Traumas & Triggers
Welcome To My TEDTalk
I took a mental health day yesterday, where I fell into old habits and slept all day just to “fast forward” through the worst feelings and did some reflecting on my 18 year mental health journey. Most people won’t care, even I’d scroll past this if I were having a good day, but maybe it could be beneficial to someone who’s not having a good day today, or for myself the next time I’m having a bad one. 🤷🏼♀️
People new to me hear the words “I was agoraphobic for 20 years and never left the house” come out of my mouth all the time, but their reaction to this bit of information – what they know about agoraphobia, and how casually I say it (almost always with a big stupid smile) – is that it sort of collides in their brains, does not compute with who they think I am today, and it’s really as if I didn’t say anything all. But if I say “I toured on a bus with a metal band for a few years,” new people have no trouble believing that, because of who I am today, they can relate to it because everyone thinks they know what that’s like or they want to know what that’s like, and they light up.
Once I realized this weird (to me) contrast about 2 years ago, after I started getting better, met Harry, got divorced, began working full-time, and started trying to have grownup friends, for really, the first time in my life, I also realized that one of the ways I’d been going about trying to get attention for the past 2 decades, was by being more traumatized than everyone around me. I’d drop these intense, but 100% true, dark stories about my childhood and family, on unsuspecting folks who had lived pretty normal childhoods by comparison (which actually turns out is most people), and who could not imagine how I could even stay alive or see the bright side of life after any of it. “No wonder she tried to kill herself! No wonder she had to spend time in the psych ward! No wonder she has to take every psychiatric medication known to pharmacology!” they said.
Telling these stories made me the centre of attention, they made me feel special and unique, like they explained why I was also such a “creative genius”. I thought my broken brain was like Russell Crowe’s in the movie “A Beautiful Mind” and that everyone around me was just going to have to accept it because this is the price you pay for high creativity and intelligence. Artists are supposed to be tortured, right? That stereotype exists for a reason, doesn’t it?
And so, everyone in my world started handling me as if I was fragile like a bomb, and things were made as soft as possible for me in a million different circumstances as a result. Excuses were made for my, quite frankly, sometimes inexcusable behaviour, which was not being corrected by the right types of medications, therapists, and certainly not myself. It sucks admitting this in such a huge forum full of strangers who don’t know me from Adam and this is their first impression, but I held my mental illnesses – bipolar & generalized anxiety disorders – and “instinctual” trauma responses accountable for my actions, not myself. If I wasn’t so sick, I wouldn’t BE like this! I thought.
“Oh, she’s sensitive,” friends and family and the greater internet would say. “Poor Sunny, she’ll be her own downfall.”
I missed out on a lot during this time because I “couldn’t” go anywhere for 100 million, tiny, nit-picky reasons, like I was a princess out of a fairy tale. Glaring, ongoing, panic or anxiety-induced “traumas” and “triggers”, which in reality usually only lasted seconds and were often easily resolved in the end, were hard to “get over” or recover from, and vastly overshadowed what should have been joyous occasions, like weddings, graduations, and anniversaries.
My former husband and I had to leave early from things a lot because I couldn’t be wherever we were for as long as I was supposed to stay, for a plethora of reasons, that all really boiled down to discomfort due to anxiety. Whenever we were back in the car, I felt the anxiety lift, and the closer we got to home, the better I felt. He was the one who did the apologizing for leaving and made the excuses to hosts. I rarely had to deal with the repercussions, if there were any, of those actions. Most people just understood “that’s Sunny” and expected it, and when there were new people in the mix, I know at least twice they were “pre-warned” about my temperament by hosts as a fun fact to go along with us also driving the farthest to get there.
I rarely brushed my hair or wore makeup when I went out during the past 20 years, and I usually wore old, ratty, paint-covered clothes thinking I looked creative when I probably really looked homeless. I purposely tried to look as unattractive and as unappealing to men as possible because it’s mostly been men who have hurt me in my life, and I figured women were smart enough to see through the disguise. It worked. It was as if I was invisible to men, but pitied by women, like “oh honey…”. 🤷🏼♀️
My entire life philosophy was built around how the animal kingdom regards sloths. You’d think since they move slowly and aren’t aggressive, sloths would be easy prey for a big cat, right? But the truth is, the animal kingdom thinks sloths are so pathetic, so not worth eating because there’s not much meat to them and they taste bad, that the whole ecosystem simply leaves them alone. Since the world seemed so volatile when I tried to stand out, triggering and traumatizing me every time I left the house, I thought all I wanted was to be not touched, left alone, to be ignored and to be pitied, like a sloth.
There’s not one single thing that made me better or even started to make me better, it was a progression of a culmination of things, that turned into a snowball, that is now an avalanche of a good life. My meds have been the same for a long time, so it wasn’t that, but I did see a lot of therapists, some good, some not so good, over the last 8 years of meds stability, finally settling on the one I have now. I won’t pretend I have any answers or that I’m “cured” or not still completely fucked up, but I am better, and now that I have 2 years of post-agoraphobia clarity, I’ve realized that I’ve inadvertently learned some things along the way.
It’s not my fault that I have mental illnesses, had a shitty childhood and family I was born into, or that I still have trauma responses, but as an adult, I’m still responsible for how those things affect others and it is my responsibility to make them right if they occur. Otherwise, I’m just an asshole.
