After witnessing so much craze on internet about Shane Dawson’s 5 episodes long docu-series on Jeffree Star I was wondering that this must be another internet drama.
I do watch Shane Dawson’s for some time now. I am not a die hard fan of him but some of his work has made me come back to his channel for more. I am not into those conspiracy theories people are crazy about but I love his personality and weird sense of humor.
Last time he made something like this docu-series just after failure of Tanacon. Those of you don’t know… Tana Mongeau is a YouTuber and YouTubers have this meet and greet program called VidCon which is arranged by YouTube. For some reason Tana was banned from coming to VidCon. Tana’s idea was to host a similar meet and greet with fans at the same time of VidCon just to show how well she was doing without VidCon. Eventually TanaCon ended up being a disaster and created lot of controversy. The event got cancelled, all the fans were angry and sad and everybody was ranting on internet. Everybody was analyzing it and giving their opinion… Shane made his 3 episode long docu-series, “The truth about TanaCon” to make an unbiased attempt to show both side of the coin.
I don’t know what triggered him this time to make something similar but bigger… “The Secret Life of Jeffree Star”. Even though I do watch YouTube for ungodly amount of time, I do not watch anything from beauty-communities. That must justify why I hadn’t watched any of his videos before.
The good portion of the complete series contains Shane dressing up like him, going to his house, talking to him. Jeffree’s rich and fancy life, I almost felt like unreal. At first it seemed like a first-world thing that I can’t relate to, I stopped watching the series in the midway. Almost a week later I watched the final episode(which had 2 parts).
What I understood just from watching the videos, Jeffree is a beauty-guru, a YouTuber, he owns a cosmetics company. He was famous in My Space time and somehow his life turned upside down. Everything changed in his life, he went through a really dark time and a lot of struggles.
“But we came here for some juicy gossip and conspiracy theory… Don’t bore us with this boring dark depressing shit!”
“No, honey. Life is not about just the juicy gossips. Sometimes you have to hear other’s problem, even though you are not going through the same, even though you may not be able to relate to it.”
So I am here sharing my take-away from the “Secret Life of Jeffree Star”…
In the final epi Jeffree talked about the darkest period of his life. He was addicted to self-harm, his body was full of scars, he later covered his full body with tattoos in order to hide them. It must have taken a lot of courage to unravel that part of his life. He didn’t share his pain with anyone and nobody really asked him. You may know a sister/ a brother/ a friend/ a family member/ a colleague… who is going through a tough time, go talk to them, take help from professional, help them to come back from darkness.
You may face such difficulties as, the victim doesn’t want to share his/her problems, he/she is treating badly with you, he/she wants to push you away. It’s easy to get pushed away but think like, you have a opportunity to save life if and only if you take a stand. Depression and self harm is not different drowning in the sea, except the fact that the death/destruction is slow.
After this series got overwhelming response from people, Jeffree later in his channel posted another video where he shared few more things of his life. One of the things was about his mother. He didn’t have good relationship with his mom and stopped talking to her. After a long time when he finally managed to call her, he found that his mother lost her house and everything, she had been compelled to live on the roads.
The pain Jeffree or his mother went through is unfathomable but it got me thinking about my parents. Sometimes I have fight with my parents, sometimes there’s so much stress that I kind of shut my self off from the people, even from my parents. Some arguments get more intense than the others and days pass without talking to them. Sometimes I feel like I cannot family dramas any more. But at the end of the day, they are my parents, my life-line. May the day never come when I forget about checking on my parents.
One more thing was how Jeffree got into trouble for saying vile things to people who were saying vile things to him. Very often we do that. That’s a very common defense mechanism we all have. But once you say the words/hit back bully that gets counted as crime too. You cannot fight hate with hate. I wouldn’t say what would be the best thing to fight the bully but don’t get down to their level so that people can’t differentiate you from them.
This is just a little part of the series and my thoughts on it. Do check out the original videos(on Shane’s channel), it’s mostly entertaining. I must say, Shane and Jeffree both are benefited from the series, there must be a lot of people who would check out their individual channels and may turn into fans.
Years after writing this, Shane and Jeffree may or may not stay relevant but depression is real, mental health is real. Let’s take the opportunity to save our dear ones and also ourselves from the dark times.
That’s all folks! Thanks for reading.
Featured Image Credit : Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash
