Chapter 14: The Price We Pay

After I had left that night, because I couldn’t stand to be in the same room with Senni and Samppa after everything, my classmates had called the police. But they had also been in touch with our journalism teacher at Fontys, Gie Meewuis, who was also our international coordinator at Fontys’ end. They told him what had happened but only their version of the story. That they were “so concerned.” That it was so bad they had to “call the police.”

I had been excluded, hurt, and made to feel unsafe in that hostel room so I did something that anyone would have done: I removed myself from a situation that was damaging to me. What else was I supposed to do? Sleep next to the people who had just emotionally devastated me? 

Instead of facing why I left  they flipped the script. They told Gie Meewuis a version of the story that erased my pain and centered their discomfort. Suddenly I wasn’t the one who had been harmed by lies, exclusion, and using systemic violence against meI was the one causing concern. And later when Gie Meewuis confronted me about the situation, he was angry at me. But not once did he ask me why I left. Not once did he ask what had happened. Just like that, my pain had disappeared from the story and all that remained was their fear, their version.

What they did is actually a known psychological phenomenon. It’s called gaslighting. And it’s even more manipulative when it’s done under the disguise of concern. Because when people frame our pain as their crisis, when they make our response to harm look like the harm itself, it becomes almost impossible to fight back. My pain, that Senni and Samppa had caused with their actions, was turned into a threat. It transformed my self-protecting act as instability. It erased my reality and replaced it with theirs. The “concern” was only to mask their deeper intent: to control the narrative about me now at the Fontys’ end. They had decided this is the only truth of what had happened, the only truth that deserved to be heard. When people said they were just worried, they didn’t know what else to do while never once asking what was done to me, or how I was feeling, it’s not concern. It’s gaslighting.  And What Senni and Samppa did to me was systemic gaslighting.

And then tell me, out of concern, did they go and tell the rest of our class in Finland, or wherever they were at the time, what had happened? They told our classmates, even though those people weren’t there, even though they had no role in the situation. Why? Was that concern too? What kind of “concern” spreads a private moment of pain and vulnerability to people across the continent, to those who weren’t even involved? What kind of “care” involves retelling a version of events that paints me as unstable or dangerous, while never once including what led me to walk out that night?

That’s not concern but social positioning. It's narrative control. It’s about making sure everyone “knows the story”, their story. The one where they’re the victims of someone too much, too intense, too unstable. The one where my pain becomes gossip, my self-protection becomes a scandal, and they become heroes for “handling” it.

If it were really about concern, they would have spoken to me. They would have asked me how I was doing. They would have included my reality in the story they told. But not once did they do that.

They didn’t want people to understand. What they wanted was backing, validation and sympathy. They were recruiting the rest of the class to view me through their lens, ensuring that wherever I turned next, I would already be branded. That’s not concern. That’s calculated exclusion. That’s how gaslighting spreads. That’s how social exile is engineered.

They might tell themselves things like: “We just wanted to make sure she’s okay.” “We were worried about her safety.” And my personal favorite: “It seemlike she is struggling with emotional regulation.” But let’s be honestmy problem wasn’t instability. My problem was being in a space that constantly disrespected me, misunderstood me, and isolated me. They framed my reactions as symptom. But what they were actually witnessing wasn’t mental illness but the cost of surviving chronic emotional harm. My sadness, my anger, my withdrawal, my protectiveness, none of them, weren’t signs of personal dysfunction. They were completely human responses to ongoing exclusion, microaggressions, and betrayal.

But framing my pain as a psychological problem served a purpose. Because if it was just my instability, then nobody had to look at their own behavior. 

Let me be clear about something here. Yes. I had depression. I’ve never hidden that. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I don’t blame my classmates for my depression. That was something I had already carried. It was part of my story even before Erasmus.

But what I do hold them accountable for is how they responded to me when I was vulnerable. What I do hold them accountable for is how they used that vulnerability against me. How they turned my emotions into a weapon, not to protect me, but to protect themselves from accountability.

My mental health didn’t cause the exclusion, the betrayal, or the silence. What happened was that their actions  - the microaggressions, the gaslighting, the isolation  magnified what was already difficult. They didn’t create the depression, but they poured fuel on it, and then they had the audacity to blame me for the fire.

There’s a difference between having a mental health condition and being harmed by people who exploit it to silence you. 

So yes, I had depression. But what I was reacting to wasn’t just internal. It was external. It was structural. It was interpersonal. It was real harm.

By medicalizing my reactions, they got to avoid responsibility. They turned a structural and relational problem  racism, queerphobia, social exclusion  - into an individual pathology. This is what I mean by  when I say they pathologized me. That’s how oppression protects itself. It doesn’t just hurt youit convinces everyone, including the one being harmed, that the pain is the real problem, not the oppression itself.

So, let us medicalize this now. But let’s do the story from my narrative, not theirs. 

Because there is a term for what I was going through. And it’s not “emotional dysregulation.”

It’s called minority stress.

Minority stress is the chronic psychological toll of living in a society  - and in a class setting  - where your identity is seen as less than, not seen, or not considered at all. It’s what happens  when a person is constantly navigating spaces that weren’t made for them. It is a form of chronic psychological stress experienced by people who belong to socially marginalized groups, and it’s not because of our identity itself, but because of how society treats that identity. This includes acts of discrimination, violence, exclusion, and injustice.

And when we experience these things long enough, we start to internalize these stressors. We become hyper-vigilant: always bracing ourselves for rejection or harm. We start self-concealing: hiding parts of who we aremaking ourselves smaller and smaller until we’re not sure there’s anything left that hasn’t been trimmed down for someone else’s comfort. We start constantly replaying interactions, wondering if we provoked something. And eventually, we might even internalize the stigma placed upon us, believing negative societal messages about our group and ourselves.

