So, I've been reflecting on my college days a lot watching the young people coming out of college today. I'm not sure if I'm just becoming a crotchety old person or if I'm right to be exasperated, but I'm basically getting pissy about some of my choices in college in the light of how people today are using the same exemptions and considerations I got to silence political dissenters.
In particular, I can't help but think about the exemption I got to not write about my family history because of my PTSD. I had a pretty fucked up childhood. Think FLDS levels of fucked up, I can't think of anything that happened or allegedly happened in the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints that didn't also happen to me, although I wasn't raised in the FLDS in particular. As a result, I have (professionally diagnosed, not self-diagnosed) PTSD from my shitty, fucked up childhood and I am on PTSD medications to control the symptoms. I took a lot of courses that asked me to write papers about my family and childhood, and I asked my psychiatrist at the time to write a letter to the disabilities office at my school so I could get alternate assignments, because talking about my family life was making me suicidal. She did and it made my college days run a lot smoother. Was it partially laziness that made me get the exemption? Yeah, probably, but I had almost been put on academic suspension for being so suicidal, and I did always do an alternate assignment (usually writing about a family in a video or book instead of my own family).
I also think about my friend, whose father, a convicted serial killer on death row, molested her. One day the teacher unexpectedly turned off the lights to show a movie and my friend had a panic attack. I went outside to sit with her and listen to her because I understood her trauma. I was the one who helped her calm down.
We were the kind of students that safe spaces were created for. We were the kind of students who the exemptions to certain assignments were designed for. We were the kind of students who actually suffered from trauma. So when I see people like Trigglypuff
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y69tkCbeC5oor these people
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6pIhwBgvmUusing those considerations, those privileges, those appeals to the school faculty's kindness to shut up people--people, mind you, who I disagree with, but who I don't think have committed the same kinds of crimes as my parents or my friend's dad--I am appalled. I can't help but to regret whatever part I played in making those spaces, in asking for those exemptions, because even though I know that I needed them, I know that my friend needed them, I can't believe how they're being used. And then I see bullshit like this
law school students demand trigger warnings for class contentand this
students try to ban a feminist from speaking for not being the right kind of feministor this
students demand a room with puppies where they can hide from someone so sweet her nickname is base momand I just want to bang my head on a wall. I feel like I brought a monster into this world by asking for help for my real, existing medical conditions caused by my real experiences. Then again, that's how I usually feel, because my parents always believed I was literally a demon who had taken human form so I could serve as a portal through which evil entered the world. Fuck, I'm off to eat ice cream and cry.
Topic: I Regret My Exemption