I love true crime, and disaster documentaries, and crime procedurals. My husband thinks my interest is a little baffling. “Baby, why do you watch this stuff when you know you have anxiety?” Well, a couple of reasons: one, it’s fascinating and I enjoy it. My interest in true crime, et. al. predates the onset of my mental health problems. (Blame that early, parentally irresponsible, exposure to Unsolved Mysteries and Rescue 911 in the 90s.) And two, it’s part of a complex coping mechanism that can actually help lessen my anxiety by giving me the illusionary feeling of being prepared for the worst. It’s almost as if I can shield myself and those I love from terrible things with the knowledge of the absolute worst case scenario. (I know this is a logical fallacy. Just bear with me.)

My fascination with true crime in particular started shortly after I witnessed a horrible crime for myself. I was young and too ill-equipped to cope with the trauma I had experienced. Like many survivors, the idea that I could arm myself with knowledge of how bad the world can actually get occurred to me organically over time. That was over twenty years ago, but my fascination with the genre has persisted, and is what lead me to start listening to a new podcast a few months ago, called My Favorite Murder. This podcast, produced by Feral audio and featuring Karen Killgariff and Georgia Hardstark, is every late-night conversation you’ve had with your best friend after watching a horror movie or catching up on grim news stories. It’s true crime and comedy coming together in the holiest of unholy unions. I was instantly hooked.

I loved the podcast right away, but I knew I needed to take it easy and avoid binge-listening. I am already a regular consumer of other true crime media, and I am aware that I have to ration myself or risk an emotional crash. I’m one of those “highly sensitive personality” people you may have heard about — sometimes I empathize a little too much and a little too strongly. I’m just hard-wired that way. So, that plus PTSD, anxiety, and bipolar disorder can be a potent cocktail. Many times I have had to stop watching a show, return a book, or unplug from a story because it became too triggering for me. I usually don’t mind missing out. If it’s a news story or a true crime story, I can usually find out the interesting bits by researching the event using sources that are less graphic. That being said, trigger warnings are nice. It takes so little and offers so much potential relief. For instance, one of my other favorite true crime podcasts, Sword and Scale, not only offers a trigger warning at the beginning of each episode, they even tell you the nature of the potential trigger. So if you, like me, find violence against children particularly abhorrent, you know to skip this episode and listen to the one about Ted Bundy instead. Win-win!

Recently on the Facebook group page for My Favorite Murder, someone suggested having a document to keep track of potential trigger warnings for each episode of the podcast. She suggested it as a kindness to those in the fandom who live with PTSD and offered to do the bulk of the work herself. Stand-up gal, in my humble opinion. But because this is the Internet and we simply cannot have nice things, she was immediately dog-piled on.

le sigh.

It is a universal but often unacknowledged truth that human beings struggle to see the value in things that don’t personally effect their lives (I’m looking at you, anti-gay/anti-trans rights dickholes), but this sentiment coming from a group of people that are supposedly all about helping each other feel safe in an unsafe world is just preposterous.

In the early episodes of the podcast, the hosts, Karen and Georgia, speak to this issue directly when they explain how talking over true instances of horrible depravity and human aberration helps them feel as if they have some modicum of control in the chaos, because to know about what humanity is capable of is to be prepared, in a sense. The tag line of the show reflects this:

The Facebook fan page is replete with stories of listeners, usually women, who took the lessons of their fallen sisters to heart: “I said FUCK POLITENESS and got the fuck out” of a dangerous situation that might have otherwise ended in her being harmed.

These stories are celebrated with thousands of Likes and comments, but for some reason, when the hive mind is pushed to recognize that the “stay sexy don’t get murdered” message of the podcast is sometimes inaccessible for those individuals who have actually been victims of trauma, people get pissy.

While I was watching this conversation unfold on the fan page, it occurred to me that I don’t know why nuerotypical, able-bodied persons get so touchy when people with illnesses and disabilities start asking for accommodations. It’s as if our presence makes them so uncomfortable that the mere suggestion of it is too much to handle: “No I will NOT give you any trigger warnings. It interferes with my ability to pretend you don’t exist!”

Perhaps it isn’t that they want to ignore us, but they are actually hyper-aware of our existence and are thereby deeply offended by our collective “weakness”: “The world owes you nothing. Nobody treats me with kid gloves, so why should you be the exception?” This is actually the most common refrain I see from people who criticize the movement for ending the stigma surrounding mental illness. Their comments typically take the form of “well, just don’t do the thing” or “why are you so sensitive/sad/anxious?” or “it’s all in your head”. “If you don’t like/can’t participate in X, do something else.” “Pick yourself up by the bootstraps!” “You could ‘mind over matter’ this problem if you really wanted to.” The list of microaggressions is infinite. All of the typical victim-blaming bullshit that puts the onus of responsibility squarely back in the shoulders of the disadvantaged party to not only justify and defend their experience, but also to prove their need for accommodation and their right to be a full, equal participant in the world around them. Apparently, some people don’t see the value in equal access — because the world ought to be more dog-eat-dog, every man for himself, and fuck PC culture too, right? I mean, until you yourself need public assistance or SSDI or find yourself part of a marginalized group, that is.

Honestly, why are people without disabilities so threatened by the other half? It isn’t as if we’re really asking anything substantial of you, just some compassion and some consideration. It doesn’t cost you anything, except perhaps a little time and a little energy. Whats the problem with that? This situation in particular is even more confounding: the poster was asking nothing of anyone! Simply posing a suggestion that she thought could be helpful.

Trivializing the experiences of survivors and those with disabilities is not only cruel to the individual, it is also undermines our society as a whole. When we cite “PC culture” and scream obscenities at “social justice warriors”, we are doing ourselves a disservice. Instead of empowering those who have been victimized, we are emboldening the perpetrators to continue mistreating others and shirking responsibility for their actions. The world is scary and dangerous enough, what with super volcanoes being overdue to detonate, and serial killers on the rampage, and Donald Trump in the White House; do we really need to make our surroundings more hostile by attacking each other? Let alone attacking each other over the mere suggestion of increased compassion for others — that just doesn’t make one lick of sense. We can do better, y’all.