Gina Jimenez doesn’t like being told what to do. Being mentally ill and neurodivergent, she’s skeptical of most rules and authority, even when they are for her own good. So when the book she was reading contained a helpful trigger warning to alert her to sensitive content that may worsen her mental health symptoms, Jimenez took that as a challenge.
Anytime Jimenez encounters such trigger warnings, there is always a stubborn part of her that thinks, “Pffft, how condescending. I’m not going to get triggered by reading a paragraph in a book. I’m an empowered disabled woman!” Besides, if she chose not to engage, the FOMO would drive her crazy. What if she missed out on something important and spent the rest of the book lacking key information?
“It’s like a wheelchair user reading a ‘No ramp, no elevator’ sign on the front of a building and trying to go in anyway. Someone was courteous enough to let me know that I, a mentally ill woman, would have a bad time if I read this paragraph, and here I am totally disrespecting the effort they put in to make this accessible for me.”
She continued, “I appreciate trigger warnings, really, I do! I just don’t have the impulse control to take them seriously. Honestly, if I click on a video with triggering content, they should make me take a mental health questionnaire first, and if I’m doing too bad in the menties, they should force me to watch ‘Great British Bake Off’ until I’m feeling better. I think that would do wonders for my mental health.”
Instead, Jimenez had to face the consequences of her actions. “Oh, I got triggered. Big time,” she said. “I don’t know what I was expecting. I had to spend the rest of the day lying on the floor and staring at the ceiling listening to Phoebe Bridgers until my brain stopped feeling like scrambled eggs. I fucked around and found out.”
In that moment, Jimenez vowed to start respecting her own accessibility needs and to take better care of her mental health. “Being triggered sucks and I don’t like it, and I’m going to start respecting the wishes of the kind, empathetic people who make sure to put trigger warnings on their content. They just want me to be safe, even though they’re being big nerds about it. I hope the other mentally ill people reading this will choose to do the same thing and take better care of themselves.”
::::::::TRIGGER WARNING::::::::
This next paragraph contains sensitive material related to mental illness that some readers may find triggering. Please feel free to skip it if you don’t want to read that kind of stuff.
Have you people learned nothing? Take better care of yourself, goddamnit! I’m going to call your therapist and tell her to give you an F in therapy. That’s right. Set some boundaries, for crying out loud! Trigger warnings are there for a reason. You just can’t follow a single rule, ever, huh? Sigh. You just haaaaad to go and show you weren’t a wimp and read the triggering material anyway, huh? That’s it, you had this coming:
Did you know one jar of peanut butter is legally allowed by the FDA to contain up to five rat hairs? There you go. Now that’s a gross fact you know, all because you just couldn’t respect a simple trigger warning. Before this, you were probably blissfully eating a peanut butter sandwich and having a great day, but not now. No, now you won’t be able to sleep at night thinking about all the rat hairs you’ve probably ingested over your lifetime. Well, unless you have a peanut allergy; then you’re probably laughing your head off right now at all of us poor suckers who have been eating PB & rat-hair sandwiches.
Bet you never thought about the privileges that went along with having a peanut allergy before. That just goes to show you that sometimes there are unexpected upsides to having a disability or medical condition. Mentally ill privilege is having an excuse not to read upsetting stuff and go watch videos of cute baby cows instead, and you totally are not taking advantage of that privilege. Now go log off, touch grass and have a great day because you’re a wonderful person who is loved, valued and appreciated. Sheesh!