Trigger Warning

Unfilterd and angry

Photo by Niranjan _ Photographs on Unsplash

In mental health terms, a trigger refers to something that affects your emotional state, often significantly, by causing extreme overwhelm or distress. A trigger affects your ability to remain present in the moment. It may bring up specific thought patterns or influence your behaviour.

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Last week it was Mother’s Day here in The Netherlands and it brought up a lot for me. Feelings of confusion, anger, sadness and powerlessness overwhelmed me. Not just on the day itself, but also in the days since. I cried, I couldn’t sleep, I felt worthless and insignificant.

Mother’s Day is meant to be celebrated, it shouldn’t wound. Objectively speaking it’s just a day, so why does it hurt me so much? That explanation is two-fold. One, I can’t celebrate Mother’s Day with my mother. Two, I really want to be a mother and I know I won’t be.

I’m well aware that this is my problem and that I need to find a way to cope with it constructively. As I’ve told my therapist: I just don’t know how, because everywhere I look, I see everything I had hoped for myself… I really feel like people don’t know or care about my emotional state at all.

My family has never asked me if I would like to have children, nor what it feels like to deal with this on my own. As a young woman and as the only person in my close family likely to remain childless and partnerless. Society doesn’t even think I have a need for warmth, intimacy and sex. So, how can I want children? I bet it never even occurred to you before reading this, because wheelchair?! Right…?

Now, I know that everything I have just said, is based on my own (very triggered) feelings. I have learned that feelings are not necessarily true, and I’m trying to keep that in mind.

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My aim is not to dish out blame to people who do nothing more than live their lives., because I would probably do the same if I got the chance to… I know that none of this is on them, but do they know it’s also not my fault? Yet I have to live with all the prejudices that surround people with disabilities. I quite literally cannot walk away from it. I never get a break.

I didn’t ask to be born the way I was. This is the life I have been given and I am so, so tired, of people telling me that I should be feeling lucky. Just because I’ve been forced into a position where I’ve been deemed not fit to work. I understand that it’s hard providing for your familiy. That it feels unfair, but so does my life at the moment. Just in a way that you could only understand if you live it. Trust me when I say: I really hope you never have to…

I realise this is my ego talking, I am being selfish, I want people to know how much I hurt, because the weight of it all is crushing me. I need to write it down because I hope doing so, will lift some of that weight off my chest, and because I am really fucking tired of putting a filter over everything I think and feel, like an obedient little girl.

All my triggers lie in ordinary life, which make mine feel like trying to make it to the opposite end of a minefield, without blowing myself out of existence. It is terrifying and exhausting

Writing this, I am riddled with anxiety, because I feel like a whiney little bitch for doing so. However, I am also rebelling against everything I have convinced myself I need to be. If you understand. Thank you, that means more to me than you will ever know! If you don’t, then click the fucking link away. Just disengage.