The impenetrable squat wall will protect you from all chain posts in the vein of “reblog or terrible things will happen to you”, just by showing up on your dash. These guys have you covered.
Yeah, so, I’m on break and I have like All The Prompts to work on and I’m writing a Hanukkah fic for the Scarlet Witch and I have a chapter of a WIP to work on, but also my aunt outed me to my grandparents and I am so fucking tired of my family. So I’m a little drunk, I’m watching Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters, and I do what
I want. Crossposted to AO3.
The witches were always so careful to tie
Hansel up. Apparently, it was something
about the height, and the leather, and possibly the attempting-to-murder them. Hell if Hansel cared what their logic was. It was uncomfortable—his wrists aching in
their shackles, every muscle in his shoulders screaming at the constraint, the
muscles in his legs spasming as he struggled to rest his weight on his toes—but
he had been uncomfortable before. This
didn’t even make the list of the most discomfort he’d ever been in. Ben was coming unglued beside him, locked
tidily into a cell with his hands shackled as he shook and tried to bargain
with the witch as she sharpened a knife.
They’d barely been here an hour, for the love of God, and she’d only managed
to snag half of them—Gretel and Edward were still out and about.
“You’re not going to get anywhere, kid,”
Hansel sighed, and Ben whipped around to look at him.
“I’m not—aren’t you concerned about this?” Ben demanded, voice cracking.
so the thing about my family is that we have two ancestors on my dad’s side who were buried in france, where I currently live. one died in the spanish civil war, and one died prior doing…we don’t know what. but he somehow managed to get buried in père lachaise.
so anyhow, my gran sends me a message like “pls put flowers on ur uncle samuel’s grave because he’s gone over a century with none and it will make the ghost mad if he hasn’t already” because my family spends time in europe but never long enough to go all the way to père lachaise and give ya boy samuel jr. his death rites. so im like “ok gran I can do that” bc im a good grandson and you do not fuck with gran she doesn’t DESERVE THAT
i figure out which plot he’s on and ask someone specifically where you can find uncle samuel jr. and they tell me where and so I arrive at the junction and.
HE GONE.
WHERE DID YOU GO UNCLE SAMUEL.
*celine dion’s smash hit “my heart will go on” playing in the distance*
in other words either someone stole my entire great great uncle samuel or he has risen again, ready to party in paris for all of eternity.
You’re pretty chill about a corpse disappearing.
My guy, my dude, he’s been dead since 1851. He could be anywhere. He does what he wants.
You know that soulmate AU trope where the first thing your soulmate(s) says to you is some how magically engraved on your wrist? Why are those stories set in worlds that are otherwise socially normal?
I mean really. If everything was exactly the same except for this trope think of how many people would have hello written on their wrist. Think of how many people would meet the wrong person but hit it off anyway and think well this must be my soulmate(s) because we get along more or less. Think of how many people would get married and have a life and a dog and like start up some kind of artisanal meat market or something and then find out that they married the “wrong” person. Like, people wouldn’t be signing prenups, this is your soulmate it should last forever. So now you’re stuck in this crazy legal battle with your fake soulmate while your real soulmate is like trying to fend off people who also have hello on their wrist and think they’re making the wrong choice. Divorce lawyers would probably make it big in this hypothetical world.
But. I don’t think the above is actually all that likely when you consider that this would be a world where everyone knows that the first thing you say to your soulmate(s) is on your wrist. I think a whole world of this trope would basically teach people that you don’t say hello to strangers.
Instead you blurt out something very original. Last thursday I ate a live worm! I own a collection of glass eyes! I’m secretly a super villain and this is my android body! You know. Distinctive. Something that isn’t likely to be ambiguous.
Think of the possibilities. Think of a society that celebrates truly unique first words. People could see someone and spend hours agonizing over what ridiculous thing they want their first words to be. An unusual metaphor for your undying love? A declaration about how much you like snails? A compliment no one could have ever possibly said to them before? Your nose is a glorious rendition of the Summer Triangle.
