Friday 28 July 2017

Triggered By A Stranger

*TRIGGER WARNING: Eating disorder (anorexia nervosa), depression, anxiety*

Holidays are an itchy time for me. It's not because I constantly want to be up and out, nor because I find myself feeling bored. It's rather because I find it so difficult to sit with myself, be alone, and do nothing. 

When I sit  alone with nothing to do, my internal monologue gets very dark. I start to think about myself, my life, my body, my choices and actions, everything I could've done better, everything I've done wrong, and all the people whose opinions about me I can't control. I wonder if anyone dislikes me, and why. I wonder if I should have been better to them. I worry about all the things I should be doing, but I feel too tired and disinterested to do them. I feel like I need to be out the house and enjoying life, but I'm too scared to get out of bed and put my feet on the floor. I feel like I should be texting my friends, making plans, and having fun, but I am reluctant to check social media because I don't want to be bombarded with so much information that my tired and, quite frankly, disinterested brain can't handle. Managing my anxiety and depression when I am alone with my thoughts is a struggle that I've had to face for many years. I am constantly wrestling with myself to find a harmonious balance that I end up feeling exhausted, almost like I've run a marathon. That is why I sleep so much when I'm alone- Because I would rather be asleep and 'unconscious' for a while than trying to quell the war in my mind. It takes all the energy I have to try and wrestle with my thoughts, and subdue them so that they don't take away my entire day. Because trust me, I could spend an entire day inside, not having left my room, not having spoken to anyone, and have my entire day ruined because of my distorted thinking that has rendered me immobile, crying, shuddering, and in a state of complete self-loathing. And I will stay there, under the covers, smelling like tears, bed hair, and unwashed pajamas, and be too scared and too tired to face the world. And to think, holidays are the time when we are meant to relax, explore our city, and be with our families and friends. That, unfortunately, is not always my reality.

But I digress. This post is supposed to be about a different kind of sadness, and that is the one that being triggered brings on.

Triggered?

When someone is triggered, they have seen, heard, or experienced something that elicits emotions of distress because it reminds them of a traumatic event or experience they lived through in the past. For example, every time I smell citrus-scented body wash, I am reminded of the holiday I was on when I was sixteen years old and very ill. The smell of the body wash causes me to have intense flashbacks of how I felt on that holiday, arousing feelings of panic, anxiety, and distress. You may also have noticed that at the beginning of some of my posts I write a trigger warning. This is an ethical practice amongst writers, screenwriters, and bloggers who want to warn their readers about the content of their work, because it could potentially bring about feelings of distress and anxiety when sensitive topics are not introduced gently, and with time to adjust.

Lol! Hashtag TRIGGERED XD ;)

However, if you search the definition of 'triggered' today, you will get the urban dictionary definition, and a bunch of memes of people looking like they are about to erupt with the word 'triggered' written in big bold letters. Being triggered has been made into somewhat of a joke amongst millennials, many using it to describe the feelings they experience when they are angered or saddened by something that normally elicits those feelings in a mild way. It is primarily used in modern terms to be overly dramatic and humorous. For example, today I could say, "My electricity was out for several hours, and I was so triggered." I might get a few laughs out of it, but I have essentially brutalized a very raw and deeply disturbing feeling that many experience on a daily basis.

What happened to me recently relies on the true, psychological definition of 'triggered', and lies far beyond the realms of humour and internet exploitation.

My triggering experience

 I was in a mall a few days ago, innocently window-shopping, when I saw her. I'll never know her, and she'll never know me, but what she made me feel was stronger than anything I've felt in a while.

She was my height, if not an inch taller. I couldn't bring myself close enough to tell. She was, however, younger than me, because she was in her school uniform, boasting the badge of one of the most prestigious girl's high schools in Cape Town. Her hair was tied in a low ponytail, and her skin was so smooth and flawless it reminded me of rain puddles under the light of streetlamps.

Her body made me feel like everything I was was inferior. She had the upper body of a dancer, and her neck extended so that her head was always tilted upwards. Her neck sloped so that her shoulders held her arms at an elegantly lazy angle to her body. Her hands were small and dainty, the kind of hands you imagine in the movies picking up perfume bottles in slow motion. Her uniform hugged her body in a way that it never had me. Her blazer seemed like it was made to fit her, holding her subtle curves so effortlessly, and perfectly accentuating the mountain peaks of her shoulder blades. The most striking thing about her was her legs. She had these long, slender legs that seemed to go on and on forever. She was clad in stockings, but that didn't contain her calf muscles that pulsed every time she took the smallest step. She had only crossed my path less than a minute ago, and I was struck by her presence.

