My Life Is A Trigger Warning

But I never use them.

I write a lot about trauma because I’ve experienced a lot of trauma.

Some of it was child abuse from my mother that lasted most of my life.

Some of it was being essentially tortured for an art form I didn’t want to be a part of for 20 years.

Some of it was a brutal assault that I almost didn’t survive when I was 16 years old.

Through it all, my one outlet was writing. I’d write it as fiction — it was the only way that I was able to see it clearly. But that was just for me. When I took my writing public on writing platforms, I started to own my trauma and tell my story. It was raw. It was emotional. It was real.

I still haven’t told the entire story. There are things that are still too painful for me to put into words but I try. In trying, I tend to write different variations of the same stories on repeat. Some of them are pretty graphic, especially when it comes to the way my body was handled and broken and bent so I could be the perfect prima ballerina… and the assault.

After over 30 hours unconscious I woke up strapped to a bed in a hospital to learn that I’d died twice, had six broken bones, my jaw was wired shut, my ear drum had burst, my eyelid was sewn back together, my ribs were so badly fractured in multiple places that movement could puncture my lung, and I’d been raped. It was weeks later that they told me what lurked under the bandage they kept replacing on my hip. I couldn’t move so I couldn’t see it. I could see his initials that he’d carved into me, branding me with a knife from my mother’s kitchen.

It’s graphic in the details I will give because it’s graphic in the anger that I feel. It’s graphic in the pain that I can’t seem to overcome. But most of all, it’s graphic in how many other survivors are out there and feel so completely alone.

Trigger warnings make people look away. If there’s a trigger warning of a violent sexual assault in someone’s piece, it makes me pause to think I shouldn’t subject myself to it. Yet sitting right in front of me is an ally on the screen. A human who knows how it feels to be me. No, we don’t share the same skin or even the same experience but we have one very major thing in common.

We’re here. We survived. And we’re just trying to figure out what that means.

We write our catharsis and scream about taking back the night and Me Too and silence is violence and then we trigger warning each other away from seeing their allies.

I won’t do it.

I don’t think anyone should.

And it isn’t because I think you’re weak or some fragile whatever if you become triggered by something that you see. I know what that feels like. I know it all too well. I’ve punched someone square in the face for grabbing my arms — one of the few sensations I remember from before the assault knocked me unconscious. I gave him a black eye and got an apology for it. I understand triggers and I’m not weak and I’m not some fragile whatever.

But if I never face my triggers… if I heed those warnings and look away from stories of others like me… all I am is alone.

I’m not weak. I’m also not strong. A label that is emblazoned upon me from all of the people who don’t have any idea how it feels to survive the unsurvivable. To live inside the impossibility of knowing the person you were and might have become died simultaneously in the violence of someone else. They need a word for that and somewhere, someone, at some point decided that it was strong. Or brave. And I am neither of those things. Telling my story makes me neither of those things. The fact that I’m still alive makes me neither of those things.

The people who know that, are the people who know that. The ones who are also still alive. The people who know that hell is not a religious concept it’s a burning reality that you are forced to walk through and all that remains are the ashes slipping through your fingers and the smoke you try to cough out of your lungs.

The people who would turn away from my story because of a trigger warning added by a well-intentioned editor.

It’s hard to read. It’s harder to turn away. One gives you support. An ally. A soul on this planet that understands the unimaginable. The things that people who don’t understand don’t even let themselves have nightmares about but we walked through — separately — on our own paths of fire but we made it out alive. Why would you turn away? Because an editor told you to protect yourself.

Trauma has no protection. There’s nothing that can make it disappear and you’re triggered when you’re triggered. Those triggers aren’t in someone else’s story of something semi-similar. Same vein, different blood. Triggers happen when you don’t see them coming. And warnings don’t show them to you.

In writing my past and my pain I have found a lot of allies. The ones who didn’t turn away. The ones who didn’t know what they were about to read but stuck around until the words stopped on the screen anyway. Because they knew what their comment would mean.

Some people are too close to it still and will turn away, warning or no warning. And maybe it’s mean of me to refuse to use them. Or maybe I let myself turn away for a long time and I know what that does to you. Staying trapped inside your trauma to avoid the trip wire of a trigger only increases the pain.

No, it’s not easy for me to say that. Not easy at all.

I’m not on the other side of my pain because there is no other side to my pain. I may eventually someday perhaps get to a point that I don’t think about it all the time. I may eventually someday perhaps get to a point where I remember what it’s like to feel safe. But it will always be there. Lurking in my memory taunting me with its refusal to leave. There is no other side. Even if there were, I’d be nowhere near it, trust me.

So I write. I read the comments from the people who have no idea how strong and brave I’m really not. And I read the comments from the people who get it. It’s the latter that pushes the story forward. It’s the latter that helps me try to tell the parts I delete. Because they’re out there. They know. They have stories too. They have deleted parts too. They have been called strange labels that don’t feel fitted against their worn and exhausted skin too.

Maybe I’d still see half of them if I included warnings. Maybe. There’d be less, that much I know.

If people were signs, I would read TRIGGER WARNING. My life is complicated, messy, scary, traumatic, and full of dysregulation.

If the only parts of my story I told were the parts that didn’t need a trigger warning then we’d be left with what the weather was like today.

Though, climate change is a thing so maybe not.

Even my pets, the six beautiful furry lights in my life — they’re all rescues with horrendous backstories, and people who love animals, as I love animals, may not want to read it. But their realities matter. Because if no one knows… if everyone turns away… who will stop it from happening to the next dog? Or the next cat?

My husband changed the way I view relationships and showed me that chaos isn’t caring but there’s a backstory to him too. It isn’t his, it’s mine. But to understand how I came to be with him, you have to trip over my triggers. He sure as hell did.

My dad fought the court system to get me away from my mother. She cheated on him and abused me and somehow still ended up with his house, his kids, and even his dog. She told a pretty lie and he told an ugly truth and the court sided with her. He tried. But I suffered immensely in his absence and flourished in his presence. He’s a beautiful part of my story. A dark, treacherous story that led to our most recent adventure… just him and I, dancing and singing in the pouring rain at a Billy Joel and Stevie Nicks concert.

My brother saved my life. He’s my best friend and the part of me that isn’t broken. He’s my favorite human in the entire world and more of my blood is him than my own. Because he gave it to me when I was dying. I died anyway. When the doctors said that they wouldn’t be able to revive me again and my family should make their peace because my organs were starting to fail — my brother came and grabbed my hand and told me to fight. I was unconscious and I have no memory of hearing him. But my father tells me that is when I started to make a turn for the better. And I survived.

It’s not strength. It’s not bravery. It’s not some warning to watch for. It’s my story and it’s real. And if any part of my story resonates with any part of yours, I want to know you.

So I don’t warn you.

I don’t tell you to turn away.

Maybe it’s selfish.

But my life is a trigger warning.

How’s the weather by you today?