Cliche

I don’t like the word ‘triggered’ in the sense that I don’t think anyone can really agree what it means but I wanted to write up a thing that happened to me.

I got badly ‘triggered’ on Friday - it was a textbook example bordering on cliche.

I saw a thing on Friday that didn’t register consciously, was very tense on Saturday, morphing into deeply irritable on Sunday and peaking at ‘Yelling and then bursting into tears’ for Sunday lunchtime. I am mortified beyond belief that Kat had to put up with me for that time (for double mortification; Sunday was Nova’s birthday; although Nova’s experience of this was limited to me telling her I was a bit grumpy and doing my best).

After a while I worked out what the particular trigger was (it was a text message that was sort-of-but-not-really related to the circumstances of Leo’s birth)

It was scary at the time but it’s very scary in the aftermath: it’s not nice knowing that a innocuous sequence of words can massively upset me like a low-budget The Manchurian Candidate and I don’t really know what to do.

It hasn’t happened before, by which I mean the cycle of ‘gradually becoming irrationally angry without clear reason’ has very likely happened before and I’ve certainly been “both angry and wrong at the same time”, but I’ve I’m certain that sequence has never happened that quickly or clearly. I’ve never before been as aware that something was wrong on the Saturday or Sunday (I wasn’t aware enough but I was certainly reaching out to friends for support on Sunday morning). That’s both a positive (in that I understand the trigger, understand more about the sequence of feelings, and can be aware of both in time to do something about it), and also a worry because I genuinely felt like I had processed everything I might want to process about that time.