Kids would grow up being encouraged to say outlandish things. You wouldn’t be told to stop saying silly things. You would be told to make sure not to copy the silly things your friend said. Think of how careful parents would be about introducing very young children to new people. Kids that are too young might meet their soulmate and not realize it. They could miss their one chance because they were too busy fighting over a little mermaid eraser.
What about people who can’t read? What about people who are blind?
You wouldn’t say sorry if you bumped into someone on the street. You’d either stay silent or shout something oddball out first, I shove lilacs up my nose. and only then do you say sorry.
Imagine “speed meets”. Groups that organize meetups between complete strangers. You’re in a room with a hundred other people. Line up and start saying outrageous things. I am actually a hippopotamus. No? Okay next. I wish to own seven hundred thirty one and a half dalmatian mice. No? Alright. Next. One day I will travel to Europa in the fanciest of hats. And then the other person grins, Well captain it’s not naked if you’re wearing a hat. And damn they have been waiting years to say that line.
The real irony of the people who make jokes about being triggered is that they tend to idolize the military/veterans as if combat related PTSD isn’t a real thing that also has triggers. Y’all make fun of the people you call hero’s when you’re making fun of the teenagers with PTSD from non-combat related issues, you can’t separate the two.
Most of the people making fun of triggers are making fun of all the bullshit “”“triggers”“”, as in the people calling a mild uncomfortable feelings triggers.
The problem with making fun of a trigger is you genuinely do not know whether they are ‘mildly uncomfortable’ or if that is a thing that is genuinely causing severe anxiety, depressive episodes, or stress responses. Most of the “““““bullshit”““““ triggers I’ve seen being made fun of are actual trauma survivors who have their trauma associated with something unusual or strange. Because the thing that triggers their PTSD or panic is odd, people, not unlike yourself, are writing them off as “whiny babies” or “triggered sjws” or call their trigger bullshit because they cannot understand the association.
For examples: Sirens are one of my triggers. When I hear sirens I get an immediate panic response. This was due to being in an active war zone as a child (The response is significantly worse if it is an air raid siren or sounds too similar to an air raid siren.). If you didn’t know I was in an active war zone though, it might seem silly to see an adult panic and attempt to get to a safe place because an ambulance, fire truck, or police car went past them.
I have a manager who is triggered by the presence of police. Specifically police, other uniforms are fine (i.e. security in the mall does not set off her panic response). Her trigger is severe, if a police officer talks to her, she starts panicking and sobbing and cannot control it. This is because when she was young, two police officers threatened her repeatedly and psychologically abused her for 6 hours while they tried to find out where her brother was (yes, this was illegal. Her parents were not home at the time, and were unaware she was alone as the brother in question was meant to be watching her). If you didn’t know that story though, it might seem silly to see an adult woman burst into tears and have a panic attack because a cop said ‘hi’ to her.
I have seen posts by an abuse survivor talking about how the sound of a garage door triggered them, due to abuse by a parent. They associated that sound with the abuser returning home and the abuse beginning. The sound became a trigger because their mind associated it to that. I saw another post by a rape survivor talking about how she was triggered by the sight of eggs because she made eggs for her rapist after he’d raped her. Her mind associated eggs with the trauma due to the two being connected at least in her mind.
Brains are weird. Trauma doesn’t make sense. The point is, YOU do not know if someone is ““““bullshitting”“““ or not. You do not know how someones trauma associated itself with something odd, which is something trauma really does all the time and making fun of trauma survivors because you don’tunderstand the association between their trauma and the item that triggers their ptsd or anxiety is absolutely wrong and absolutely hypocritical if you think any other form of trigger is acceptable or okay. You don’t get to decide other peoples trauma triggers. They didn’t even get to decide them, and to tell someone that you’re okay to make fun of them because what upsets them doesn’t make sense to you is absolutely not okay.
I should note too: Phobia’s are real triggers too. People have panic attacks when exposed to their phobia’s in the wrong way. I need certain pictures tagged because I am absolutely terrified of heights, which is a pretty common phobia. People can have serious phobia’s to everything and anything though, and there are things I am not afraid of that others are that may seem strange to me, but to them are very real and very frightening. Just because it seems odd to you, doesn’t mean it isn’t still real to the person experiencing it.
