Trigger Warning

It’s funny. You know whenever you see ‘warning – content may trigger those with etc etc’ – and you just think jeez, I’m never that person, so I’ll just go ahead? For a long time I was one of those people. You’d see it on fanfics containing suicidal characters or those suffering from depression and you just think, how could something like that affect anyone in real life? It’s just a story. Or when you’re watching something and the previews are all like ‘the following may contain adult references – trigger warning’. And you just think, again, how could something make believe incite any kind of reaction in the viewer? It isn’t real.

For a long time, I had denied the truth of what was happening to me. I’d spend a lot of time in my room, in the dark, alone; I’d binge eat and cry in the shower or after everyone had gone to sleep, when no one was there to hear it. I lost my motivation; my grades were dropping, I didn’t care. I lost the motivation to do the things I love. I had no energy to speak with or see my friends outside of school because pasting on the smile everyday was so exhausting, and I was just tired. And I slept a lot. I just felt so negative, and sad, and more than anything I hated myself.

Long story short, I confessed to my parents how I felt – pretty much a big breakdown and I remember saying over and over I just don’t feel good inside anymore I’m sorry and just crying and crying because I was relieved and scared to finally get it off my chest. I went to therapy, and I got medication, and for a while it was good.

The meds weren’t good enough. They were doubled. I think I was expecting some kind of miracle cure, to make all the bad go away. But it didn’t. The first time I self-harmed was actually when I was on the meds; I took a razor to my knee, where nobody would see because I didn’t wear short clothing on my lower half.

The second time was after an argument with my dad. Everything I had worked for with the psychologist, to build some confidence and assert myself, was undone when he put me in my place like he used to. And when he left, and I was alone, I took the razor to my hip, right in the spot where my waistband sat so every time I moved, every time I breathed I would feel it.

The third time is what is relevant here though. This’ll sound stupid. It sounds dumb even to me. But I watched ‘If I Stay’ on Netflix and it was just brutal. And I cried for about two hours after the movie before taking the razor to the same spot I did last time. And something like that normally wouldn’t set me off, and it was just bizarre that this occasion did. And the whole trigger thing came to mind, and I felt myself apologising for all those times I looked upon those words or heard them in scorn. How could something make believe cause a damaging reaction to someone in the real world?

The other night I was watching that episode of American Horror Story when Violet Harmon tries to commit suicide; she downs those pills and almost succeeds. And then I thought how easy it would for me to succeed – I could just swallow down the packets of painkillers in the house we have for mum’s hip. Or I could just slip outside and get into the pool, put the pool cover over my head and seal myself in. Would they find me? Would they realise I was gone? Who would go outside to check?

Now I know how important this trigger warning really is to people with damaging states of mind. I wish that the entertainment industry was more liberal in assigning these warnings – society is so concerned with glorifying the ugly things like mental illness that they don’t stop to think about what seeing something like that on screen does to someone who has been there, or is thinking about going there. It disgusts me that mental illness is used as a plot device as a lazy means of developing character, at the expense of the mental well being of some viewers. It needs to stop being skated over, or euphemised as ‘adult’ (which could mean anything really). Don’t be afraid to show how much something could really have the potential to affect someone. It may just mean the difference between life and death.