How Animation Distracted Me from My Mental Health
For the longest time, I thought myself to be fairly normal. I liked sticking out occasionally, since sticking out meant being special and different, which I thought was terribly attractive even as a four-year-old, but otherwise I considered myself as a regular child. This kind of thinking lent itself to another reason behind my obliviousness to my condition, which wasn’t extreme, but was still something off that most people could tell and be bothered about. My parents often brushed off how I acted as child-like behavior, just a “kid being a kid,” and nothing more. I didn’t interact with others well? I was shy. I was very focused and controlling over the situations that I imagined and played by myself? I had a very vivid imagination. I didn’t pay attention well if it didn’t interest me and would find other things to entertain me? I was resourceful and smart. In my parents’ eyes, I was healthy, growing properly, and I didn’t exhibit any symptoms of any big mental illnesses that my parents could tell, and that meant I was the perfect child.
As I grew older, however, when the behavior didn’t go away and my parents continued to write my mannerisms off as little quirks, I assumed that my behavior was okay. Television only enforced this, as when I would consult cartoons, the way I functioned was perfectly normal. (To specify, I was not emulating the cartoon characters, but the characteristics they exhibited often simply made me believe that that was what everybody else was like.) These animated shows were also one of the few things that held my attention: though my mom taught me to enjoy solving puzzles and reading from a young age, watching the bright and quirky animation was far easier than either activity, and as something that didn’t require me constantly asking questions on how to pronounce a word or fit a puzzle piece, my parents usually didn’t have much problem with me watching television so regularly. They had me watch relatively educational content, anyways, so it was good that I learned something from the shows I watched without them having to go through the tedious lectures on explaining why certain things were bad, how certain things were wrong, when it was necessary to restrain from doing certain things. However, there were unintended side effects that occurred from me watching cartoons.
When I started attending school and people started noting that I behaved differently, I occasionally felt embarrassed and self-conscious, but instead of asking my parents if I were normal (which probably wouldn’t have done much: they probably would give me the same “you’re normal in your own way” spiel), I simply asked myself if I cared. I would think of how the people I cared about, my friends and family, didn’t care about the way I acted: this reasoning made it so that I ignored the problems in my behavior. If it wasn’t hindering anyone else but myself, and barely doing that, I didn’t feel there was a need to do anything about it. The problem was, due to people nitpicking my mannerisms, I distanced myself from my classmates, finding it better to interact solely with adults and close friends. This isolation from others resulted in heightening my mental illness though, as it furthered my strange habits and seemingly inexplicable hindrances. I refused to bother understanding why I contrasted so much with my peers: it was simply a thing that occurred, I didn’t need to explain it. I had my friends, my family… and most importantly, my biggest distraction, cartoons.
Although most children’s cartoons that I watched were generally normal and were good role models for me to mimic (nickjr was a favorite of my parents, as it taught relatively educational material like counting and reading, as well as morals and good behavior vs bad behavior), there were some cartoon characters that were not as good role models. For example, though Spongebob Squarepants was a fun show to watch, the way that it demonstrated Spongebob’s sporadic nature, habit of continuously talking with almost no heed to other characters, and always being in the center of attention, as something nobody criticized influenced how I viewed my own sporadic nature and habit of continuously talking over others to fight for attention. Similarly, another character from a different cartoon also showed my actions to be normal: Robin from Teen Titans. Though it inevitably did show him interacting with others as an example of learning teamwork and cooperation, he had a small group of people he relied on, and initially he struggled to work with others. This misdirected me quite a bit, since this taught me a bit backwardly that it was okay for me to be by myself if I occasionally worked with a select few that I determined as close to me. A third big influence on the way I acted was Lilo from Lilo and Stitch: being able to relate to her as a young, islander girl without many friends who concentrated on her imagination and helping other people, there was good reasoning behind why I emulated Lilo. The one problem that derived from this was the fact that it emphasized on how I interacted with others, as though I would try to apply advice that would help others like Lilo did, it often did not come across the way that she did so, seeming to others as more judgmental and disapproving rather than helpful and supportive. This led to me isolating myself and preferring to play by myself than with others, who didn’t listen to how I thought they could improve on how we played.
Collectively, though these cartoons did somewhat hinder me through encouraging undesirable traits, at the same time, they acted as a source of comfort for me. When I found myself feeling upset or sad, I would seek solace in cartoons, which actually benefited me by helping my imagination flourish and inevitably affecting me by developing my love of drawing. In also being responsible for making me feel normal in a world where people continuously nitpicked my behavior, I might have grown up much more paranoid about myself had I not had the reassurance I derived from the shows I watched. Also, these cartoons did teach me actual lessons that I applied to real life situations, which allowed me to analyze people’s behavior and understand interactions from an outside perspective - a very useful habit that I have used countless times through life. Though there were some drawbacks with the miscellaneous effects these animated shows had on me, I believe that the cost did not outweigh the applications it had on my life growing up.
Generally, however, I do not tell this story as entertainment or a ploy for sympathy: I tell this story to spread awareness about how mental health is difficult to identify, but should be checked if one or someone close is exhibiting signs that they are struggling in any way. As somewhat of a cautionary tale of how to avoid growing up in a fairly difficult childhood, I ask the reader to understand the difficulties of mental health and watch their loved ones carefully. One never knows when they could avoid a lot of trouble.
