Triggers Not the Horse

Knowing your triggers. Absolute must for anyone with any sort of bipolar, BPD, PTSD, anxiety and more big medical words I don't know or have forgotten to mention. Triggers are to insanity what peanuts are to allergies. Know your triggers and avoid them or at least have 911 on speed dial so you hit the button before going into anaphylaxis shock. Yes, they're that bad. 

Triggers. I have many. Some I know. Some are hidden. Some sneak up on me when I'm not looking. I try to avoid them, but somehow they always find my hiding places. The last two days I've been triggering HARD. My safety nets were being pulled from under me. Even though they aren't real safety nets, they're actually harmful to me. In all truth, my so called safety nets are one of my biggest triggers. Fear, rejection, and abandonment. 

Yesterday the perfect storm was created. A long time friend who in many ways has helped me and in many ways not, I confronted. I stood up for myself. I refused to be treated like a steaming pile of dog shit he was scrapping off his shoe, but for ten years he's my one and only friend. The only person my insanity hasn't driven away. Even though he was at times verbally abusive, I clung to him because he was always there. I didn't fear him leaving me. Abandoning me. If that meant being called names, told I was stupid, and used, then that was ok. Because I wasn't alone. 

Except now I have started surrounding myself with people who don't use me, don't abuse me. Who respect me. Who see my flaws, my  broken pieces, and accept them. Who look over the frazzled me and see what lies underneath, and I like that. I don't want to be treated like dogshit anymore even if it means I'm alone. I'd rather be alone than be someone's dogshit. But still it's a trigger. 

Then there are normal worries, financial worries, that pretty much every person who sucks oxygen on this planet has, but when you put those worries inside of a mind that works overtime they become blown out of proportion. So I fight to keep my grip on reality. While things aren't great, they're not that bad either. While some things haven't worked out exactly like I wanted, they are at least working and I'm constantly looking for other ways of gaining income. At the very least I don't feel entitled. I don't feel that it is ok to sit on my ass while others support me. I might have little but it's all fucking mine and I worked through insanity to get it. It's mine fuckers and you can't have it. 

So I'm on a bit of a roller coaster. I'll have to start taking sleeping pills today. I've been awake for two days now. Not good. Not sleeping is definitely a sign. So today I'll take little pink tablets with my grape juice so my mind will slow at least enough for my eyes to close and for a few moments the ping pongs bouncing inside my head will lay quietly on the floor. Shhhh......