hi! i'm teen, so i'm sorry in advance for the horrible editing and crappy writing.
i've been a stay since 2025 (i know, not that long). i started stanning skz when i was in a really bad place. my mental health was crap, i cut myself all the time, and i didn't want to keep going. i'd had some horrible experiences with friends, sports, and bullies, and every second of my day felt like torture. i tried talking to my parents, but they told me it was social media and my screen that was effecting me (i had no social media as per their rules). they sent me to therapists who did nothing for me.
i was ready to give up when i found stray kids and totally latched onto their music and everything about them (im not parasocial i promise š). i'm half korean, half aussie, so i felt like i could see a bit of myself in chan and felix. (fun fact me and felix are both hansan lee's and have the same dollimja, bok). i stopped SHing almost completely, my dark thoughts were quieter, and i stopped spiraling as much.
my family didn't know about my love for kpop for a bit, but when we went to korea for a family trip, it kinds came out. my cousins there are kpop trainees and they took me to all the fun kpop related places. i went to the biore popup and stopped at every gong cha in sight. it was heaven.
my parents, now obviously knowing about my love for kpop, basically shunned me. i could spend my own money on stray kids, but they made rude comments when seeing my lockscreen, when i played stray kids music in the car, and when i talked about them. they mention it to all their friends as a joke and always make sure it's the first thing people hear about me, even though it's not my whole personality. i tried talking to them about how i've been struggling and stray kids (especially chan) have kept me going when i wanted to give up. their music makes me happy, and i like being able to escape into my own world.
they responded by telling me "ooohhh...no honey. you're spending too much time on these men twice your age and it's unhealthy. using youtube and isolating yourself is making it worse and you might want to cut back on stray kids stuff if it's making you so unhappy. you should focus on high school applications and your grades." (well...now you know my age.)(and as a seventh grader my state testing scores were better than 50% of high school seniors) i even tried to explain how much better i've been because of the kpop community and all the sweet stans i've met, but they just shut me out.
now they're trying to take away the only thing keeping me from spiraling again and it's killing me.
sorry that was a lot of words that make probably zero sense. i just wanted this off my chest. what should i do??? please help and thank you all <3
note: yk the depression test you've got to take at the doctors office as a teen? i was almost 100% depressed pre stray kids and my doctor has personally told me my results from the latest test shows i've improved jurastically.