On Trauma and Forever Finding Triggers

Well, shit.


I'm particularly vulnerable right now. The ricochet changes in weather are aggravating the deep, sharp pain of arthritis, making my outlook decidedly more dim than I'd prefer. The pain makes me sad and jumpy, drives my depression, and causes more felt pain. Quite the cycle, that.

Yesterday was just another moment of what seems to be an endless stream of objectification, misogyny, and patriarchal horseshit. Some jackass, with whom I had previously had a friendly, professional "relationship" managed to say a single sentence that struck me so hard, I felt as stripped and dirty as if I had actually been standing there in only my work apron, as he so flippantly suggested.

I'm reeling today. I'm lost and in shock and in tears. I'm not sure, but I might be fresh out of indignation and standing only on shame. Half of me continues on, understanding that this bullshit is, entirely, bullshit. That people should not say such things to relative strangers. Hell, the only person who can tell me that I should work in my apron only while fondling me with his eyeballs is my partner. That's it. But the other half of me is trying desperately to figure out how to avoid this, how to modify my behaviour, how not to dress, that I am too friendly, that of course it's my fault, somehow.

It's moments like this that bring a wellspring of memory and agony and self-doubt and prolonged terror/shame. I'm sick to my stomach. My throat is tight and my head hurts so much. Mental flashes of all the times I've been stripped naked and injured come flooding in. In my mind's eye, I see the blanket I buried myself in as a little girl and can smell my own fear and panic, can feel the suffocation of breathing my own exhalations back in because it's better to suffocate than to give in and be raped. I can still hear the ticking of the clock downstairs, can feel the late-summer heat of the attic, the tickle of unknown spiders' cobwebs, the roar of my own blood in my own ears as I crush myself smaller and smaller, hoping to become invisible in the dark space of the rafters for when my attackers return. My five year old self is right here. My heart is pounding, I'm trying not to see the soft, promising glint of blade edges in an otherwise empty cabinet. I'm trying not to feel the hard but spongy reverberation of my head bouncing off a dormitory door while a shark-eyed man tells me he loves me and can't wait to introduce me to his mother. My barely twenty year old self is here. My back and my knees remember the bite of sandstone, the silent, scuffling struggle under the stars, the crackle of bonfire and wafting laughter of people not twenty feet away who don't know that I'm fighting a losing battle with a man in a sweatshirt that smells of body odor, vomit, and mortality.

All these things. They come bubbling back up, slick and sticky and fetid.

This doesn't happen every time some asshole strips me bare with words, but it happens often enough that I can string these moments like vulgar pearls onto a necklace that I can't seem to remove. I claw at the clasp and all I manage to do is wound myself, stinging rake marks onto my own throat, bleeding shame and anger at my own shame.

I will never be able to convince myself that it's not my fault, somehow. I will never stop feeling like I should have done something different, every time.

I'm doing that now. The very best thing I can do is scream in rage, howling unholy into the dark, and pray to myself that maybe this time, I can tear this part of myself out and fling it into the wind.