31: Trigger Warning
Sleep, shame, and toxic adult soul-vampires
There are a few aspects of my childhood that were so rotten and fraught that I feel quite ashamed to speak them out loud, ashamed to have lived them. Today’s comic is about another of those, so here: a courteous heads-up.
Please know that today’s comic discusses sexual abuse by priests. If that’ll fuck you up, you have the choice to not read it right now, or ever.Trigger Warnings
began to earn contempt from certain corners as soon as they were introduced. If I were a young person, I wouldn’t sweat it: every novel and progressive idea is showered in contempt by old, ungenerous pricks until they eventually find it useful. Then they’ll gaslight you and pretend it was their idea. Just watch. It’s a real pattern. But: I’m not a young person now. These days.
Back in the Day
While my college days (early 90s) had their issues (the same issues), we were allowed to explore them more slowly. My university was a very progressive place - York U was so progressive it lacked all coherence! - but at least we weren’t hearing 24-hour Fucker Carlson commentary about it.
We scrapped over naming and pride and shame, same as now, and over the many potential solutions to cultural toxicity: women-only spaces, Queer spaces, clubs, protests, etc. These scraps were complicated - they should be - and while we did see articles about us and our reprehensible, weak “political correctness” (a bullshit term even back then), those were in staid newspapers and TV, not in our pockets and our feeds. You could ignore them. It was a protected place to try out ideas - as it should be - and one could emerge from it a little confused about what the wider culture was up to. You guys are still racist??
Now this phenomenon - the progressive ideas and the reactionary contempt - have spilled out into the common culture. This is kind of good for the many young people who are ready for these crucial discussions earlier than 18, and good for those who don’t go to post-secondary; they aren’t sacred or particularly complicated ideas, and didn’t need to only exist on campus.
High School Trigger Warnings
My film class students (high school) engaged in discussions all year long about Trigger Warnings, especially as tempers became brittle after a year in lockdown. Some used them casually, before, say, making a joke about being in love with Ted Bundy. Some scolded me for not letting them know, say, that a character in a film was going to feign suicide. Some argued that we had too many warnings, some too few - you know, intelligent discussions of a thing! And all told, they added a simple level of courtesy to our classes: people recognizing that our various traumas and experiences leave us differently vulnerable to pain while learning.
And here’s the main thing: very seldom did anyone opt out of watching a film after hearing about troubling content. They weren’t afraid - they just wanted a heads-up, which allowed them to access their courage and not be surprise-kneecapped. (Hilariously, the opportunity to skip did get taken up by the odd kid who simply “didn’t like” a certain genre, which choice needed discussing too.)
I was somewhat clumsy with trigger warnings, noticing when they were needed sometimes, and not seeing the need until it was too late at other times.* I did my best and was honest about it, and the students were warmly welcoming of the idea. And respectful of our collective development. Nobody shit on anybody about it.
(*I think I should have had one on the post about Jason. There isn’t a name for what happened, but maybe a warning about child abuse. If that bothered you, I apologize.)
Of course, cranky pricks (i.e.., Bill Maher on the left, and pretty much everybody on the right) like to find the worst, most shrill or badly applied examples of this phenomenon to laugh at and freak out about. But fuck them: everybody wants to be safe, a point made several times by Ezra Klein on his podcasts on the topic, and bullies always laugh at people being vulnerable or sensitive (I suspect because they don’t get it).
Triggers
I do not sleep well. I wake up with a start shortly after falling asleep, and then I am up and anxious. When I do sleep I yell, sweat profusely, punch and kick. I have my own bedroom for this reason, by the way - in case you were worried about my partner. I am 51 years old, and only in the last chunk of years have I made the connection between this and the incident with the priests recounted in the comic. Does it make sense? Of course it makes sense. It was traumatic, never healed, and has affected me since.
Not sleeping sucks, but what hurts quite a bit more is that talking about it, and writing/drawing about it puts me in a place of incredible, overwhelming shame. I feel it right now, writing this. “It’s my third rail,” I said to my wife the morning after writing this strip. “Every time, after, I want to kill myself.”
“Why do you keep touching it?” she asked.
“I think I think it’ll get fixed one time,” I ventured. But I’m not sure. Another part of me wants to talk about it so other people see the example and can avoid feeling shamefully alone with their own abuse situations. But that’s a pretence, a way of absenting myself from it. I think about it because it’s an unhealed wound, and it has to be aired out. The cure for trauma - this is what I always tell my students - is storytelling and love.
Anyway:
if you haven’t already looked away, my memories of ages 11-14 are scrambled and somehow irretrievable to me. It seems important to a memoir to engage with that, even as it feels very strange to pause a story about loving music to talk about abuse. If you’re still here, thank you for bearing with me, and receiving this story with love, and know that we’re not going to dwell on it.
Thank you. Here’s the stupid strip. ;) Thanks for reading.
jep
