by Anya Josephs

This post contains graphic descriptions of eating disorders that may be triggering to some readers.

As Sartre once said—hell is other people.

I read this in my theatre of the absurd class this semester. Presumably, I also heard it when I read the play in high school, but I don’t remember. Most of high school is a blur, mostly worrying about the next meal and whether I would eat it or skip it and what a disgusting failure I felt like even being hungry and how dizzy I was and whether or not I was going to make it to my next class or what I would say to get out of it if I fainted in the halls again.

Maybe that’s hell.

Hell is the bathroom on the first floor of my dorm building, the bathroom almost no one ever uses. Hell is gagging on my fingers and retching and choking and crying and finally, finally vomiting. Hell is looking in that first floor toilet and seeing that it’s not enough, not enough has come back up, looking down at myself and seeing that it’s still too much, and having to put those fingers down my throat again.

Hell is calorie counts in Hewitt and trying to tactfully explain to friends that we have to go to Ferris for dinner instead.

And hell is definitely, absolutely, the whining of a bunch of people who are worried that trigger warnings are going to stifle academic discourse. That people like me should just shut up and go away.  That, as “superuser” MarcEdwards says on the comments of a Huffington Post article on the subject, if I ever need a trigger warning, I am taking the place of a “more deserving student.” (There’s an even more insensitive take on the same issue here at the LA Times, and someone just totally missing the point at Slate.)

The one in four students who experience sexual assault, apparently, aren’t deserving. Child abuse victims aren’t deserving. I am one of 25% of women who struggle with an eating disorder. I got into Columbia University after taking the most challenging classes available to me in high school on 600 calories a day or less, acing the SATs, running 2 non-profits. I got admitted to this school the same way most other members of the elite 7% of admitted students in my year did— through determination, through hard work, and through (I’m tired of avoiding saying it) my own intelligence.

I am finally ready to say that I deserve my spot here. It took me years to feel worthy of it, but it’s true.

Because of this—not in spite of it—I have important contributions to make. There are many people like me, and many of them, too many of them, have been beaten by this illness. Some of them are dead. More of them are silenced, unable to keep up with the pressures of succeeding in a competitive academic environment despite the life-wrenching horror that is having an eating disorder.

(The same is true for people with other triggers, like abuse or sexual violence, but I prefer to speak from my own experience on something this personal.)

I can sit through a conversation that is triggering. I can do it. I can lose another hour, another day, another week of my life to the disordered thoughts and behaviors caused by a trigger—because that’s what “trigger warning” means. It means “warning: this might cause you to be hurt.” Not sad feelings, not offense, not controversy—if I say something triggered me, I mean it triggered an incident of binging, purging, or restricting. A trigger is something that actively harms something else and one of those other wonderful things I learned this year in school (it’s amazing how much you retain when you eat every day!) is that almost every moral philosopher significant to the history of thought agrees that it is immoral to hurt others if it’s more or less neutral in effect to you.

Seriously, the only exception I can think of to that one is Nietzche, and he was basically a proto-Nazi. Do you really want to be on his team? Do you really think strength is the best and only moral determiner?

Or do you want a world where people take care of each other? Where everyone’s experiences have value?

I am not asking for any sensitive subjects to be banned—far from it, I think we would be better off if we talked about these issues more. But, as some people have rightly pointed out above, as college students we are basically adults. Meaning I can act like an adult and quietly absent myself from class if I am told in advance that eating disorders are on the syllabus that day, that my friend can send a note to her professor explaining why she couldn’t do a reading containing a graphic rape scene instead of having her night ruined by a violent flashback, that students with all this rich wealth of experience can share those experiences with their academic communities from an informed and safe perspective.

I am asking instructors to take a moment out of their day to keep their students safe—or at least to do as Professor Essig did above, and publicly inform the world in a Huffington Post article that she doesn’t care about the emotional safety of her students so I could choose to avoid her classes if I attended her university.

Personally, I do not believe trigger warnings should be mandated. I do not ask or even want my university to require them of professors. But when I see people being so incredibly offended by the mere fact that some people need accessibility accommodations, I need to speak up.

I survived an eating disorder, but every time I am triggered into a relapse, there is a chance that this time it will be forever. There is a chance I will lose my voice. My health and safety, physical and emotional, is put at risk by people like Professor Essig who seem almost happy to be triggering their students. (By the way, the specific thing she mentions, pro-Ana imagery, is a huge trigger for me. If I’d been in that class, I almost certainly would have left in a relapse. Usually accidentally seeing something like that means restrictive behavior—that is, skipping all my meals—for about a day, sometimes two. How well do you think I’d be doing in school then?)

What really stifles discourse is making a huge portion of voices (and I should probably point out at this point that they are largely women’s voices) completely silent because the classroom is not a safe place for them or their experiences. How can we have real discourse about these issues when it is not conducted in a safe and thoughtful way towards the people most affected by it?

Not every professor should have to have trigger warnings—but they, and everyone, should make it clear that they are willing to provide warnings if anyone asks. (If they object so strongly to the phrase “trigger warning,” “content warning” serves just as well.) Maybe open up an anonymous form online. It’ll take a few minutes to deal with at the beginning of the semester, and will free students from the danger and pain of being triggered or the anxiety of knowing that at any moment hurtful comments could come out of nowhere. It’s a question of simple compassion, and I do not understand how any ethical person could claim that the right not to print four words: “content warning: Eating Disorders” on a syllabus is more important than someone else’s health and happiness.