(no subject)
Childhoods should not contain Nam-style flashbacks.
It's a thought I've had a lot. I had a pretty traumatic upbringing, so at any given point in time, I have a myriad of triggers pop up that I didn't even know I had. Low-register voices from another room (read: loud neighbors in an apartment building), loud knocking on a door, fireworks, shouting...anything like that will send me into a straight panic. I've learned to deal with it, but what I haven't figured out how to handle is these random bursts of suppressed or buried trivial moments that have no real significance, but abruptly start plaguing me.
I was playing Wolfenstein 3D earlier and was puttering around the first episode when I suddenly recalled myself at a young child, watching my biological father play the game. According to Wikipedia, Wolf3D came out just a smidge before my 5th birthday, and I suspect I was likely either 5 or 6 when we obtained the game (and the computer; no small feat for poor folks). So of course, violence be damned, I wanted to play too. I wasn't very good at it, being a young child, and also being profoundly anxious and easily startled even at a young age, I would get scared often by what I was seeing. Combine that with some of the creepiest background music ever (it took me years after obtaining Wolf3D as an adult to play it with the music on instead of just the sound) and you have a recipe for endless nightmares. Long story short, I mostly spent my time watching my bio-dad play it.
I don't remember exactly what I said to initiate this conversation. It's possible I asked my bio-dad what a Nazi was, or who the man on all the walls was (Hitler), or what the images all meant (even as a child, with the OCD, I've always had an affinity for "even"-looking geometric imagery, so it's entirely possible I said something about the swastikas on the walls being pretty before I knew what they actually stood for). It's also wholly likely my bio-dad decided he just wanted to "teach" me things. He liked to do that, when he wasn't violent or depressive. He occasionally would decide to "teach" during a manic phase too, but you can imagine how well that would typically go (I have that to thank for my innate fear of dogs/rabies).
So he started trying to explain Hitler, the Third Reich, and the Holocaust to me in terms a five-year-old might comprehend. I was a very intelligent and precocious child, but there are some things that are just...difficult to explain in depth to a child. Hell, even many adults can't grasp the entire depth of heavy concepts like what happened during the Third Reich. So, naturally, he dumbed it down significantly.
It's also possible that part of it was dumbed down just by virtue of the fact that my biological father was not very educated at the time and came from a pretty racist background, so the fact that he was able to speak about this in a somewhat-comprehensive way that sought to impart on young me that racism at its core is dangerous & wrong is pretty astounding.
Regardless, I don't remember too many specifics from that "lesson". He told me that the bad man on the walls killed millions and millions of people because he didn't like them. I don't recall him ever using the term "Jewish" (and there was no mention of Slavic folks, Romani, homosexuals, disabled people, etc.), because I doubt I would've known what "Jewish" meant (we lived in a little nothing town where the primary non-white people were Native Americans; I doubt there's even a synagogue in that area at all). However, he did stress the fact that Bad Man Hitler hated people who had dark hair, dark eyes, or dark skin, so he killed lots of those people.
He further emphasized this point by grasping a few of my then-dirty-blonde, fine, bone-straight tresses and saying "See, Hitler would have left you alone because you have pretty blonde hair and blue eyes, and are white."
Looking back on it, I wonder if that's why I have almost-exclusively only dated people with darker eyes/hair, and have been physically repulsed by the few blonde-blues I tried to give a chance. Maybe somehow, thanks to my biological father's disjointed "lessons", my subconscious always associates them with Nazis.
It's a thought I've had a lot. I had a pretty traumatic upbringing, so at any given point in time, I have a myriad of triggers pop up that I didn't even know I had. Low-register voices from another room (read: loud neighbors in an apartment building), loud knocking on a door, fireworks, shouting...anything like that will send me into a straight panic. I've learned to deal with it, but what I haven't figured out how to handle is these random bursts of suppressed or buried trivial moments that have no real significance, but abruptly start plaguing me.
I was playing Wolfenstein 3D earlier and was puttering around the first episode when I suddenly recalled myself at a young child, watching my biological father play the game. According to Wikipedia, Wolf3D came out just a smidge before my 5th birthday, and I suspect I was likely either 5 or 6 when we obtained the game (and the computer; no small feat for poor folks). So of course, violence be damned, I wanted to play too. I wasn't very good at it, being a young child, and also being profoundly anxious and easily startled even at a young age, I would get scared often by what I was seeing. Combine that with some of the creepiest background music ever (it took me years after obtaining Wolf3D as an adult to play it with the music on instead of just the sound) and you have a recipe for endless nightmares. Long story short, I mostly spent my time watching my bio-dad play it.
I don't remember exactly what I said to initiate this conversation. It's possible I asked my bio-dad what a Nazi was, or who the man on all the walls was (Hitler), or what the images all meant (even as a child, with the OCD, I've always had an affinity for "even"-looking geometric imagery, so it's entirely possible I said something about the swastikas on the walls being pretty before I knew what they actually stood for). It's also wholly likely my bio-dad decided he just wanted to "teach" me things. He liked to do that, when he wasn't violent or depressive. He occasionally would decide to "teach" during a manic phase too, but you can imagine how well that would typically go (I have that to thank for my innate fear of dogs/rabies).
So he started trying to explain Hitler, the Third Reich, and the Holocaust to me in terms a five-year-old might comprehend. I was a very intelligent and precocious child, but there are some things that are just...difficult to explain in depth to a child. Hell, even many adults can't grasp the entire depth of heavy concepts like what happened during the Third Reich. So, naturally, he dumbed it down significantly.
It's also possible that part of it was dumbed down just by virtue of the fact that my biological father was not very educated at the time and came from a pretty racist background, so the fact that he was able to speak about this in a somewhat-comprehensive way that sought to impart on young me that racism at its core is dangerous & wrong is pretty astounding.
Regardless, I don't remember too many specifics from that "lesson". He told me that the bad man on the walls killed millions and millions of people because he didn't like them. I don't recall him ever using the term "Jewish" (and there was no mention of Slavic folks, Romani, homosexuals, disabled people, etc.), because I doubt I would've known what "Jewish" meant (we lived in a little nothing town where the primary non-white people were Native Americans; I doubt there's even a synagogue in that area at all). However, he did stress the fact that Bad Man Hitler hated people who had dark hair, dark eyes, or dark skin, so he killed lots of those people.
He further emphasized this point by grasping a few of my then-dirty-blonde, fine, bone-straight tresses and saying "See, Hitler would have left you alone because you have pretty blonde hair and blue eyes, and are white."
Looking back on it, I wonder if that's why I have almost-exclusively only dated people with darker eyes/hair, and have been physically repulsed by the few blonde-blues I tried to give a chance. Maybe somehow, thanks to my biological father's disjointed "lessons", my subconscious always associates them with Nazis.