This is called internalized stigma, and it happens when you start to believe, absorb, or act according to the negative stereotypes, prejudices, or social messages about your own identity, whether that identity is your race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, disability, mental health status, or another marginalized trait.

In other words, instead of seeing society’s discrimination as the problem, we start to see ourselves as the problem. When we repeatedly experience stigma, exclusion, or prejudice, our brains try to make sense of it. Internalized stigma can be devastating because it turns external oppression into an inner wound. It weakens our ability to build resilience because we start to feel we deserve mistreatment. This internalization is not our fault, it doesn’t mean there is something wrong with us. It’s a psychological survival response. 

The violence we experience is invisible, slow, relational. It happens in how people look at us, listen to us, exclude us, pathologize us, or pretend they didn’t hurt us. Many majority-culture people don’t see it, because it’s not built into their daily experienceand they convince themselves that if they don’t experience it, it simply doesn’t exist. But that’s a lie, a delusion that lets them deny others’ pain while staying comfortable in their own ignorance.  So when we name it, they may say: “You’re overreacting.” or “Don’t make it about race/gender/etc., This is about you, not society, not our group.” But these responses only reproduce the stress, because they deny our reality. They isolate us even more.

This is how structural exclusion works: it’s the ways systems, institutions, or social structures routinely keep certain groups of people out or keep them in positions of disadvantage, through policies, norms, or unspoken rules. Unlike individual acts of discrimination (like someone insulting you), structural exclusion is built into the system itself. It doesn’t always look like open hostility; it can be quiet, subtle, or even “normal” but it still pushes people to the margins.

And in my case, it was hidden in the social dynamics of our class. It came out in unspoken group norms that made it “normal” for my classmates to ignore my needs or discomfort, or to treat my reactions as inappropriate while excusing others’ harmful behavior.

Eventually, all this systemic harm, relational exclusion, and social gaslighting leads to exhaustion, numbness, rage we can’t express, loneliness, and depression so deep it suffocates. Because it’s not just about what happened, it’s about what keeps happening. It’s the pattern. The repetition. The way our story is constantly twisted, minimized, or erased. We are constantly forced to fight against assumptions, stereotypes, pity instead of solidarity, and so-called “help” that only erases our voice, along with the ongoing misinterpretation of everything we do and are. And in this context, we’re not just talking about misunderstandings anymore because here, it becomes emotional and psychological violence. And the reason is that it invalidates our lived experience, undermines our sense of self, reinforces isolation by denying connection, and signals that our feelings are inconvenient or wrong.

Minority stress is what builds up when we’re told in subtle and not-so-subtle ways that we don’t belong. When every small exclusion adds up to harm. When our boundaries are ignored, our reactions scrutinized, and our pain dismissed over and over again. This is called cumulative trauma, and it doesn’t come from a single incident but it is shaped by pain that keeps adding up until it becomes impossible to separate one incident from the whole pattern of harm.

And here’s the thing: minority stress looks a lot like instability from the outside — if you don’t want to look in. It can look like anxiety, withdrawal, anger, depression. Even suicidal behavior.

Research shows that minority stress can lead to higher rates of depression and anxiety, increased PTSD symptoms, sleep disturbances, substance abuse, self-harm, suicidal ideation, and even chronic physical conditionsespecially when the stress is severe, prolonged, or starts early in life. It can cause cardiovascular problems, metabolic disorders, gastrointestinal issues, immune system dysregulation, chronic pain conditions, respiratory problems, and many more. So this is no joke. This is a serious condition. And none of it is a personal defect of ours. It’s an adaptation to repeated harm. It is the human way our brains and body function under that kind of pressure.

So yes, I cried a lot, and loudly. I got overwhelmed. I acted out. But not because there was something wrong with me, but because I was being slowly erased, and I was resisting it. And why does nobody ever ask why we are expected to lie down laconic and silent when we face this kind of violence? Why is our quiet compliance taken for granted, as if our pain should never make a sound? Don’t you see that, if we don’t react to this kind of harm, there is something wrong, because then we have already internalized that injustice is the only way of being for people like us. And that is the highest price of minority stress. 

Is that really a just price for us to pay so you can stay comfortable? 

When my classmates called it a mental health issue, they were kind of right, but not in the way they thought. Because the mental health issue wasn’t me. It was what they did to me. It was the silencing. The cold shoulders. The looks. The side comments. The betrayals.

That is minority stress. And it is real. And opposite from the diagnoses they projected onto me, it is backed by real science, not prejudices.

Minority stress is studied. It is recognized in psychology and psychiatry. But people don’t like to talk about it because if you name it, then you also have to name the systems causing it. And then you actually have to see your privilege for how ugly it actually is. You have to look at yourself in the mirror and see the naked emperor as naked as he really is. And that is not a pretty sight.

So let’s tell this story, but let’s tell it on my terms, from my reality.

Let’s medicalize it but this time correctly.

Let’s name the real diagnosis: structural exclusion, internalized stigma, minority stress, and cumulative trauma.

And if that makes some people uncomfortable? Good. It should. Because if it doesn't, there is no humanity left in you, and you should be very worried about yourself.

Minority stress, what people like me have to go through in our livesis like thousands of little cuts that eventually wear us down. And what I’m doing in this blog is making those cuts visible.

Now it’s my turn to tell my story. Now it’s my turn to name things. I am voicing my truth. And although there are many truths in this world, not all of them are equivalent because some truths uphold and honor human dignity, and others erase it.

I choose dignity.