This post needs a zillion more notes. As a Complex PTSD sufferer I truly hope that people will someday stop policing others’ triggers and health problems as if they have a single clue.
Just BACK OFF and let people LIVE.
And PTSD has ALWAYS had odd triggers, this isn’t just a modern thing. My grandmother couldn’t do anything with the reservoir on the back of a toilet because when she was nine, she was gangraped. When her attackers were in their stupor, she took all of their guns and put them in the reservoir of their toilet, and ran through the street naked until someone helped her. Having to put the weapons she KNEW they were going to use on her behind the toilet stuck in her mind, that was what became a trigger for her brain- along with being unable to go outside in her bare feet ever again.
One of my closest friends is triggered by someone touching his hair, because one of his stepfathers swung him around by his hair and smashed him into things. Now any time someone touches his hair, he gets so badly panicked he just vomits on the spot.
And then you have people with conventional ptsd triggers like me- it’s hard for me to see blood and violence in certain contexts. Oddly, it’s fine in video games, but in movies or TV shows- ESPECIALLY if it’s suicide- it triggers me. Because through my suicide prevention work, I’ve WITNESSED suicides, so as a result it triggers my ptsd.
Brains are strange and unpredictable in what they associate a situation to, and what becomes a symbol of trauma. But it’s not anyone’s job to gatekeep the subject, because it does absolutely no one any good. When someone says something triggers them, you need to respect it. And you also need to respect that triggers can generate different responses. My grandmother would get quiet and skittish when triggers. My friend vomits when triggered. I get enraged and frustrated when triggered- an unconventional response to a conventional trigger.
Some people cope so well that they only get ‘uncomfortable’. I’ve even seen one person who would get a ‘high’ because their body would try to release a shitload of dopamine in response to it, and then they’d crash. Shit’s weird, and all you can do is respect what someone says about their own boundaries.
Also, there’s a common misconception that trigger warnings are always about avoiding the trigger. That’s just not the case. A lot of times, a person is able to view a trigger and be perfectly fine if they were warned beforehand and allowed to mentally prepare. I’ve heard it compared to the fact that people can get used to and tune out a noise like a smoke detector beeping if it happens in a regular and predictable way. But random, unpredictable beeps cause immense psychological distress to almost anyone if you are forced to listen to them long enough. Letting people know a trigger is coming often helps mitigate the reaction.
I was once asked to please tag cats. And I was like “Oookay, bud, I’ll try, but like, ¾ of my life IS cats, so I can’t promise anything…?” Because that just seemed really weird to me.
And then, even though they didn’t have to, they actually wrote back and said, basically, “Hey, the reason I’m asking is because I had to witness people torturing cats in a situation I couldn’t escape, and now I just … can’t.”
Oh shit.
So I said “Hey, holy fuck, I’m sorry. Do you need me to tag all cats, or just housecats? What about cartoon cats? I just want to help you out, friend.”
And again, even though they didn’t have to, they came back and said “Cartoon cats aren’t too bad, but what I really can’t handle is seeing kittens.”
Fucking … fuck.
And I’m not gonna lie, that fucking hurt and chilled me to read. Just … the story there. I don’t want to know it. It makes me sick just imagining it. So I now tag for cats.
It’d be easy to say “It’s stupid to be triggered by kittens.”
But, uhh, I really don’t think that situation is “stupid” at all. I think it’s fucking tragic. And that person had the guts to ask, knowing that they might get made fun of for it, and then they were even kind enough to explain, and I’m grateful to them because it taught me something I intellectually but did not yet viscerally understand.
A healthy person, or even just someone with different triggers, can’t understand the significance behind triggers. And triggers can be really fucking weird or even seemingly inappropriate.
So I got to make a choice. I could say “If you can’t handle cats, seriously, I’m not the blog for you.” Understandable, I suppose. Or I could say “JFC that sucks, and the rest of the goddamn internet is flooded with untagged cats. Maybe … maybe I can do this one thing so that they will feel safe reading my blog? Maybe I have the power to actually … help a little?”
