triggers and depression

When I hear accounts of abductions such as this one, I'm intensely appalled but also darkly fascinated. I feel pulled to learn more of the story, more details. (A part of this I think, is that my own fantasies tend to revolve around bondage and torture and such.)

In a similar way, I'm both fascinated and repulsed by accounts of the Nazis and the Holocaust, and other sordid incidents from history and recent times.

Yet I've learned (somewhat) to avoid reading/listening/watching those kind of things, due to the deeply negative impact they have on my emotions.

When I do start paying attention, reading, digging into the details, then my mind has a very hard time letting go of it. The horror stays with me, and my mind keeps dwelling on it, over and over again, and everything starts to feel very grim. I know that the world is full of other horrors too, not just that one, and all the horrors are too much to bear. How can anyone stand to live in such a horrible world full of horrible people and horrible situations?

It often takes several days for these feelings to start fading away again, and to get distance from them.

So, when I first heard about that particular abduction 2 years ago, I didn't dig into the details.

But while driving home last week, there was an NPR radio piece with an interview with 2 of the survivors, and I listened to it. Then I got home and turned it off, and avoided researching more of the story even though my mind had plenty of questions about it.

With these kind of sexual abductions, it's nearly always females that are the victims, and males that are the perpetrators. This gets me so angry, so disgusted. Men preying on women and girls, over and over again, all around the world, all throughout history.

In some countries, this kind of thing isn't even necessarily considered a crime. Husbands locking up their wives, beating them, raping them... these women, even if they escape, can't just call 911 and be saved. There's no place for them to go. In some places, women aren't even allowed to go out in public without a male escort.

And then there are things like Gamergate and online trolls and street harassment. Lesser evils, but still, largely men preying on women. So damn disgusting.

It was also my foster sister's birthday last week. I stopped by her house in the evening to visit. She happened to have a movie playing on the TV in the background which seemed to be about some girl who had been abducted by some bearded guy. It had the quality of an old movie from the 70s. I did my best to ignore it while chatting with my sister. At one point she exclaimed "Is he torturing her?! He is!". I continued to ignore it. With my back turned to the TV, it was actually pretty easy to ignore. I only saw a few brief glimpses of it, and the volume was low enough that I didn't consciously hear any of the dialog. I thought I heard the name of the girl one time, though - "Amanda Bean". After leaving my sister's house, I put it out of my mind.

On Saturday, I watched the Iranian movie "Taste of Cherry". It's about a man who has decided to kill himself. I found the movie likeable, yet not very uplifting. Most of the scenes in the movie seemed quite bleak. Overall, it was neither a downer nor an upper. It was interesting and gave me a few things to think about.

On Sunday, I was feeling rather down - still partially related to the NPR show and thoughts around that. I did something unusual that day - I went outside and laid down on the concrete driveway, in the sunshine. If the dogs can enjoy the sunshine like that, why shouldn't I? I dozed, feeling the warmth, watching the sky, listening to the breeze. Getting some Vitamin D. Supposed to be good for you, against depression. Supposed to make you feel better.

It didn't make the world seem any less horrible, but it was relaxing. I finally got up and went back inside, as Qiao and I were going to take my mom out to eat for Mother's Day.

In the car, driving to the restaurant, guess what topic my mom starts talking about? She had been watching a movie the other day, about some girls who had been abducted. (I'm thinking, really? Is she really talking about this? For Mother's Day??? Why am I being hounded by that topic?) I don't know if she saw the same movie my sister was watching or some different one... what she described was girls being abducted as toddlers and held captive, but actually not being mistreated. It sounded odd.

Then she mentioned again about how I had nearly been abducted when I was a toddler. Some guy had taken my hand in the subway station and started walking away with me. She had lost track of me for that moment, then ran after me in a panic and pulled me away from the guy.

In the car, she patted my shoulder and commented on how lucky she/I was, that he didn't get away with me. I gritted my teeth in silence and waited for the topic to change.

When I got home afterwards, I was again curious. What movie had my mom been watching, and was it the same one my sister had been watching?

I found no abduction-related results for the name Amanda Bean. Yet Lifetime recently premiered a movie about the Cleveland abduction, one of the survivors of whom was Amanda Berry. So maybe that is what my sister was watching after all.

Then I read a few news articles and the Wikipedia page about that case. Just a few pages to answer a few questions in my mind. I'm not going to watch the movie or read the book, if there is one. I don't want to know all the details.

And then last night, I even dreamt about it too. Fer gawd's sake.

Can it get out of my head now? Can it?? I debated writing a post about this, as writing about it requires thinking about it.

But a part of what I wanted to write about, is that I think it is a sign of a depressed or dysthymic mind, in how the mind can't easily let go of topics like that. How those unpleasant thoughts keep repeating themselves again and again, making you feel worse and worse. Whereas good thoughts come and go, and don't stay and don't particularly make you feel better.

Tonight, Qiao watched 2 Criminal Minds episodes. One about some guy killing people by driving them down, and another about a guy killing people with anthrax. Those didn't bother me at all. They seem like pure fiction. (I guess that must be how it feels for other people when they watch movies about things that affect me so badly, as otherwise why would anyone want to watch those kind of movies?)

Those kind of topics aren't triggering for me, whereas many other topics are triggering for me.