My anxiety, and discomfort from anxiety, does not trump someone else’s a) secret, b) good news, c) bad news, d) important moment, e) serious moment, or f) real live pain from illness or injury. It is not an emergency, and I will not die, despite how persistent and convincing my brain can be in telling me otherwise.
Everyone has trauma and no one’s trauma is more “extreme” than another’s because how trauma affects us is relative to the experience and unique to the person who experienced it. One person could be traumatized by finding a family member with a gunshot wound to the head, another could have the same feelings of trauma about their parents fighting or their dog running away. It’s all relative and not a contest!
Now that I have a better baseline, if I had to put a number on it, I’d say 90% of my anxiety, depression, and trauma responses are literally my brain lying to me because it’s getting the wrong signals and/or too many of the wrong chemicals at that moment and glitching out. The world is really not that stressful if you slow down and take each piece of information at a time, which is a learned skill when your brain wants to go 100 miles a minute. You learn this with cognitive behavioural therapy. (Pro Tip: if you can, find a therapist that tricks you into learning CBT, as opposed to taking a workshop. Learning psychiatric concepts from a workbook did NOT work for me.)
Neither my friends, nor Harry, are qualified to be my therapist, especially if I’m feeling suicidal. They are just mere mortals.
I do not have the right to impose my traumatic stories on other people without their consent, especially if I’m doing it for attention or to “one up” them. I need to see how they’re feeling first, or they have to have told me they’re okay with hearing these types of stories (prior consent).
I’ve learned that most people just want pleasant conversation and the details of poor mental or physical health are not pleasant, nor always appropriate. 🤷🏼♀️ (Sometimes you can make them really funny tho and some people appreciate that, but “read the room” first.)
People really only care to hear about poor mental health after I’ve overcome it. Rarely did people want to hear about it as it was occurring unless they were being paid to, or they were my besties, and even the latter tuned me out a lot. Most of the people – aside from my therapist – who were listening to me and paying attention to me while I was spilling my woes and pain, were also mentally ill and feeling the same way, so it was like the blind leading the blind, or like rats drowning each other trying to get out of a bucket full of water. I was never going to get better by doing that. Telling people my mental health struggles, or even my physical health struggles at the time, pushed people away, and lead me to feeling ignored, which is a completely different thing than wanting/choosing to be left alone. It feels worse and compounds any bad mental health situation.
Finally, again with post-agoraphobia clarity so I get how it’s hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel when you’re in the thick of a bad mental health day/week/month/year/life, I realized that people can see you a million different ways, and for the most part, you control your own image and reputation, just by showing up and being yourself.
So who do I want to be? Someone unpleasant, who’s to be pitied, like a sloth? Someone other people avoid, who doesn’t get invited to things, who doesn’t have experiences and yucks other people’s yums? Someone who always has conflict and drama and who comes with a warning? Why would I want that?
So, along with doing co-dependency checks in my relationship, I stay vigilant that I’m not slipping into being that person again. Even writing this post is “too close” to who I was before for my liking, I hated that my writing niche was mental illness for so long, and that my also mentally ill friends were inadvertently hurting me. I don’t want to be pitied or to be made to feel like any of this is some grand accomplishment. I learned how to be a mostly functional adult and have a happy life, like I’m supposed to, that’s it.
I’m still mentally ill, of course. My bipolar and anxiety disorders didn’t magically disappear overnight, even though it may appear that way to some. I’m just more in control of them because I’m no longer married with a caregiver and need to be responsible for myself so I don’t end up a a literal crazy homeless person. True story. I think that’s why they affect me less.
I will always be on mood stabilizers and anti-depressants because my brain has a physical malfunction, but after almost 20 years of daily use, I rarely take clonazepam (anxiety med) anymore unless I can’t sleep and absolutely need to.
I still slide into old patterns sometimes, I still sometimes freak out and cry and say dumb stuff when I feel helpless and hopeless or not listened to, but I’m quicker to recognize when I’ve fucked up and my apologies don’t come with “but”s. In fact, I don’t just apologize anymore, I try to learn precisely where I made the mistake and make amends by taking accountability for what I did and telling the person what measures I’m taking to ensure it’s less likely to happen in the future.
I still have plenty of “triggers” and I learn about new ones all the time. I deal with them and talk them through in hindsight with Harry and my therapist so they’re less likely to affect me so hard in the future. A big trigger, for example, is drama in my communities (plural, Fet does not have a monopoly on internet drama), which was the impetus for writing this post.
I don’t have all the answers, and it’s not like I’m the poster child for good mental or physical health, I’m barely a grownup, mentally! I’ve just done a lot of work in therapy, and listening to self-help books and memoirs, learned by talking to people, and lived a lot of miserable life, to be at peace mentally, for the most part. I know what’s required to get here, and I can tell who’s doing/done the same work and who hasn’t. I choose who to spend my time with accordingly.
One thing I will say in closing though, is that I’ve learned that when you have mental health issues, the key is to stay proactive. I pretend I’m a fish and that if I stop moving, something will eat me, and that “something” is my mental illnesses swallowing me whole. I’m always trying to improve, always trying to make everything even 1% better. I want to be someone people are genuinely happy to see, and I want Harry to be proud of me.
The only way I want to be broken, is by Harry fucking me until I’m a puddle of goo, any other way no longer serves me.