And obviously, I made the latter choice.
Here’s another thing.
Recovery is a process, and eventually a lot of people move away from needing trigger warnings. They are a helpful tool to protect yourself during a certain stage of healing. That healing might take a really long time, and it might never be complete … or … it might only be necessary for a few months or years.
So you aren’t “coddling” people by tagging for [x thing you think shouldn’t be a trigger], you’re enabling them to engage on their terms. Engaging on your own terms is literally the only way to make progress, therapeutically, so asserting that trigger warnings hinder progress is just not factually a correct statement at all.
You personally may choose not to tag for anything, and that’s fine. You are absolutely allowed to run your personal space however you want, and people shouldn’t bug you about it.
But what you don’t get to do is decide what a “stupid” trigger is (hint: there isn’t one, there’s only fucked up situations that leave fucked up scars) and whether or not someone is experiencing severe or mild discomfort. You can’t know that. Their reaction isn’t even a good guide to how they are feeling inside. They may seem only mildly uncomfortable. You don’t see them losing their shit later because something hit them way worse than they thought it would, and they thought they were okay at the time but … hahaha, nope.
I guess … a lot of people seem to think that there’s this whole category of “special snowflake” people wandering around saying “I know how to get sympathy and validation: I’ll ask a total stranger to tag for cookware because I’m ‘triggered’ by spatulas!” Just as if that’s liable to elicit the kind of validation truly lonely and desperate people need.
Or maybe … maybe they think there’s all these people who are so unacquainted with “real” pain or fear that they think their mildly uncomfortable feelings about Furbys compare to, and this is so often the example used and I think that is so wrong, combat vets who can’t handle fireworks.
What it comes down to, it seems like, is trying to extrapolate a story from the trigger so that you can say “Stop crying, you don’t have it that bad!” Which is ridiculous. As someone above pointed out, triggers can seem nonsensical even within the context of the instigating trauma. I remember the eggs post. The things that stick with you about trauma are not always just the things you expect. You can’t actually guess anything about a trauma from a seemingly inexplicable trigger beyond “Wow, fear of paintbrushes, plastic cups, and raisins … I bet that’s a story.”
And if that story that they imagine doesn’t match what they think is a “valid” trauma narrative, then they feel justified in dismissing it. Completely missing the fact that there’s no such thing as a “valid” or “invalid” trauma narrative, because trauma is a really strange and subjective thing. Also completely missing the fact that it’s not okay to try to make that judgment to begin with.
A lot of people seem unwilling, for some reason totally alien to me, to make that empathetic leap and say “Okay. I don’t need to know more. I believe you.” They want to police other people’s experiences. And that’s just one of the worst impulses of humanity. It’s really nasty, and it gets applied in so many horrible ways to mental illness of all kinds. It needs to stop.
Ultimately, it costs you nothing to be cool about it. It costs you nothing to take what people say at face value, or to believe strangers and not comment on their mental health issues. It costs you nothing to say nothing, even if you don’t believe them. Because you are inevitably going to be wrong, and why risk making yourself look like a clueless, deliberately oafish asshole?
I’m really confused as to why this is an issue, except certain segments of the online community take great pleasure in being critical of other people’s attempts to cope, because they have invested a lot of their self-image in being “smart” and “discerning” and “no-nonsense” and “not gonna be fooled” … and they really enjoy tearing down people who are saying “these things are unfair” or “these things are hard for me.”
“You aren’t really hurt/traumatized/oppressed!” is a truly unpleasantly common thing to hear these people say. Often they will even say it outright. Other times, it comes across indirectly.
It’s not at all surprising for anti-feminists to also be anti-trigger-warning, and I think this is probably why. I know it was the case for me for a very long time. Then I kind of … grew up, I guess? Enough bad shit happened to me and to people I know that I acquired sympathy. And realized that, actually, my own traumas have left me with some pretty weird issues, things that make me uncomfortable but which other people are unlikely to consider inherently threatening. So I had no room to judge.
