Ugh. Triggers.

“…There is a level of investment that comes at a cost, because when you choose to press into that, you get great outcomes from kids, you do, but you also choose to press into the pain, for some people it’s too much, especially if it’s unfamiliar, but it’s worth the cost because the return on your investment is pretty powerful.” ~Mauri Melander, former principal, Lucy Craft Laney Community School

Triggers. Not the ones on the gun, although as we know, pulling those can cause a catastrophic reaction in their targets. Triggers are the things that can set off a catastrophic grief reaction in me. They are everywhere, and they are nowhere. They happen at predictable times with predictable things–start of the school year, during an event that I know, if my boy were alive, he would have loved, holidays, “(insert number here) Year After” dates, the smell of his shampoo, the lyrics of a favorite song we would car dance to–and at unpredictable times with unpredictable things, when only the Universe knows why, in that moment, it needed to aim into my soul and pull that particular trigger. Triggers themselves are not predictable (see my previous post about my love affair with spreadsheets and data tracking). What is on one day is not on another day. Like the seizures that ravaged my boy’s mind, body and spirit, they have no predictable pattern and no predictable outcome. But they always cause an emotional reaction of some kind.

For four years, I have fought that reaction. Because I’ve been trained by the Others that reactions of any emotional size are weak, that zero reaction is the only reaction to anything they may have said or done or implied about my parenting, my personality, my “denial” of Noah’s “actual” abilities and achievements and potential that I just had to accept and stop fighting the “reality” of. And they threw some real shit at me. I was “too dramatic” when I got angry at their passive-aggressive narcissism, I was “over-emotional” when I questioned the actual evidence sitting right in front of me, I was “perhaps not fit to handle it” when I asked for more support, and so much more. So. Much. More. Every reaction had an overwhelming response coming back at me that what I saw IN FRONT OF MY FACE was wrong, what I was feeling was too much, too dramatic, and not really warranted for the situation despite the evidence. The worst and most effective for training me, that they used with unerring accuracy, was that my reactions might be evidence for the Others that I was not fit to be a part of my boy’s life.

So, I learned. Emotions were not healthy, no matter the evidence in front of me, reactions must always be tempered and boxed up and shoved deep down inside because they might be wrong or used against me, and that strong feelings and emotions must always be hidden deep inside and protected from them.

And then, Noah died. He was tired, he was sick, and he needed to shed his body riddled with disease, waste and atrophy to find the Universe so he could be free to spread joy and laughter, love and light to our world. While I understand it, and I’m so grateful he is no longer in pain, I’m grieving. Hard. And I was fighting it. Hard. Because I was trained well by the Others. I went back to work a week after his funeral because I thought normalcy, a routine, the day-to-day schedule would help me fight this grief business the way it helped me to survive my training.

I’m sure those of you still reading this know exactly what I’m about to say…….

Yeah. It didn’t work. Grief doesn’t fight fair. It had no fucks to give me and my training. It was determined to make me feel, to react, to do what I needed to do to process what happened. Let me say that again. To do WHAT I NEEDED TO DO to process what happened (my therapists are fist bumping each other right now).

So Grief and I fought. I would shove my trigger reactions into the box until I got so overwhelmed I had to get somewhere where no-one could see or hear me, lose it so completely and totally that I would feel sore and need to sleep afterward, and emerge to rejoin the world and pretend it didn’t happen. And I put my game face on and did my best to convince everyone that I was fine.

(Those who know me, who are in my inner circle are laughing their asses off right now because I absolutely did not convince them. But they let me get away with it, so thanks for that fam and friends)

I got tired, and I got sick far more often than I should. And after some time, an amazing life change (Looking at you, Tiger Pride), and some seriously intense therapy from some (yes, some) gentle, kind therapists, I am coming to realize that fighting just makes it harder. I am starting to absorb the idea that *maybe* the Others were wrong; maybe they needed to control me so they could make their stupid, narcissistic, dumbass, and ridiculous selves feel better and feel righteous in all the wrong they did to the OHT and me. That it’s OK to Grieve Large over the worst thing that has ever and will ever happen to me. That, even though I have gratitude for the life he lived and the freedom from pain, I can be ANGRY, and SAD, and ALL THE THINGS because my arms are empty, my heart aches and there’s a piece of my soul that shredded to bits the moment Noah’s soul escaped from his body to fly free and unencumbered.

So now, instead of fighting, I’m practicing. The trigger comes, and I sit still, absorbing it and letting it wash over me so I can feel the feelings and react the reaction. I’m pressing into the pain. I’m testing it out, learning to live with it instead of fighting it or forcing it into the training box deep inside me.

It’s not going away. It won’t go away. I’ve begun to accept that. To press into it. I am slowly discovering as I practice that it doesn’t mean the Others have won. That I am weak, ineffective, dramatic or “too much”. It means that I went through the worst thing that has ever happened or will happen to me and It. Is. OK. to be emotional, to feel hard core and react hard core. And that doing that means I am being authentic. Which is all I can ever hope to be.