I watched two episodes of Making a Murderer today. I will probably finish the series, because I have a relentless need to fit in with a bunch of strangers on the internet who do not know I exist, and because it's pretty interesting! And yet, I will do so knowing that each and every episode of the show will fill me with dread and possibly send me into an existential crisis. You see, I have been given a brain that cannot handle even the slightest bit of uncertainty. I've had full meltdowns over gloomy weather forecasts, I constantly assume any ailment on my body is going to spell out my untimely death, and don't even get me started on the whole "is there life after death?" thing - I've had to lock myself in bathroom stalls to get myself to calm down over it. Truthfully, I don't really know what's wrong with me. I am guessing I have some kind of anxiety disorder, likely some form of OCD, but I can't get myself to a doctor because I'm convinced they're going to tell me I'm an idiot who's making it all up. Also, that shit's kind of expensive.
ANYWAY! I'm not sure where I'm going with this, but those two episodes of Making a Murderer gave me that familiar feeling I get whenever I've tried to watch shows like CSI or Law & Order or oh, Jesus, Criminal Minds. Especially goddamn Criminal Minds. They ZOOM IN on open wounds! Why are they allowed to do that?! Crime drama has always unsettled me to an extreme degree. I remember when my parents would watch crime documentaries and procedurals when I was a kid, and they would always just make me feel terrified. Part of that was normal childhood fear, the kind you get as a kid slowly realizing the world isn't what Disney movies told you it would be. But even as a little kid, the idea that human beings could commit such heinous crimes bothered me in a really deep way. My mind couldn't process it. "Well, if the people who do this are human, and I'm human, then what's the difference between me and them?". That thought would set me off for days. I would watch CSI and I would get legitimate anxiety if the revealed killer was someone I found myself identifying with at all through-out the episode. Hell, even if it was shallow, like they were short or had brown hair or something, I would think "oh my God, that short, brown-haired dude killed that mailman and stuffed him into a fish tank. I'm short and I have brown hair. Could I do that?!". Even at a young age, I realized this fear was completely irrational, and yet the hilarious thing about anxiety is that you can continue to worry about something even as you're totally aware it is completely and utterly irrational.
Anyway, these fears intensified as I got older, and they hit a breaking point sometime in college, when I spent a summer paralyzed in fear that I would one day find my inner serial killer and go on a rampage, often triggered by things like ho-hum episodes of network crime procedurals or movies starring dirty looking white men. I didn't really think I would be a serial killer, but the idea that I was physically capable of being one was enough reason for me to think it was a possibility, which was enough reason for my brain to run with that fear and send itself into a spiral of depression and horror. I pictured myself sitting in prison as my friends and family members gave interviews about "what a great person they thought I was" and how "they just aren't sure what happened." I pictured myself sitting in a cell thinking about my hopes and dreams, dashed - thanks to my secret destiny of being a murderer that had been with me since a child and had suddenly come out with absolutely no warning or reason whatsoever. In my mind, being a deranged killer was something you were born with, something that you just were, and that if I was having these thoughts, it meant I was one of the unlucky chosen ones. Again, half of me knew this was ridiculous. Half of me wanted to take my brain out, smack it, and ask what the fuck was wrong with it. But the half that was thinking these thoughts overtook the rational half. As I've learned, an OCD mind is one that gets stuck on a particular thought and can't let go. Lots of people probably have the passing thought of "whoa, what if I was a killer? That'd be weird, right?", but someone with an OCD mind thinks "wait, why did you think that? Do you want to think that? Is this a sign? Are you choosing to think that?". This thought process was not exclusive to the idea of committing heinous crimes - I would watch shows where a character loses their mom and spend the next few weeks saying "I love you" to my own mother every time I saw her, in fear it could be the last time. (And I lived at home, so I saw her a lot.) I would watch a movie where someone got into a car crash and be afraid of even being in a car for the conceivable future.
But, naturally, imaging myself as a murderer was the most disturbing to me, and therefore left the biggest impact.It got to the point where I would dread waking up every morning and hearing this cycle of fear repeated over and over again, so I decided to do something about it. I did self-help exercises and minor forms of cognitive behavior therapy - anything I could find on my own, because I was too scared and too broke to afford actual therapy. And, surprisingly, it helped. A lot. I don't have those thoughts anymore, although my OCD tendencies tend to pop up in other (less dramatic and awful) forms. I've accepted the reality that: yes, we are all physically capable of doing terrible things, but if we don't want to, then we don't, and that's that. There is no part of me that wants to be a serial killer, so I'm not going to be one. Life is cool that way!
And yet, when I watch things like true crime shows, the uncertainty of it all sort of re-aggravates my brain. After I watched those two episodes of Making a Murderer, I drove my girlfriend home, carefully making sure that no one around was murdering anyone and could potentially pin it on me. Yes, I knew this probably wasn't going to happen. But it could. I mean, it's not impossible. It's not science fiction. It's not unicorns. It's happened to other people. It happened to Steven Avery, once, maybe twice. And as much as my brain knows that worrying about this is ridiculous, I think the reason Making a Murderer (and Serial, ect) is that everyone, a little bit, has that fear. And everyone knows that fear is mostly irrational, but it's a little justified. Because we're all human beings. Steven Avery is a human being. He's a human being who is accused of some terrible things, a human being who had some terrible things happen to him, and a human being who actually has done some terrible things. Let's be honest, he's not someone most of us would go and grab a drink with. But he's a human being, just like the rest of us. And both he and us deserve to live in a world where you can feel reasonably safe that if you don't commit a crime, you won't be imprisoned for it. It's not too much to ask for. And I guess that's why I'm going to finish Making a Murderer. It'll wreak my brain, but at least I'm more equipped to handle it now than I used to be. One of the most effective tools for treating anxiety is exposure therapy. I guess this is my exposure therapy. This terrible thing could happen to me. It probably won't! There's a 95% chance it won't! But it could. And running towards that fear, rather than running away from it, is what's going to keep me healthy in the long run. We all need to run towards that fear, because we should live in a world where that fear is as ridiculous as it could possibly be, and the only way to do that is to watch these things. Educate ourselves. Get angry about the system. Get angry about the system by realizing that you are not immune from the system. You can be Steven Avery. He's not an alien, he's not a monster, he's a human being. He might be a human being who killed someone. He might not be. You're a human being, you haven't killed anyone (hopefully!), but who knows? One day someone could think you did. It's a scary thought, but it's reality, and we need to be aware of that in order to accept it and make it right for all of us.
So, yes, I guess what I'm saying is, Making a Murderer is AMERICA'S exposure therapy, and...oh...no. This is totally a hot take on Making a Murderer, isn't it?
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