It’s sad, because it’s actually a whole lot less effort to believe people when they talk about their experiences than it is to sit there, smoldering with disdain and resentment over the person who really can’t abide milk, of all things, and asks that it be tagged for.
If you’re angry about trigger warnings and are lashing out about it, just … go ask a mutual friend for a hug or something. Go do something self-affirming. Because the trigger warning thing is not about you or for you. You might as well spend your energy doing something nice for yourself. You’re lucky not to have to wrestle with a fear you very well know is ridiculous. Enjoy that and move on. Don’t waste your time thinking about how many people are wrong to feel the way they feel. Just let it go.
I also want to emphasize something said above:
A lot of times, a person is able to view a trigger and be perfectly fine if they were warned beforehand and allowed to mentally prepare.
This is huge.
I can engage with my triggers.
I can do it voluntarily on my own terms, and the effects can, depending on circumstance, be pretty minimal.
I can do it with warning on someone else’s terms, and depending on circumstance I can be mostly okay to messed up but still mostly functional.
Or I can do it without warning at all, and depending on circumstance, fall apart a little, or a lot.
If given control of the situation, I can get away with a “yuck” feeling and then move on. If not, I may need medication to bring me down. It can fuck me up for a couple of days if I was not allowed to choose when/how/whether to engage. If I am, hey, wow, look at that, I’m mostly all right.
This is not evidence that it’s not that bad. Like with a lot of illness, disability, and mental health stuff, just because I can do it sometimes doesn’t mean it’s okay all the time.
This is how these things work. Period. This is actually what recovery from trauma looks like, this is how it works, this is what you have to accept if you want to accept that any trauma at all is valid.
It really is a useless endeavor to try to draw conclusions about someone’s trauma from whether or not they ask for, use, or need trigger warnings.
And tbh, even if they come right out and say “I don’t have PTSD, I just hate seeing pictures of dogs, I’m so triggered lol”, that’s them being horrendously disrespectful of mentally ill people. It’s not an excuse to then be even more disrespectful by using that to draw conclusions that allow you to dismiss the very concept of trigger warnings as stupid.
There are people who fake entire illnesses, okay? Who lie about having cancer or whatever. But we don’t take those people as evidence that people who have, you know, actual cancer must be lying and pretending to be special snowflakes.
And, just for the record, sometimes people can’t move past a trigger.
I have fairly bad PTSD about dentists. Nothing helps. I don’t look to get trigger warnings because it doesn’t help. I can barely walk into a dentist’s office–I’m 19 and my mom still has to hold my hand and probably always will. I never make my own appointments, someone else has to do it. I can barely speak in a dentist’s chair, and I get flashbacks from the lights.
I’ve been working on getting past this for 12 years, I’ve tried every technique in the book to get through an appointment without this stuff including all available forms of sedation, and I’ve literally reached the point where my therapist went “Yeah, you might want to just get drunk afterward” when I told her that’s what I was going to do.
So… barring a miracle, this is as good as it’s going to get. That’s a trigger I’m never going to get rid of. If trigger warnings helped, I’d need them for the rest of my life. And it’s not because I or anyone else in that position is weak. It’s just because some wounds heal, and others still leave you limping.
Okay friends today we are gonna learn
about the GHOST ARMY, which, disappointingly, was not actually an
army made of ghosts
pictured: the unit patch for the
Ghost Army, which is DOPE AS FUCK
see one of the things that made WWII so
fucking nuts was the totally bizarre level of technology. Like wow we
invented the first real computer and radar but also if you wanted to
see how many troops were hanging out somewhere you had to send a dude
to fly over and take pictures manually??? this left A LOT of room for
shenanigans
so the normal method of dealing with
aerial surveillance was to cover shit with camouflage netting. Say
you’ve got an nice air base that you really don’t want any bombs
dropped on- you literally just cover that with a ludicrous amount of
netting and some fake trees and BAM now it looks like just an empty
field from the air
there’s a building under that weird
lump
that’s cool! That’s
really cool! But not cool enough
At some point
somebody sat down and went “hey wait. What if…what if instead of
disguising buildings and units as fields, we disguise fields as
units”
holy fucking
shit!!!
