Being Human: What Steven Universe Taught Me About Trauma
A retrospective understanding of how a cartoon helped its viewers process trauma.
“Full Disclosure”
There is a moment in Steven Universe Future where Steven, at the age of 16, goes to the doctor for the first time due to health issues he can’t explain. What follows is an entire episode dedicated to the lead character of the show being shown all of the physical damage that he took during the course of the story we have been watching since 2013. But the wounds are all healed. Technically speaking he’s perfectly healthy.
Then the conflict of the episode actually occurs when the doctor reveals what Steven is actually going through has to do with trauma, which sends Steven into a panic attack that is only calmed down when the doctor is forced to leave and his dad runs in to talk him down. And through all of this, and most of the multi-year spanning narrative leading up to this moment, Steven is still trying to insist to everyone that he is fine and there’s nothing to worry about.
It’s a moment I really like. Not only for being a clever narrative device but scenes from action movies and shows where characters are forced to see how much they have been through always lead to memorable and interesting scenes. But it particularly hit me because, minus the sci-fi elements, a very similar thing happened to me when I was a teenager.
In the late summer of 2013, I was taken to the ER for what I assumed was a severe asthma attack. I have a very long history of respiratory issues and several other problems that kept me hospitalized for what felt like the entirety of my childhood.
As I got older, the issues tended to be less severe and I got much better at hiding my symptoms so that most days I could appear “normal”. So, the hospital visits were much less consistent but still not out of the ordinary, and I was still expecting to be fine. And regardless of how bad my health ever got I still tried my best to insist that I was fine too.
Once the doctor and nurses started seeing me and running their basic tests to see what was up, it turned out that I was fine. I, like Steven, was technically healthy. And what they deemed to have happened was a bad panic attack, which in some cases feels very similar to an asthma attack.
What followed was a conversation I was not ready to have. They asked a lot of questions regarding my past. What sprung the anxiety attack? Have I ever tried to commit suicide? Several other ones that I just shrugged off as being not a big deal, outright lying, or dodging completely to try to change the subject. Social workers got involved which scared my parents and me.
It was… not a good experience.
I was not ready and didn’t have the words to talk about my mental issues. Even now I have a hard time discussing my issues with depression and anxiety with doctors, and I never sought out to get diagnosed for the exact issues I have because I have always been afraid to put a name to it. Doctors saying off the cuff that I have clinical depression has been happening since I was a teenager and even that is too much to hear for me.
“Here Comes a Thought”
After this hospital visit, I started going back to therapy. The theory is that I was so distraught and anxious from the fact that my life had been shaken up; my family and I had just moved from Florida to California. And while we had moved around a lot in the past, this was the biggest move.
But when it came down to it, and what therapists have been trying to pull out of me for years, is it wasn’t about moving. Actually, California was probably the place I liked living the most because of my group of friends and family there.
I was relatively happy thereafter the initial shock of change, which is saying a lot because I’m almost never happy, I’m much too anxious to ever let that emotion sneak in. The issue was about how I grew up.
When I think back to when I was a kid, the first memories to pop up are ones in which I was hospitalized and had no idea what was happening. Memories filled with sadness, fear, pain, loneliness, and exhaustion. And while I was never angry at the world or blamed anyone for that, it took me a long time to accept this aspect of my life. Even now I still have problems with it.
It’s not something I particularly like talking about for obvious reasons. It makes me uncomfortable and even talking around the topic like I am now is distressing. This piece itself has taken me weeks and multiple rewrites to properly get accustomed to writing about it, but it still makes my body shake and makes me anxious.
So, what does this have to do with Steven Universe? Kind of everything.
“Drift Away”
A big reason so many people my age have become attached to this show is because of how relatable it is. The way the show discusses and represents complicated emotions like anxiety, depression, guilt, and the way it handles trauma is intensely human.
The way the characters act and talk to each other about it is basically the idyllic way to grip these things. To handle it with a sense of love, understanding, and frankness. Even when characters mess up with what they’re trying to say, you can tell their heart is in the right place.
It doesn’t work like that in real life, people are much too complicated to be able to solve their problems in satisfying 11-minute episodes. And when people show the level of honesty and frankness the characters in the show do, it could come across as alienating and confrontational.
But somehow in the show, it feels very natural. The raw emotional honesty is this shows version of training or powering up. Even after multiple seasons, it tended to grate on some of the audience with some fans saying the show was too forgiving to its villains. Which in the context of the show, is a valid criticism even if it’s one I don’t agree with.