You may be wandering why any of this is important. You may be wandering what this beautiful girl could have possibly done to trigger me. The simple answer is, she didn't do anything. We didn't speak, we didn't lock eyes, we didn't even know each other. We just happened to be in the same place at the same time.

The truth is that she triggered me by reminding me of everything I wanted to be, but that I feel (in isolation I've been told, which I sometimes believe, but other times don't) I fell short of, in my high school career. Many people have told me that I have the features I just described- That of a dancer's body, long neck, elegant arms, slender legs, and dainty hands, but that didn't make sense to me, because I wasn't her. I was Sarah. I was still just Sarah. I wasn't perfect with her hair and her skin. I was Sarah. And so I saw none of those things on me. Her image is what I spent so long trying to manipulate myself to fit. She reminded me of what I spent my high school career trying to achieve. Her body was what I was working towards when I started my restrictive eating habits. Her image, in my mind, was what I needed to achieve in order to be happy, successful, and popular in high school. Her body is what I felt I needed to look like in order to be my happiest self, live my happiest life, and have the happiest high school experience.

Trust me, I know how warped that sounds. I know. It sounds absolutely insane. But that is what the distorted thinking that comes with being mentally ill does to you. It makes the craziest of illusions sound completely sane and totally viable.

This girl, who I will probably never see again, had transported me back to the worst year of my life in a split second. She reminded me of everything I cried for at night, all the times I clutched my skin and willed God to take it away, all the times I hurt myself, all the times I pushed my body to the edge, all the times I was so unhappy but didn't realize it, all the times I hid from the people I loved, all the pages I wrote in my journal about self-loathing, and how I was going to become perfect. She, essentially, was everything that I wanted to be, but that ended up nearly killing me. She was the perfect girl in my mind, in human form. And that scared me. It was like my thoughts were coming alive, except she didn't have the hurt, and the pain, and the sickness attached to her. She was walking, breathing, and human. And that made me angry. How could she exist so effortlessly when I had cried, and tried, and pushed to look like her for so long, and still I had failed? I was so angry and jealous of her. I wanted to scream at her. I wanted to shout at her for existing, and for being the person I had wanted to be, except she hadn't experienced the pain and hurt I had felt. She was just living for free. I was also so terrified at the emotions I felt. All of the repressed rage, sadness, and confusion I had felt towards myself and the world when I was sixteen came flooding back to me. I remembered how I had spent hours upon hours stressing, worrying, planning, and trying to map out every move I made in order to fashion myself into the perfect girl. All of the tears I shed, the lies I told, the fear I experienced, and the hurt I harbored began hammering on my chest and poking behind my eyes.

I'm sure I've been triggered before, and I will probably be triggered by something again someday. But this was an experience that made me feel like a frozen iceberg plunging silently into the ocean, sinking.

I can't do anything about the fact that I crossed paths with her, and I can't do anything about what she made me feel in that moment. But, what I can do is move forward. I can move forward from that feeling after having experienced it, letting it have its moment, and then saying goodbye to it. Because if I sit with it, it will keep dragging me down until I eventually do sink with it. I need to let go of that iceberg, because I know in my heart that I can swim.

I can thank this stranger for helping me realize this, I can hate her for making me feel those feelings, or I can make peace with the fact that I will never see her again, and that moment is over. I am making the conscious and moral decision not to hate her, because if I do, that would be like letting go of one iceberg, and sticking myself to another.


XO

Saturday 1 July 2017

My Journey With Language: A University Essay

Happy weekend! And happy birthday month to my fellow Cancerians!

 The paper you are about to read is a reflective essay I had to write for my English literature class.  It is about my personal history with language.  I made it take the form of a journey, as I have done many times with my reflective writing on this blog.  I was so proud of the result I got for it, as this was the first university essay I've done that didn't have to follow the conventional structure of an academic essay.  Instead, it could be done in a more personal style with a subject of our choice, giving us a chance to make our voices heard in the world of academia.

I certainly hope you enjoy it.  Any and all comments and criticisms are welcome in the comments!