the British had
used a bunch of fake tanks and like, boxes of provisions stacked up
in tank shape and then covered with a tarp in 1942 during Operation
Bertram and it worked really well, but they didn’t have a special
unit devoted to just clowning on the Germans like that.
so the US military
decides they do want a designated clowning unit and goes out and
recruits a bunch of fucking nerds from all the art schools and makes
them into the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops aka THE
GHOST ARMY, WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU USE ANY OTHER NAME LIKE SERIOUSLY
the ghost army’s
job was basically to go in, sidle up to a real unit, and then
basically set up a fake version of that unit while the actual unit
sneaked away to go dunk on Nazis where the Nazis weren’t expecting
them
okay time to get
into the really cool part of this story, which is HOW the ghost army
faked being a real unit:
step 1: INFLATABLE
TANKS AND AIRCRAFT OH MY GOD
that’s a big ol balloon!!!
the ghost army had
a stockpile of inflatable tanks, aircraft, artillery, cars, whatever,
that they would set up and then poorly cover with camouflage
netting so from the air it looked like someone had just done a
real shit job of hiding actual materiel. They even had dummy soldiers
that they would set up to make the scene look populated, since the
ghost army itself was about 1,000 dudes regularly imitating units of
30,000 men
what’s really cool
is that visual deception was more than just the inflatable stuff
itself. If the ghost army plopped down a balloon tank, they then also
had to go out with shovels and rakes and shit to make a fake track
that a real tank would have left, because it turns out tanks are
really hard on your landscaping
step 2: “spoof
radio”
the last couple of
days before the real unit moved out, the radio operators of the ghost
army would move in. see, radio transmissions were done in Morse code,
and it turns out every radio operator has a slightly different “fist”
when typing Morse. A “fist” is basically typing style- some
people would take longer to type out certain letters or would have
pauses between groups or anything like. Anybody listening to the
radio transmissions who was skilled enough could tell different radio
operators apart from just their fist
anyway the ghost
army operators would move in and basically listen to all the real
unit’s radio transmissions until they had learned the real operators’
fists. Then they would take over radio traffic, imitating that fist
so it seemed like the real operator had never left. I forgot to make
this section funny because I was too caught up in how rad it is SORRY
step 3: making a
lot of noise
the ghost army had
special trucks fitted with huge fuck off speakers and a whole library
of stock sound effects. Once the real unit left and the fake unit
inflated, the sound trucks would come in, select a combination of
sound effects that matched the unit they were impersonating, and then
played everyone in the 15 mile radius of the speakers their fire mix
tape
step 4: fuckin
partying!!!
see the thing about
impersonating your own units is that other allied units would know
about it and might talk about it where enemy collaborators could
hear. So the ghost army had to fool the Germans but they also had to
fool their own army. Every time they impersonated a new unit,
the ghost soldiers would paint that unit’s insignia on all the fake
materiel, make fake signs with the unit’s name and colors, and sew
the unit’s patches on their own uniforms
once they were
dressed up as soldiers from the impersonated unit, the ghost army
dudes would go into town and mingle with other soldiers from actual
fighting units nearby and hang out in bars while loudly saying things
like “YES HELLO I AM DEFINITELY A REAL SOLDIER FROM THE WHATEVER
DIVISION, ABSOLUTELY FOR REAL STATIONED ON THAT HILL OVER THERE”
so anyway this
bunch of weedy American art nerds staged 20+ battlefield deceptions
between 1944 and the end of the war, sometimes fooling that Germans
so successfully that they actually got shelled
I'mma leave you
with this quote from the book “The Ghost Army of World War II” by
Rick Beyer and Elizabeth Sayles, because it’s a quote from an actual
member of the Ghost Army and that alone makes it funnier than
anything I could ever write:
On another
occasion, two Frenchmen on bicycles somehow got through the security
perimeter. Shilstone managed to halt them, but not before they had
seen more than they should. “What they thought they saw was four
GIs picking up a forty-ton Sherman tank and turning it around. They
looked at me, and they were looking for answers, and I finally said
‘The Americans are very strong.‘”
