By Dara Clariza Evangelista
Trigger Warning: This article discusses suicide and mental health. If you or someone you know is struggling, please reach out to a trusted friend, family member, or mental health professional.
When someone takes their own life, especially someone we’ve followed, admired, or even casually scrolled past online, the grief feels different. We mourn a person we may never have met, yet somehow felt connected to. It’s a quiet shock that reminds us how little we truly know about the people behind our screens. Behind every post, filter, and emoji is a human being, and sometimes, that person is holding on by a thread.
Time and time again, women both here and abroad have faced unbearable pain under the weight of public scrutiny and online cruelty. Each loss reminds us that while the internet connects us, it can also become a place of deep loneliness and harm.
In the aftermath, timelines fill with grief, disbelief, and sympathy. For a while, we come together, sharing tributes, promising kindness, remembering. We also hear the same phrases again: “kulang lang sa dasal,” “mahina lang loob,” “kaya mo ’yan.” Words meant to comfort, but that often dismiss what a person is truly going through. Faith can heal, yes, but so can therapy, compassion, and open conversation. Mental health deserves the same urgency, care, and understanding as any other kind of pain.
Still, we return to our screens, to the same spaces where words can build or break. And here, we need to pause and ask ourselves: what are we adding to this shared space? Are we helping it heal, or are we contributing to the noise that hurts? Regarding that comment, do we really have to take time out of our day, our life, to send hate or judgment to someone we barely know?
Criticism, when fair, has its place. Accountability truly matters. But cruelty never has to be part of the conversation. There’s a line between calling someone out and tearing someone down, and too often, that line disappears when the person on the other side is young, vulnerable, or simply human. The internet is our shared space now, one that carries our words farther than we ever intend. What we say online can lift someone up or add to the weight they’re already carrying.
At Stylish Magazine, we believe that self-love always begins within, but kindness starts with all of us as a community. Check on your friends. Reach out when something feels off. Go to therapy if you can, and hold space for those who are hurting, even quietly.
If you haven’t yet today, spread a little love into the world. Leave a kind comment. Tell someone you appreciate them. Choose softness, even when it feels easier to scroll past. And if you have nothing kind to say, it’s okay to stay silent. We never truly know what someone is going through, and sometimes, a small act of care can be what helps them stay.
Little by little, together, we can make this world, online and beyond, a place where people feel safe enough to heal, to rest, and to remain.
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Jasmine Curtis-Smith is on the cover of STYLISH Magazine right now, as she shares her thoughts on good storytelling in films, as she’s set to star in upcoming movies Open Night, a 2025 Cinemalaya Philippine Independent Film Festival sapphic film entry; and Manila’s Finest, an upcoming 2025 Metro Manila Film Festival (MMFF) crime drama movie.
Read the Stylish Magazine September-October 2025 cover story here.
Watch out for a new #StylishPodcast episode featuring our cover girl Jasmine Curtis-Smith, dropping soon on Facebook and YouTube.
Stylish Magazine is “your source of self-love, style & inspiration” first introduced in June 2020. Our television series format, Stylish TV, once ranked one of the Top 50 Most Watched Multicultural Shows in the USA, can be streamed on iWantTFC and be watched on TFC (The Filipino Channel) in more than 50 countries. Watch it online here.
Style Visionary Network is a lifestyle-business online platform where #WeCreateVisionaries. Also introduced in June 2020, Style Visionary Network is also the digital home channel of media brands Stylish Magazine and Stylish TV.