From journaling to blogging: My journey with language

Among the greatest things in my room is my stack of fifteen journals.  Some of them are the size of composition notebooks, while others are the size of school exercise books.  Some have personalized covers, and others have the pastel covers from Typo that I would not dare to spoil.  Some journals are filled with magazine clippings, newspaper articles, collages, and scrapbook designs, some are packed with short stories, poems, and ideas for novels that I have jotted down over the years, and others contain the most intimate details about my life:  My innermost thoughts and feelings, my hardships and tribulations, and my relationships and dreams.  If I had to pinpoint a moment in my life when I first realised how powerful language could be if I learned to manipulate it skilfully, I would pin it to the moment I started journaling.

My journaling started when I was ten-years-old.  It was a requirement for us in school to keep a journal.  We were given total control over what we wanted to write about, and what form the journal could take.  As ten-year-old school girls on the cusp of writing our first set of exams, journaling would help us in ways we did not yet understand.  We had never before been asked to interrogate and interpret texts in a formal setting such as an exam, so journaling and making our thoughts visible before our eyes helped us form more concrete thoughts that could be edited and made to be concise.  Journaling assisted in making English a tangible object for us to manipulate and mould however we wanted to in order to portray our sense of understanding of the world around us, to engage and grapple with our thought patterns, and to communicate our interpretations of texts, media, drawings, and poems in the exams.  This was an incredibly powerful feeling to hold language in your hands, and have your inner workings of your mind compiled into a document that was entirely your own.  To me, language became a door to another world that I could open and close as I pleased, constructing my own reality, and exploring the deepest parts of myself that had never been unlocked before as my mind raced with my hand to make it onto the blank page.

The one restriction to my journaling was the form it took.  As stated previously, the journals were free to be written in our own style and form, such as a letter, dialogue, poem, prose, or cartoon.  However, the types of books I was reading at that stage of my language journey were the likes of Jacqueline Wilson and Meg Cabot, which featured pre-pubescent teenage girls writing in their journals in the form of “Dear diary” and ending with “Love, Emily.”  Because these authors were published novelists, and because this was the only form of journaling I had been exposed to through literature, it appeared to be that this was the way I had to write in order to appear professional, and be taken seriously in my writing.  That is a lot of responsibility for a ten-year-old to manage, but I had never known any other way to journal other than the ways presented in the books I was reading at the time.  I was also not comfortable enough in my manipulation of language, and did not have faith in my creative abilities with language, to include my own personal style in my journals.  As a result, my journal entries from when I was ten-years-old all appear to be carbon copies of the journal entries of the characters from the books I was reading. 

This frustrates me deeply, because I plan on majoring in English literature, and when I look back on my journey with language, I cannot accurately analyse my own writing.  I cannot track my own progress with my writing styles because they exist so heavily on external influences that they end up feeling like they are not my own.  I accept that I cannot do anything to change this looking back, but it is still frustrating that I will never be able to call my writing and the language I spoke as a ten-year old my own, because I was so insecure in my own language usage and creativity to the point that I had to rely on the work of others.  Because of this, I also never developed my own unique style of speaking and expressing myself verbally through language.  I borrowed and copied phrases from other people’s conversations and dialects, and incorporated them into my daily speech.  Today, I do not consider this to be my own unique style because, once again, it was a blend of everything that ultimately was not me.  Nothing that I said, nor the style that I said it in, came from myself and my interpretation of the world. My relationship with language grew weaker as I struggled to construct my own identity that I was proud and confident of.  This lack of personal identity that I had failed to construct through language became more apparent to me as I started high school.

Not only did I have to make the transition from primary school to high school, I also had to make the transition from public school to private school.  In public school, my friends and I spoke in loud voices.  We shouted to each other across the field, made jokes in Afrikaans, and laughed without inhibition.  Language did not restrict us in any way.  Instead, it freed us, allowing us to express ourselves, form friendship circles and debating groups, and explore and question the world around us by giving us the confidence to speak about our feelings, and share and debate in a safe environment.  In private school, however, I felt restricted by language.  Language was used to police, enforce, and keep us grounded.  We were rarely allowed to express our opinions in the schooling environment, and were not allowed to make any form of announcement, demonstration, or displays unless they had been approved, censored, and edited by an authoritarian member.  This restricted us to saying only what the school wanted us to say, and only hearing what they wanted us to hear.  I felt the door that language had opened up for me as a young girl slowly start to close.  As a result, I only began to see the world from within the confinements of private school.  Even when I was not in school, I would be making assumptions, judgements, and observations based on how I had been entrenched to do in school.  It was not until I started interacting with my public school friends again that I realised how much language had changed and influenced the way I behaved, spoke, and viewed the world.  I realised I had come full circle from where I was when I was ten years old, and that nothing I was doing through language had ever come from my own.  Instead, I was speaking the way others taught me to speak, writing the way others told me to write, and making observations the way my school had taught me to do.  I had become like the collages I made in my journals: A little bit of everything else, but not entirely me.  I also realised that, like the journaling project, language was not empowering me in the way I hoped it would.  I knew that language could be a powerful tool if I learned to manipulate it, as I said in the beginning, but I had not managed to do so successfully.  I thought that journaling would help me in that process, but that failed in helping me establish my unique identity through language.  Moving from public school to private school had further pushed this problem to the point that I felt powerless in my own manipulation of language.

