Depression, Trigger Warnings, and BoJack Horseman

Trigger warning.

It’s a term that’s lost a lot of its power and meaning over the last few years. Originally, its intent was for people to take care in their actions and words around people with diagnosed phobias or post-traumatic stress disorder. After all, it’s a pretty shitty to make loud noises around someone who got back from a warzone, or to surprise someone who’s been in an accident, or raise your voice to someone who’s survived abuse, or startle someone who’s been a victim of assault or violence. Being triggered could cause someone to shut down completely, become violent, hypervigilant, or worse. Today, “trigger warning” has been overused so often that a “trigger warning” usually means the subject matter might make the audience upset, and from there it’s a fool’s gold brick road of fallacies that usually leads to severe social conservativism and/or toxic masculinity.

But trigger warnings also let you know what you’re getting into so you’re not blindsided and have an attack. The first season of Jessica Jones, for example, was considering triggering for survivors of sexual assault and domestic abuse, not because David Tennant played every survivor’s worst nightmare in Kilgrave, but because Krystin Ritter so accurately portrayed the behaviors and mannerisms of a survivor still in the midst of hypervigilance that many who watched her were triggered.

I couldn’t make it past episode 2 and had trouble sleeping for weeks. Ritter’s performance put me right back to that night where my ex finally left after the latest beating and didn’t return. I developed cynophobia (fear of dogs) as a result, and soon after swung into a near suicidal depression.

I want to say “I’m better now, peeps, don’t worry about it!”, but I have to say that struggling against depression is work. And most of the time it’s work that you don’t even know that you’re doing. It’s a Sword of Damocles hanging perilously above your head, and most of your day is spent distracting yourself from the fact that it’s there. Getting “triggered” is someone pointing out that dangling sword to you, whether intentionally or not, and then your whole day or week is wrecked because either you’ll freak out, knowing that your reality will come crashing down any second, or give in to despair because the sword will fall and you know that no one will give a damn one way or the other. Most days, you’re just trying to find any sort of win, no matter how pathetic it might seem.

Stupid Piece of Shit

• Source: BoJack Horseman, Season 4, Episode 6

So now I’m going to talk about BoJack Horseman. It’s a Netflix original series, animated, but it’s by no means appropriate for kids. Will Arnett voices a has-been actor living off the residuals of a shitty 80s sitcom. He’s an alcoholic, a drug-user, a sex-addict, and suffers from major depression. BoJack Horseman, to put it most simply, is a carnival of human misery where any light at the end of the tunnel is quickly snuffed out by BoJack’s own self-destructive actions and tendencies.

It’s a show I had trouble watching, understandably, but I was able to separate myself from identifying too much with Bojack. I don’t drink, after all. I don’t do drugs. I’m asexual, so becoming a self-destructive sex fiend isn’t a worry for me. Also, I’ve never been in a Full House ripoff, so that’s a plus on any day of the week. Some episodes I needed my fiancé there to comfort me that no, my life is nowhere near the trainwreck that BoJack’s is, that I’m far more like Diane than him, or at least Todd, my fellow ace.

And then season four rolled around, new plotlines, new threads and connections for BoJack to ruin, to fuck up and drown himself in a pool of alcohol. I’d been a little desensitized by this point, preferring to focus on other characters. I thought I’d be cool watching the show alone for an episode or two.

It’s obvious from the first episode that BoJack is depressed, but you can convince yourself that it’s not like your depression. BoJack is just a drunk and a drug addict and whatever, it’s not like yours, so that damned Sword over your head will just stay right where it is. Every time he fucks up, there’s an explanation that you can nod at, almost smugly, while he rationalizes, while you rationalize his rationalization to yourself. After all, it’s not like they’d show the inner voice that constantly lets you know that you’re a faker, worthless, a hack, talentless, ugly, dumb, self-destructive, unlikeable, annoying, irritating, that your friends see you as a “friend”, and let’s not forget lazy and too fucked up to be fixed or saved.

And that, of course, is when I saw the episode “Stupid Piece of Shit”.

The episode is, of course, like any episode of BoJack Horseman in that you watch him continually screw up and push everyone around him away, be combative and hostile, the filter on his words eroding before the viewer’s eyes, forcing the pity and sympathy not on him, but on the people around him who have to put up with his shit. Only this time, Will Arnett also provides the voice of his depression, giving a constant play-by-play of every second of his day, a voice that is so goddamned tired of trying to get you off your ass to get your life back on track, and then browbeating you because you failed even the simplest tasks it set for you. Again.

“Stupid Piece of Shit” is probably one of the most accurate depictions of depression since Allie Brosh’s essay on the same subject. It’s understandable why it took my fiancé a few days to drag me out of that hole.

Exposure and Erosion

So every now and then, I watch it again. I read the Brosh essay again. Not because it’s going to cure me or anything, but because I need to apply my critical eye to them. I have to so completely dissect their portrayals of depression so I can find the differences, however minute. Unlike Brosh, my depression wasn’t so crippling I couldn’t leave the house. Unlike BoJack, it wasn’t my voice that was berating me and bullying me constantly, it was…. Well, everyone I knew, but at least when my own mental voice piped up to say “fuck you”, it wasn’t directed at me. It’s slaving away, spending hours when you know you could be doing something productive to instead put yourself through weird, contortionist mental gymnastics to find any kind of progress on the depression front.

It’s exhausting, but every time, like exercise, it gets a tiny bit easier, the emotional soreness isn’t as pronounced, my brain tracks through the entire episode and essay until they become just… stories, parts of a larger narrative. It’s a method that I don’t recommend, because it doesn’t make much sense, no matter what kind of analogy I try to force it into, but it’s a way to fight off that dark cloud for another day, ignore the dangling sword, erode the sharp edges of the past with time and exposure. When I face it now, it still hurts, there’s still that sigh and knowing nod when BoJack bullies himself to not have cookies for breakfast, but still does it anyway because just… fuck everything.

But, it’s not as bad as last time, or the time before. I’m still at work, doing my job and when I get students I’ll put on the customer-service smile and for 45 minutes forget about the sword above my head.

I’ll take that win.