"Goodbye Christopher Robin" is a movie that came for my fucking throat. I had been told several times that it was "extremely triggering" and to exercise extreme caution and knowing the context I fully knew what I was getting into.
I've been hyper focusing on Winnie the Pooh for the past few weeks so I finally watched it tonight and fucking christ.
There is so much shared trauma and so much is different and yet so much is the same. I remember especially as a stupid preteen I RESENTED C.R. Milne with a fiery burning passion for what felt like what was a betrayal, completely unable to separate how my trauma affected me with how his must have affected him and could not fathom how he could have "abandoned his childhood" and things that would have been my everything.
And ultimately it was because people always brought it up "oh he hated the books he wanted nothing to do with his toys he gave them away" as some edgy "childhood ruined" shit but never actually the full story. They fucking victim blamed him and acted like he was ungrateful and I completely swallowed the propaganda.
But with experience and processing of my own trauma I came to realize that the alienation was because our childhood traumas though similar were like opposite sides of the same coin and even though the outcomes of our sense of self could not have been more different in the end, the way our childhoods had been denied of us was virtually the same.
Especially the whole "people only care about a fake me that doesn't actually exist but is being forced into me" thing.
Like I was denied a proper childhood and as such latched onto the fantasy world as a source of identity and comfort while he was denied separation from his childhood and as such wanted nothing to do with it. His mental state is incomprehensible to me because it's the antithesis of mine but it comes from the same source and that is childhood trauma.
For me the fake boy was the one denied of a childhood that was made to be "an old soul" and for him the fake boy was the romanticized childhood that he could not escape from under the shadow of.
Also generational trauma just in general. His father was a more complicated and sympathetic individual than mine (who was straight up just a predator) and especially in the way the movie portrays it you can see that he's maladaptive coping through his own trauma using his son and it's just. Wow. Extremely identifiable and painful.
Also the mother acting like giving birth to this kid is enough to justify the level of control she exerts over him and the manipulation of A.A. Milne and the whole "wanted a daughter stuck with a son" thing is a gutpunch too. I try to be sympathetic towards her too because she's very clearly not coping with the fear that she's just going to lose her son like she lost her husband during WWI but she just lacks empathy for others seemingly. Like she resents her husband for "coming back wrong" when he literally has fucking PTSD.
And then to top it all off the only healthy relationship the kid has (with his nanny) is taken away because she stands up and says she won't allow him to be exploited anymore. Followed by him needing to go to school which is like being thrown to the fucking wolves.
Canadian public school system is bad enough, I know this, it made shit so much worse.
But goddamn fucking late 20th century English boarding school is like a pit of fucking demons. The British school system is one of the worst things ever created by mankind and pretty much exists solely to abuse children.
And how in the end all his father wanted was to stop what he went through from ever happening again and his son to his horror wants to be enlist just so he can be his own person. Trauma is a cycle. It keeps happening unless it is broken. Agonizing.
Ultimately it's a movie and like the memoir of C. R. himself we are just getting one window into the past and what truly happened so I want to be careful with how I process things but it's just a lot to take in.
Winnie the Pooh (both the original books AND the Disney version) had significant meaning in my younger life with the books instilling a lot of comfort and the Disney stuff serving as an early special interest alongside Dumbo (yeah, you can't choose your autism as a toddler) and dogs and penguins.
And in the end my compulsion to revisit this and finally tackle the movie about his life was because in the end I wanted to revisit both the books and the Disney content for creative inspiration for a story I am trying to write after not being able to write for years because of trauma and grief and finding out that my brain had repressed that one 1996 Disney movie because it related with an agonizing degree to my own trauma.
The movie did not touch on how his marriage was with his cousin or that he eventually took the residual checks but only to care for their disabled daughter. Or how he went completely no contact with his mother at one point. (His mother did not approve of his relationship with her brother's child because they hadn't been on speaking terms for like a decade(?) I also vaguely remember reading that one of his parents his mother I think was the product of something similar.) Which I mean. I think that is very important to the conversation. Because once again, unhealthy relationships and the cycle of abuse/trauma.
Also at one point C.R. Milne did an interview where he spoke about the neglect and abuse and his mother "was so upset she buried a statue of him in the yard so she wouldn't be able to look at it again." Which 1. What in the fuck and 2. Why do you have a statue of your estranged son?
I don't even know where I'm going with this or what I hope to gain by sharing it.
Processing trauma is good and all but I'm exhausted.
The entire time my brain keeps trying to go "HOLY SHIT LOOK AT THE TOY RECREATIONS. THEY'RE LIKE... SO GOOD. THEY LOOK LIKE THEY'RE ACTUAL COPIES OF THE STUFFED ANIMALS HOW DID THEY DO THIS YOU MUST FIND OUT" To try and pull me away from the trauma and I'm like "we can fucking wait to do that. Come on" fighting with myself.
Because yeah. Either they actually tracked down mint condition copies of the original stuffed animals or they skillfully recreated 1 for 1 replicas intended to look as close to what they theoretically would have looked like as possible.
And that's evidently the way I cope with things. Stuffed animals.
Shit man. Also my roommate has been pestering me and I'm trying so hard not to snap at him because I am going through it right now.