I decided to start a blog when I was sixteen-years-old.  I had been wanting to start blogging before, but due to my writing and language manipulation insecurities that stemmed from primary school, I did not feel confident enough.  However, when it came time for me to choose my subjects I wanted to study to Matric, and prepare my way for deciding my majors in university, I realised I needed to take ownership of my writing, and become the enlightened, skilled literature student I knew I could be.  I knew how to analyse poetry, answer comprehensions, and explain figures of speech in a regurgitating manner so that I could get the marks I needed to get in order to do well in my exams, because this was what the institution I was in wanted to hear.  I knew how to please them, because it did not require any analysis on my part.  It only required telling them what other sources said was true about the piece of literature, and why this was the correct interpretation of the piece.  However, my creative writing suffered in that process.  Creative writing was an exercise where my own creative flair could be made known, but two problems presented themselves:  The first being that even though a level of creativity was allowed, it was still within the restrictions that language within the school environment placed on me.  The second problem was that I fell victim to clichés, overused metaphors, and variations of similar plot lines, because I had not established my own voice, identity, and confidence through writing and language.  My creative writing suffered further, and I truly believed that I had no creative writing skills whatsoever.  I had virtually no writing identity outside of academia.  I knew I needed to establish my identity through language sooner than later, and now was the time to do it.  Now was the time to find my unique voice through writing, and the way I decided to do so was by blogging.

Blogging seemed like an appropriate place to find my voice through creative writing and language manipulation because I was an anonymous person on the internet amongst thousands of bloggers.  I could write and express myself without anyone limiting my content, and I could choose whatever I wanted to focus on without being given a specific topic.  For the first time since starting my academic journey through language, I finally felt my own unique road start to pave.  I felt my own journey with language begin as I was without restrictions and inhibitions, and settled into my own literary refuge to write and express myself at my will.  I finally felt empowered through language, and felt my creativity showcase itself like never before.  As my blog content became more personal, and as my audience worldwide grew, my confidence in my abilities to manipulate language increased, and I became even more excited at the prospect of studying English literature at university. 

Blogging was the best decision for me considering the space that I was in in my journey with language.  Blogging assisted me in increasing my confidence in my abilities to express myself through creative writing, and helped me in constructing logical, coherent arguments.  If I had remained complacent with my writing abilities, and not made an effort to exert myself as a unique individual through my blog, my language manipulation abilities and creative writing skills would have remained stagnant.  I also would not have been as excited as I was to become an English literature major in university, because my writing abilities and relationship with language would not have been as strong as they could have been.

Reflecting on the journey I have walked with language fills me with pride and hope.  I am proud of myself for committing to forging a stronger relationship with language, and for realising that my own unique identity was necessary for me to construct more coherent arguments, to improve my creative writing skills, to learn to strengthen my voice, and to value and express my own opinions, beliefs, and story-telling abilities.  I am realizing more and more every day that my relationship with language has also helped me forge international connections by people connecting with me through the written word, and being inspired by my writing.  It gives me immense hope for the future, because my blog is expanding at an unprecedented rate.  My blog has opened up so many more doors than I ever could have opened myself, and has helped me dream bigger than the confinements of school allowed me to.

Language has not only opened my mind, but the world for me too.  Through strengthening my relationship with language, and having faith in my writing abilities and language manipulation, I have gained a confidence and passion for language that I could not have anticipated as a ten-year-old school struggling to find herself in her journal.  Seeing the stack of journals in my room reminds me that while this journey with language has been a fulfilling and enlightening one, I have a duty to continue on the road I paved for myself, and keep building on the identity I have found through language.


XO

Copyright © 2014 Sarah-Kate Says