Speaking of art and being that I am very talkative today,
I shared my teenage trauma with a couple friends last night. Specifically the one where I was 15, and my friends online sat me down to watch the leaked Dnepropetrovsk maniacs murder video. Mid-retelling the story and how it led to my real gore phase where I spent the majority of my online time hanging out on websites dedicated to dead bodies and liveleaks of murders and accidents and deaths and torture, populated primarily by necrophiliacs which I didn’t understand at the time, I realised that was all retraumatization.
It’s always fascinated me how that video triggered that phase in me. I always wondered why, because it’s left me so fucked up for a lifetime seeing that shit. I just couldn’t stop. I kept going back. And it took me thirteen years to figure out that I was trying to regain control by repeating the exposure, I was trying to make sense of the trauma I’d been inflicted by desensitizing myself to the images and videos of extreme and often perverted violence.
I wonder how big part of who I grew up to be as an adult is a result of this exposure. My fascination with bones? The strange relief and sense of control I get from painting wounds, both on the canvas and on my skin? What about my fondness of scars and imperfections? The way I feel in control when I cut myself? The way I perceive vulnerability to violence and injury, illness and death attractive, not in a sexual sense but in the emotional, the way a creature or a character can captivate me by dying, being gutted, rotting away? The way the more decomposed and rotted a monster is, the more I will love her? The stillness and quiet I feel when I clean skulls and pick apart carcasses I find outdoors?
After this realisation I desperately want to know which parts of me were created from that one video I saw when I was young. I want to know how much it changed me. I want to know how much it changed me to learn the entire process of human decomposition and what men do to bodies when they’re alone and amongst each other, and knowing intimately that all of this is shared on websites that a 15 years old can access - and not only access, but frequent.
Thirteen years and I still get that feeling that I want to go back. I want to take a look because I’m curious because it gives me a sense of control and calm. I’m not curious anymore. I had my curiosity sated when I was a child. There’s nothing left to know. I just want to see more, seek it out on purpose. I haven’t been to the sites since I was 19, because around that age I’d figured out how badly it was battering my brain to see that over and over and over again. People aren’t meant to watch each other torn apart and decompose. Especially not teenagers. I don’t have the composure of a homicide detective and I never will. I can’t stomach the evil that people are capable of. I saw an uncensored photo of a murdered little girl on this fucking website of all places a few weeks ago. I couldn’t move or breathe for a while. I couldn’t get it out of my head. I couldn’t get it off my eyes even if I closed them. I couldn’t stop seeing it no matter how far I scrolled. I’ve seen too many, but it’s been so long it hit me in right in the trauma to see that again. I don’t want to see another. But I want to have control. Some part of me just wants to have control. It fascinates me the same way the thought of letting my body fall forwards off a rooftop does. I want to feel the fall. The sheer fucking desperation of having no way out.
I’ve never really talked about it anywhere, or to anyone. It’s a “fun fact” about me. “Hey, I used to visit sites that had pictures of murdered people on them”. Ha ha. It’s shocking so it’s funny, right? It has to be funny. I was 15 and a boy of 18 showed it to me. When it comes up how dangerous the Internet is to a young person, I tend to conveniently forget about this experience and state that I never saw or went through anything particularly bad when I was a kid online. After all, I sought this shit out - after the initial exposure - and nobody was holding me at gunpoint to watch it. So that was my own choice, right? I think of the men who hacked into my MSN Messenger and masturbated on webcams, and how I thought it was hilarious, and how I never felt threatened by it. So I say it wasn’t that bad. I was a smart girl, after all, I was in control of the situation. I let them put on a show until they started demanding I talk dirty to them, at which point I’d disconnect and block them. I liked to think I was in control.
I don’t think I was ever in control. I was a fucking child.
