tw: CSA

OK SO perks of being a wallflower depicts the slow, eventual breakdown of the walls put up by the brain between consciousness, and memories of abuse and if you don’t pick up on the signs in the book and esp the film, yeah, the end will probably shock tf out of you !!!

tw: csa, abuse ment

and it’s meant to, not for shock value, but bc the entire point is to depict how complex the relationship between the brain; body and trauma is. you don’t always remember it and esp if you were a child, your brain represses shit so you can survive

but the key word here is survive. charlie survives his trauma bu living on the outskirts of his own life, barely connecting to people outside his own family, bc of trauma *he can barely remember*, but feels through depression and “random” attacks of crying and anxiety

that was me! that is many, many people who don’t even know they’ve been abused until, bc of a trigger or the brain just imploding a la Charlie’s biggest breakdown Perks, they remember everything. and at that point, your entire life is basically ripped apart

no, the film didn’t depict all this anywhere NEAR as well as the book, and i personally have some issues w/ it esp from the POV of being a writer w/ PTSD;; but hating a fictional portrayal of abuse + trauma bc it doesn’t fit your understanding of them....? hmmm

charlie was me. traumatised, terrified of their own brain, knows something is wrong but can’t figure out what it is, me. and i only realised it *after* i remembered what’d REALLY happened to me, after years of pain. there would be more to come. but i never forgot that book

so, yeah. i have my issues with the film, less so the book, but they’re among the first and only pieces of media i’ve ever read to even try to handle trauma bc of CSA and i’m so grateful i found it when i did. i really am

and! i wanna say that to anyone who, like i did once i started remembering, questions themselves, how bad it was, if they’re “allowed” to be traumatised, thinks of themselves as eternally tainted and dirty: you’re not. you’re not lying. you’re not poisoned. you’re a survivor

[me doing a 180 back to this thread] AND another thing i just realised is that especially in the book, Charlie is more obviously an unreliable narrator. there’s a palpable energy of avoidance and denial that gets more and more frantic and over that the movie doesn’t do much with