The Triggering of Deb Fillman

Imaging being triggered by an essay that wasn't even about you.

Oct 12, 2022

Deb Fillman - a homeschool advocate with a YouTube channel - didn’t know what to make of my essay about why people need to be triggered.

And, well, she got triggered by it. She even ignored this sage piece of advice to use the wisdom in the article to prevent herself from being triggered next time.

Alas. You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.

Deb, in fact, got so bent out of shape that, between the hours of 1am eastern when I posted the essay, and 10am eastern when I woke up, she found my essay (even though I’ve blocked her), read my essay, seethed over my essay, and posted a 30-tweet-long thread about me and my essay on Twitter.

I’ve documented the entire Twitter thread at the end of this post so you can see the triggering for yourself.

Deb wasn’t mentioned in my essay. No one was mentioned in my essay. And still, the simple contents of it were enough to cause Deb to write a full public response before she had even had coffee.

I mean…you have to admire the motivation.

In Deb’s case, the reason she’s triggered by me giving sage life advice to people is that Deb self-triggered into believing that I am a monster. Therefore, in order to maintain her delusion, she needs to find a way to paint everything I do as evil. Of course, if I’m the ultimate evil, that means Deb must be the ultimate good. Everything Deb says and posts publicly must have this lens - Karlyn is an evil, horrible monster and Deb is the perfect saintly voice we all need.

Except that she’s completely unhinged from reality.

So, the trigger for Deb was the fact that I dared to start a satirical self-help website. I could have literally written anything in the essay - the content was immaterial. The trigger for Deb was the content existing at all.

If you want to trigger someone, you have to understand how they perceive the world. Playing off of blind hatred is one of the easiest ways to trigger people because the person they hate can do almost anything - walk down the street, post a picture of themselves, express an opinion, hug a dog - and the person being triggered will respond as if the person they had has committed some mass atrocity.

If you want to find a reason to dislike something or someone, it is extremely easy to do so. Human beings are very good at reinforcing their existing perception, even if those perceptions had no basis in reality.

And if you want to avoid being triggered, you have to know emphatically that how others perceive the world shouldn’t influence how you perceive the world. If someone hates you, let them hate it. It should make no difference in your mood at all. There are billions of people in the world. That’s billions of other people who made like you. Just go hang with a different group.

I documented the full triggering of Deb Fillman in this stream, where I walk you through the triggering, her 30-tweet thread, and call out the absurdity of the situation.

Opportunities like this don’t come around all the time. It’s our job to learn to from it.