trauma therapy

i need
my trauma therapy
‘cuz i’m just trying to forget
all those things you said

Tw: secondhand discussions of SA

So some of you might remember when I made a post called “I accidentally planned a protest” back in 2021. And how that whole thing kinda spiraled out of control, led to a bit of a crisis, and the absolute death of my mental health at the time. I am eternally grateful to that one person who spent actual hours speaking to me even though we had only met one time prior to that.

So that was almost 2 years ago, and I was 14 at the time. I didn’t quite see how much of a bad idea it was at the time because of my 14 year old brain. And I’m not sure how much I’ve spoken about this on here (I’ve talked about it a ton irl) but I didn’t want it to even be about SA, I wanted it to be about the school doing nothing about bullying, nothing about ableism, and also just general teenage “mad at the establishment angst”. I wasn’t that emotionally invested in the cause, I’ve realized in more recent times that I just thought the person leading it was insanely hot and I wanted to be around that energy as much as possible.

But that’s not to say I wasn’t at all emotionally invested, I just wasn’t that fired up about it, definitely not as much as they were. But that doesn’t really matter because the bottom line is that I still hurt people. I still went along with it. I still made those posts. I still indirectly led to people cornering our principal and threatening him.

I wound up leading the effort to apologize for our actions. I wrote the whole damn apology post because my time on here led me to being really freaking good at statements like that. Honestly I’m not upset that effort fell onto me because, knowing this person, I doubt they would have touched on everything that needed to be touched on. And nowadays I doubt they were actually sorry.

So me and this person broke it off because they were convinced we had been manipulated into backing down. They also believed I cared more about my career than the victims, but at the end of the day, it’s not my responsibility to keep this whole thing up. I’m not an SA victim. I’ve barely been a harassment victim. I do not have to fix pain that I did not cause. And I more than fulfilled attempting to fix the pain I did cause.

At least I thought I had.

2 years and a whole lot of maturing later, I wanted to do an instagram live stream. I wanted to go through my ‘following’ list to see if there was anything or anyone I no longer want to be following. And I came across that account.

In that moment I realized that all of the stories we published were still very much up and visible. Stories people had published about being assaulted under the watch of the school. And I highly doubt they realized they were still up.

I kinda freaked out. Me and that person were not on speaking terms after our last convo (the only reason I hadn’t been locked out of the account was because I slightly backed down as soon as they threatened that). The login info was stored on my old deleted Snapchat account. The login info was stored on my tablet that I cannot find. And my other phone was waterlogged. I no longer have the array of devices I once had.

So I sent a rather long message to them. Explaining what I wanted to do, why I wanted to do it, when I hoped for it to be done, and the ways we could go about doing it. I also firmly established that I had no ulterior motives with this, and plus the other person had graduated! They have no stakes in this! They are an adult and should probably be acting as such. I went in expecting a fight. What did I get?

I got blocked without a word.

Fan-f*cking-tastic.

I’ve never heard anyone actually using that word but it seems right now, doesn’t it? I have to shoulder the weight of a decision made by a 14 year old because the 18 year old wants to keep their head in there a*s 2 years later.

I’m not one to speak on someone else’s truth, but this is an anonymous website. The other person’s motives lie in a situation that has nothing to do with the school. I’d get it if they had some personal baggage with the school system, but from everything they’ve told me, they don’t. They’ve told me where their primary motives lie and one of them has nothing to do with the school and one of them was a situation that they had nothing to do with.

And they’re arguing with someone who could write a f*cking novel about their bad experiences at the school. I could talk about gifted education in addition to talking about camp. I could talk about how one of the ‘teachers’ who was there that day was moved to the high school and I had to see that classroom every damn day.

Our traumas are equally valid at the end of the day. They still have no goddamn business talking about these things. I never claimed to know ANYTHING firsthand about SA. But I did, even as a young teen, watch hours upon hours of TED talks to at least try to understand. And I only did that because the sole teacher that holds my future in her hands told me I had to fix this*.

Tell me, what the hell else was I supposed to do on that day in October 2021? What else could I have done?

I can tell you what my dear friend could have done in July 2023, that’s for sure.

I don’t know where I’m going to go from here. I’ll discuss what I can when I can. But I’ll end this here.

—TG

* This statement needs context. After making the account we were approached by the school’s theatre account and told to stop. We were requested to come in and say our piece, we did. We revealed our identities in the process. We then heard about our principal getting threatened and that’s when the “you have to fix this” came in. One thing lead to another and, using what I had learned from those TED talks, I basically came up with a therapy route for students who had been affected by r*pe or abusive relationships. I presented it to a large group of administrators, teachers, and counselors. I was congratulated and told I did a good job and discussions would be started on implementing it. I stopped speaking about it after they said that because I truly did not feel comfortable speaking on behalf of people who survived something like that when I couldn’t relate.

If any further context is requested on any part of this post I can always clarify, save for some personal info.