The level of understanding and frankness is afforded to everyone in the show except Steven. Since the story is told through his point of view it never really could give this type of attention to Steven since he was always the one giving it to others. Which made the character selfless to an extreme that actually hurts him and becomes the main conflict in the show’s epilogue series, Steven Universe Future.
Steven was so worried about others and so selfless he never really considered what he wanted out of life besides his words in the extended opening theme song: “I will fight to be everything that everybody wants me to be when I’m grown.”
It’s a very normal thought to want to live up to unrealistic expectations, but it’s not something that is always healthy. Which is just one of the various reasons I find the show to be so relatable.
“Something Entirely New”
Recently in my life, I have hit a similar crisis point that Steven reaches towards the end of the show. I realized that practically every decision I have ever made in my life was made to make someone else happy. I rarely, if ever, considered my own feelings. But I was okay with doing it because making other people happy is always what I thought I was supposed to do.
And like I mentioned, long term this is not something that works out and is 100% the reason I feel so lost, frustrated, and confused in my life right now. I have absolutely no way of knowing how to handle it or even talk to people about it. And I can directly point the cause of this stemming back to just saying “I’m fine” no matter how bad the situation in my life got, again much as Steven does in the show.
It never mattered what was happening to me, I would always insist that I was alright. I never wanted anyone to worry about me because I grew up seeing how distressed my general existence made everyone in my life due to all of my health issues. This insistence only got worse as I got older because I had so many doctors who lacked empathy and also insisted that I was ok despite there still being clear health issues.
Like for an example, for at least a decade I have had horrible sleeping problems largely caused by recurring and constant nightmares, which even now when I tell doctors about the reaction tends to be like “eh you’re young it’s fine, I bet you just are on your phone too much.” I guess it’s easier to just ignore something than acknowledge it, even as a doctor, which is a situation that is way too common judging by experiences I have heard others tell me about doctors, as well as my own.
Then as a teenager, most adults in life will tell you that whatever problem you’re having is just hormones or saying some variation of “you’re just young you’ll grow out of it”. Which back then always frustrated me because it’s like when people say mental issues are “just in your head”. It’s frustrating because while technically true, mental issues are commonly an issue of brain chemistry and therefore in your head, but it completely ignores and diminishes that there’s still a problem and it’s understandable to be feeling these emotions.
All of these reactions informed how I started to feel about myself, which only made me angry because I was frustrated at my lack of understanding of my health, both physical and mental.
It was a sense of anger that literally took me years of therapy to process along with the help of a small group of people I actually feel comfortable talking about such things with. I will forever love and respect them for putting up with me as I figured it all out, or even as I continue to figure things out now. I still randomly thank them for helping me through things out of nowhere if I happen to be thinking about it because I still feel like I don’t deserve that level of patience and care.
This is why it makes me happy to see a show talk frankly about things like this. Call it representation, call it good storytelling, call it whatever you want because it’s probably true. It’s just surprising to me still to see a show that helped me process these feelings.
“It’s Over Isn’t It”
Now that the show is over, I feel like I can finally understand my own personal connection to it. The crew behind the show clearly cared a lot about a lot of things I do as well, with entire animated sequences or plot devices being homages to video games and anime from the late 90s and early 2000s. The location of the show, Beach City, is also heavily based on a popular vacation spot, Ocean City, that my parents used to take my sister and me too as kids. So even location-wise all of the callbacks and illusions to my home state of Maryland just filled me with all sorts of nostalgia from the get-go.
On a deeper level, I connected with the themes of the show. The characters finding their own sense of self-worth, dealing with trauma, trying their hardest to not let other people define who they are. Feeling like everything is a direct challenge to your identity. Or just even having to deal with so many serious issues in life that you hit a point where any bit of conflict or stress feels like the end of the world.
These are all things I’ve been dealing with my entire life and still deal with to this day. So honestly, this show coming out while I was in high school and following with me as I went through college was sort of perfect timing for me.
Not only that but I can point to this show as a reason I bonded with a lot of my past and current friends. It gave us a sense of common ground that even a very shy and quiet person like me could connect with people over. It not only gave us a common interest but through the lens of the show, helped us understand each other more, and giving me moments with them that I would never trade for the world.
In the words of the show, “maybe I’m not alone.”
It’s not like this show has solved any of my issues, and it would be weird to expect it to, I still struggle with processing things, my own mental state, as well as my non-existent sense of self-worth. That being said, I will forever be thankful for this show. For reminding me there is always the possibility for improvement and change. For bringing me so many friends. For helping me find the words to describe the impossible and process the unthinkable.
Thank you, Steven Universe.
