SELF DESTRUCTION
This piece is demonstrating the headspace of my obsessive compulsions to look at gore. This compulsion began in my late teens when I was first exposed to gore online by mistake, someone reposted a video of a child being run over by a vehicle. It was horrible and graphic, but it was real. It is a cultural taboo to witness a real person die a graphic death. Terrified of death and the horrors of what can happen to one’s body, at the time, I believed that challenging myself to look at these photos and videos would give me a better understanding of the realities of the world and ultimately help me to appreciate every moment I have, knowing the true horrors of what could happen to anyone at any moment. I could become desensitized and grounded with the ugly truths of humanity and fate. Car accidents, gnarly infections, factory incidents, animal maulings, crime scene photos - all are terrifying and easily accessible online.
The “safest” place I discovered to look at gore was on a Reddit page titled r/fiftyfifty, with a fitting page description: “because choices matter.” Disturbingly, the page is formatted like a game. Each post is presented with a title and blurred image. The “game” is that you have a fifty fifty chance of being exposed to a graphic image, or something nice. The title tells you the two things you might see, formatted like this, for example: [50/50] An amazing slice of apple pie (SFW) | Motorcyclist explodes on impact with a car (NSFW)*. The blurred image underneath is so obscured that the viewer really cannot decipher which it is that they are looking at. The only way to find out for sure is to click on the image. To let your morbid curiosity get the best of you. But sometimes it truly is just a slice of apple pie or a nice sunset. Sometimes it was not. That is the game. It was “safe” to me because it gave me the element of control. I was not there to play this disturbing game, but here I can choose based on the title if I thought I could stomach the latter. Many other online gore sites lack this control element entirely, so I avoided them.
Speaking with my therapist, I was able to realize that this was not desensitizing me, not grounding me, but rather assisting the intensity of intrusive thoughts. Now I was placing people I loved in these horrific scenarios, bombarding my thoughts constantly and feeling ridden with guilt and anxiety. This would in turn feed the urge to look at gore again to make sense of death. Thus creating the compulsion to continue this self destructive behavior.
*SFW: Safe For Work (not graphic), NSFW: Not Safe For Work (graphic)
-Beth Schueffner, 2023