I’ve been chatting a little with two younger writers on the platform. I know y’all are unaware of my age but take my word for it. An extensive nano-second long glance at their profiles revealed their youth or superb skin routines. If you’re looking for an approximate age for me then consider researching the etymology of my favourite insult, ‘Thundercunts’.

Or to say it in full…. ‘Thunder… Thunder…Thunder…Thundercunts! Ho!’

These two young writers write very well, they’re able to chip in on my comment wall with reckless abandon… but both have confessed a hesitation about firing their own thoughts out into the world in articles, or experience a little hesitation about taking big writers to task.

It’s why I want to talk about the perils of omnivision and why the only valid safe space is the self.

What the hell is Omnivision?

Omnivision, a word I happily invented for the purposes of this article, is the tendency of people below a certain age to view themselves through the lens of everyone else. I’d say that age is somewhere around thirty and coincides neatly with people hitting their teen years as social media took off.

The teen years are pretty important for self-development. You move away from your family, slam doors and get spots. You become simultaneously self-aware at all times yet predisposed to only shout intimate conversations on public transport.

Some people discover alcohol, misbehaving and interesting things to do with subcutaneous fat. Sometimes genitals get damp. This is all frightfully embarrassing at the time.

Now imagine you’re doing this but you’re the first generation of people to jack up your input to eleven. You are now getting information about what everyone thinks about everything at all times. You are growing up bathed in the batshit musings of people your own age.

Given the high stakes drama of being a teen, you now have to factor in what every single person thinks about every single thing you put out into the world. What’s worse is you’ve got nobody older to help.

If you’re wondering why we’ve got a generation of young people in the workforce with anxiety, I reckon that’s a good place to start. It’s the sort of mystery doctors in the 1970s faced when getting lung cancer became all the rage.

Could it have been related to giving cigarettes to kids twelve seconds after they learned to talk? Convinced those might be related? Twiddle your moustache like a Belgian, you nailed it you absolute champion.

Into the latter end of this generation, we inserted new social media platforms with a heavy focus on aesthetics. Nothing in the average teen psyche is prepared to see two or three thousand pictures of yourself a day. Want to fast-track eating disorders, body dysmorphia and plummeting self-esteem? That’s how you do it.

And now, for the love of fuck, we’ve added Tik-Tok. Teenagers announcing their self-diagnosed mental health issues like superheroes. That’s right, there’s widespread faking of Tourettes Syndrome, self-reported Multiple Personality Disorder (or Dissociative Identity Disorder) and depression/anxiety are the minimum entry requirements for inclusion.

Mental health issues are now a badge of honour from which to speak at the pulpit of victimhood. If you haven’t suffered you aren’t relevant. You cannot opine on any subject until your credentials have been checked in a wave of faux-empathy.

In four or five years these are the writers who will arrive fresh-faced on Medium and psychologically implode.

The safe space

When your entire scope of ‘whose opinion matters’ consists of the observable universe then you’re not going to be able to write. Period. One comment I get with alarming regularity about my work is ‘brave’. I don’t mind the comment, it fluffs my little feathers up. But it’s alarming and here’s why.

If my writing is brave then we have really lowered the standard for bravery.

If we’re going to hand out medals for bravery in the modern world, it needs to be people throwing themselves into burning buildings to rescue kittens. It needs to be that French guy climbing the walls of that apartment to rescue a dangling toddler. It needs to be children overcoming cancer. Doctors going into front line work during a pandemic.

Not brave, just opinionated. And I’ve got a safe space.

I am my own safe space. It sounds somewhat glib but it isn’t. I am the only safe space I know. What happened with many young people brought up on a diet of social media is that they beelined into chatrooms with people who agreed with them. Consensus was always better than conflict. Online conflicts often escalate amongst teenagers and sometimes into life and death.

Again, I’m not glib. I’ve worked in spaces where teen suicides because of social media have happened. I have read the reviews. Blame is diffused between hundreds of young people who oftentimes lack the psychological capacity to understand — but it’ll stay there buried in their psyche. Nobody means to bully someone else to death but it happens.

So to avoid conflict, consensus must be found … and consensus bred the safe space.

If everyone in a space agrees with each other then we can ban particular subjects and people from being in the space. This is great for things like domestic abuse shelters and emergency foster placements but less of an adaptive long term strategy for the general population.

A safe space that includes other people is inherently flawed. It has a membership. Everyone must watch everyone else and the rules must be codified, everyone must be guarded against everyone else. A safe space is only as safe as the people in it. Sometimes safe spaces are like getting in an elevator with a viper.

A safe space of one is simpler.

I am my own safe space. I feel perfectly happy with what I write and I don’t think of my work as controversial. They’re my thoughts. If people read my articles and are offended by them (and many people are), they can carry that burden around with them for the rest of the day. It’s not really any of my business.

I didn’t set out to be offensive and I don’t really care all that much if people are offended.

And in the nicest possible way, I don’t really care all that much what other people’s opinions are. Agree, disagree, as long as we’re civil it doesn’t impact my day all that much. Uncivil people low on intelligent input and high in unthinking abuse often get turned into their own whack-a-woke articles… I’ve monetised mild irritation to work in my favour.

And so I am my safe space of one.

If I spent my day worrying about what I might be cancelled for or who might get upset about my writing, I’d never get anything done. I’d drown in the lake of hesitancy. As my dance teacher told me, it’s better to be loud proud and wrong than unsure and hesitant.

And as a metaphor, that’s pretty apt. I’ve taught kids who were loud, proud, and wrong and often they make the other twenty kids look like they mucked up the choreography.

So, writers young and old, dance to the beat of your own drum, say what you think, not what you think other people want you to think.

I don’t want to live in a world where everyone is a digital Jeremy Bentham devotee. There is nothing inherently brave about saying what you think unless you live in a tyrannical regime… and I’m reliably informed we live in a liberal democracy. If it’s sliding towards tyranny by the masses for the masses then there might be a moral obligation on all of us to stop it.

I think there is. That’s not brave, that’s an act of self preservation for democratic principles. If you are afraid to speak out and say what you really want to say then what does that mean for wider society. There are two options.

You’ve got shit people around you who run an unenforceable social contract to which you must adhere OR it’s all in your head. I think it’s a bit of both and would heavily advocate questioning your social circle or getting some CBT.

Make yourself bulletproof, turn yourself into a safe space of one and get out into the world like the opinionated badasses you are and we need.

Here’s some more of my work with a social media and psychology focus.