Flashback.

The definition of "triggers" in psychology originated as stimuli which provoked flashbacks in post-traumatic stress patients. Moving further & further down intellectual hierarchies, until finally making its way to Tumblr, the "trigger" is now a term you (as a victim) can blanket over whatever makes you uncomfortable. It's been a hot-button issue for those of us with no lives outside of the Internet, ever since Susannah Breslin concluded that trigger warnings just don't work, because the warning in & of itself is a trigger.
     But when I found out what a "trigger warning" was, I was already familiar with the concept, albeit not by name; I went to a high school that had a written policy about trigger warnings. We called it "third-party harassment."

Flashback. TW: weed. And trigger warnings. But mostly weed.

It's 2008--November of 2008, and I'm a sixteen-year-old high school senior attending alternative school in Madison, Wisconsin.
     One of Madison's fun facts is that the Great Midwest Marijuana Harvest Festival takes place there every November, and every November at least half of the Shabazz High student body smokes weed on State Street that day with full legal protection from police.

To sidetrack, and drudge up some vaguely-relevant high school drama, there had been a dispute around that time between two students. It boiled down, basically, to our school's "third-party harassment" policy; wherein, if a student was made uncomfortable overhearing a conversation, and the people in the conversation didn't stop, they would be suspended.
     At the time, I was going through some "trigger warning"-type issues myself; however, it made more sense to me to just remove myself from things that made me uncomfortable, rather than draw attention to myself by being uncomfortable. That, and I thought (and still do) that a "third-party harassment" policy was the worst thing to enforce in an institution where students just years away from being legal adults (if they weren't already).

To baby-blanket teenagers in a world where you can just tell someone to stop indirectly making you uncomfortable? To say that you have a greater right to tell others that they don't have the right to do something that indirectly makes you uncomfortable? What the fuck kind of life skills is that?
     So, after Harvest Fest, most of Shabazz came back to school that Monday still-stoned and draped in 420-friendly body decorum. My poetry teacher took a moment to explain that, even though most of us were either active participants or supportive of Harvest Fest, some of us weren't--and that the pot leaf pins & patches could be taken as quite offensive, especially to anyone seeking treatment for drug & alcohol abuse. "It might not be that big of a deal to you," she said, "but I have a friend who struggled for a long time with a marijuana addiction."

I blinked twice. That's a bummer. Then I raised my hand.
     "Since we're bringing it up, I'd like everyone to know I have a non-specified eating disorder, and it's really offensive to me when people talk about food."
     The whole class turned to glare at me.
     "So, can we just, like, not talk about food anymore?"
     My ex-boyfriend, one of the few other Shabazzoids who wasn't a de facto bleeding heart, burst out laughing.
     Flashback: we had class that day and no one ever said anything to me about "third-party harassment" ever again.