How do you feel about venting?

[Felly]

I'm the kind of person that usually keeps things bottled in until it all gets to be too much. I think it's honestly better to vent a little bit to someone you know that cares and will listen to, or even just write a diary/blog entry to get it out of your system. It's no good to keep things bottled up, and it might not always be good to vent to someone else either.

[Noblejanobii]

The instant people see I have replied to this thread they'll already know my answer.

I am ok with venting. I have actually vented in a blog or two before on here just because I was so upset that I didn't know what else to do. However, venting is not for everyone. For people like my best friend and I, it's what keeps our relationship healthy. If my best friend didn't vent to me when we're in private (like when she drives me home and stuff) then I'd never know what was going on with her and wouldn't be able to support her as much as I do. The same goes for my venting with her. Venting helps us lift a weight off of us that otherwise would be suffocating us. As a person who was forced to bottle it in from the first to the eighth grade, I'm going to say now that bottling it in mentally and emotionally kills you. People who bottle it in usually feel like there's no one for them to turn to and that usually results in high amounts of depression. How do I know? It's happened to me and the friends I have now. We've all been through that and there's been several kids I knew who were going through the whole bottling scenario and didn't make it. They committed suicide because they felt that they couldn't vent about their problems to anyone. That's why I think venting is something that everyone needs to do every once and while. I'm probably giving a biased opinion given my situation, but after having to hold it in for so long and seeing the consequences of what happens when people bottle up, I think everyone should vent.

That being said, if there's one thing in this world that I hate, it's vent haters. I can't tell you how many times I got called a whiner and a five year old because I was upset over something and tried to vent to someone about it. I get that online not everyone is going to like me but the amount of hate I got during some of my most vulnerable years when I had no friends was ridiculous. It only made my situation worse and even though I did not discuss my online situation in my rant blog about my life in the past, I'm just going to say that sites like Pokefarm have been forever banned in my books because of what I went through there. I know not all sites are like that but when a moderator who is supposed to help you gets involved and says things that I'm not even allowed to say to you, one tends to forever associate sites like that with sites like those. But I digress. My point here is, if someone is venting, I don't care how annoying it is, try to help them because you never know how bad their situation is. Had I gotten some moral support in my middle school years I might not have suffered as much as I did, and while there's no turning back the clock now, I do think supporting people during a vent is more important than whether you think what they're saying is stupid or not.