Last Wednesday night, my boyfriend and I finished watching the second season of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, turned off the television, and went to bed. I didn’t sleep. He conked out in minutes; it was late, and we’d stayed up well past our weekday bedtimes to polish off the season. But I laid there feeling my heart stutter-stepping in my chest, my neck prickling with heat. I couldn’t get comfortable in bed, and every nighttime sound seemed amplified. I tossed and turned myself right onto the edge of a panic attack. But it wasn’t just anxiety, I suddenly realized. I was pissed.Like many people who’ve dealt with trauma, I enjoy a lot of dark shit. Armenian Genocide documentary? I’m your girl. Munchausen’s memoir? Yes, please. Anyone wanna check out this new Holocaust museum with me? Of course, this is not an interest unique to folks with traumatic histories. If Serial and Making a Murderer are any evidence, then we all get off on some hard-core darkness from time to time. Certainly, among the millions of people consuming these series, there are those with far, far greater wounds than my own. But one thing I think we must have in common is our wall: the thing between us and anything that might hit too close to home. “Boundaries,” I think they call them.Some people are good with boundaries. They know how to ride out emotional reactions, when to protect themselves, and when to let something in. For those people, the wall is more like a gate they can open and shut with ease — and I’m so fucking jealous of them I could scream. Me, I have the wall. It’s taller than anything as far as the eye can see and thick enough to deaden any sound that might otherwise startle. For years, I relied on the wall to keep me at a safe distance from things like self-reflection (scary!) and human relationships (SUPER scary!). The wall was necessary protection when I was a kid. But as an adult, I’ve spent a billion or so hours in therapy, drilling holes into it so I can participate in normal-grown-up things like friendships and dating.But, holes or not, the wall is still there and it’s never more obvious than when I’m watching sad or upsetting media. I never cried at a movie until I was 25, and even then I was really trying. It’s not that I don’t have feelings. It’s just that an old, scared part of my mind knows what’s coming, and up goes the wall. With Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, I didn’t see it coming.For those unfamiliar, the series follows a young woman recently freed from 15 years of captivity, where, among other torments, she was continuously raped by her kidnapper. Season 1 occasionally touched on the effects of post-traumatic stress, but mostly it focused on the unbreakable part of Kimmy (Ellie Kemper). She’s resilient and giddy about starting her life again. Even when the first season did get dark, it did so in that familiar, 30 Rock style, so that even when she’s re-enacting a rape, it was wacky, brief, and concluded with a punch line. The comedy was so strong, you could avoid most of the horror if you blinked enough (a coping mechanism Kimmy herself would probably advocate — magical blinking!).