Living with an Uncommon Trigger

It can happen anywhere, anytime. You will be always listening, watching, eyes darting everywhere for any sign of the thing that will crush your day, evening, party, etc. It’s not that you want to see it; it’s that you will never be alerted to it being there so you can pull out of a situation and be able to take care of yourself.

You can never prepare enough. You can’t ever anticipate when it will infest something you trust and feel safe in, like a class or social media platform. Or even the most basic news. Even things that are not related can push your buttons as they inch into the territory.

Irrational.

Get over it.

It’s been years.

Why can’t you just move on?

It’s just a stupid ______.

You will be told all these things and more. You will tell yourself all these things and more. It will seem as though the only people who believe you are the people who have seen your ‘crazy,’ the ones who have nursed you back from the brink with soothing words and hugs.

But even they will accidentally be unaware of what they’ve just done and you will have to tell them that they hurt you even though they love you. And something inside you will think that you see judgment and that they are feeling you are a burden because they can’t talk about what they want around you.

You will fall in love with and fall out of love with so many hobbies as you realize they have some kind of connection to the thing that triggers you. Even the most socially accepted things can become sources of problems with overthinking, which becomes a normal for you.

Your deepest nightmare is having this trigger enter the mainstream. To watch people post about it on social media, to have to go into a complete cut-off from the world around you. And when it doesn’t and you expected it to, you will feel overjoyed.

Sometimes, you’ll be daring and tread where you thought you never would: seeking out that which triggers you and staring it down, a big smile on your face. And, for a moment, you think you’re normal. But for every single time you feel good, there are five times that it’s not.

There is no way to stop it. You may be able to put it on pause, but the thought lingers and you wonder if you’ll ever shake it. And maybe you won’t. But you won’t give up because you’ll be damned if this thing is what signs your death warrant and takes you down.

• living with mental illness
• trigger warnings
• triggers