Talking to friends…hard triggered…anger…consulting Most Favored Tree, and also laying out tarot/oracle spreads for clarity…”this is human too.”
Adventures du jour!
Yesterday was a good day and a bad day.
Good day: talked to several friends. AHHHHHH so good. My tanks were getting empty and I didn’t even realize.
Bad day: got hard triggered and uhhhhh had to shut down a bit. I told myself to just sleep on it, but I got up this morning and still felt unreasonable about it.
I don’t want to go into details but I’m going to talk about some lessons learned in a bit. If you’re reading this, it’s not you.
The good stuff:
I talked to a friend who’s finding some really excellent moments inside a difficult relationship situation.–I got a cute line from him for the WIP. In turn I babbled to him about what I’m doing to heal up from my difficult relationship situation with the ex. I’ll probably talk about it someday, but it’s still too raw to post about. Nevertheless it was nice to start finding words for something I’ve been working on since about this time last year. (Holy shit, has it been that long? It has.)
I talked to another friend who’s dealing with something difficult today; it’s a privilege to be able to share time with a friend in times like that, not to help or offer advice so much as to just be there. I teased her a little for being so very HER, although of course I wouldn’t change her for the world.
A third friend, I didn’t get nearly enough time with, but I decided not to be a little shit about it, particularly since I broke off in the middle of texting her earlier in the day so I could get a big burst of writing done on the WIP (yay! finished the scene!). Balancing things is hard when everyone’s busy. But I got to see her face and, as usual, found myself helplessly smiling. (And laughing, because the line I got from the first friend was perfect for the moment, if not quite accurate.)
Throughout the day, messaged back and forth with another friend, too. Watched some anime with my daughter, got and gave hugs. Posted photos and Midjourney stuff. Ate apples and cheese and a few leaves from the pea plants growing on the patio.
I felt *full.*
And then, hard trigger.
It was brutal. I soon found myself playing game after game of sudoku, which I used to do a lot of while I was trapped upstairs at the house and waiting for the divorce to go through. It felt difficult to do anything else. Eventually I put some music on and fell asleep.
Got up this morning, still in hard-trigger mode, knew that if I tried to do yoga I’d just hurt myself, went out for the walk. My feet took me straight out to the Most Favored Tree. I took a few pictures on the way out there, but not a tenth of what I’d normally take. I asked my characters to walk with me, and Three-Pointer came out to watch over me, although he wasn’t himself in a mood to converse, which was fine by me. I took some selfies so I could look back later and see what my face looked like at the moment, whether it was as scary as I felt. Probably it wasn’t; nobody crossed the street to avoid me or anything.
Once I got to the tree, I burst into tears and stood there and cried for a while. The tree offered no comfort (I doubt I would have accepted any), but also muttered no condemnation or “you’re blowing things out of proportion” either.–I know that words of advice received from a tree come from my own mind, but I also know that doing stuff like this helps me know my own mind. Nevertheless, it surprised me not to find any trace of “you’re being stupid, you just need to calm down.”
My conscious self was trying to tell me to calm down and be reasonable. But whatever part of my thought that was coming through the tree, wasn’t.
Eventually I kept going until I got to some thicker woods and stopped at a place where I’d gone to be alone and process things on a different day. It felt like that spot was the “right” place to process things again.
I got there and was angry. I stayed there for ten minutes or so, just being angry, a place beyond right or wrong, thinking about what I would have liked to do (ahahahaha) and just not swerving away from the thought the way I normally would.
In the end I didn’t know what else to do but I felt like it was time to go.
As I walked up to the Most Favored Tree on the way back, I suddenly and literally saw it in a way that I hadn’t seen before, so I took a photo. The words “this is human too” popped into my head, which I was not expecting.
I was still burning up with anger and not thinking straight, though, so I decided to lay out some Tarot/oracle cards when I got back to see if that would help clarify anything. It often does. Another tool that has a dubious basis but helps me know my own mind.
On the way back I took more pictures. That part of my mind was functioning more or less normally again.
I also thought briefly about Enneagram stuff; I find it helpful sometimes in framing “this is what I mean to me” questions.
In nerdy Enneagram language for those who follow it, I thought I was 5w4 548 SP/SO when I first took the test (and INTP). But as I started working on things about a year ago, I found lots of points of connection to 4 and SO/SX (and INFP) and like zero points of connection to SP. I think I’m on the fence in lots of ways and got “pushed” from who I am into something marginally more acceptable by my mom and spouse over the years. I actually have a lot of traits that fall into both 4 and 5, plus I’m fairly balanced on the extrovert/introvert thing, too. Right now, my Enneagram works out more naturally as 4w5 458 SO/SX. However, I got triggered into a very black 8 SP mode and I’m neither comfortable nor skilled at it; I just know that my gut instincts in the moment probably wouldn’t get me where I wanted to go, long term. Or even short term.
Outside of nerdy Enneagram talk…how do I even say it? “I’m normally either a nerd or some sort of artiste, but I wasn’t, not then; I had flipped over into something so triggered that I wasn’t just angry, I was anger itself”?
Maybe something like that?
At any rate, I made it home and did two spreads, one with an oracle deck and another with a Tarot deck. The first was all about what my overall focus should be, and the second was about how I could carry that out. It takes time to lay out a good spread and interpret it, and I forced myself to look everything up and write it down as I went so I wouldn’t skim over the thoughts I didn’t want to think.
It took a while. I didn’t uncover any radically new course of action or perspective. Sometimes that happens: whatever is really going on, whether that trigger came solely out of my mind or it has some basis in fact, I don’t need to change what I’m doing. Disenfucking myself this way continues to be sound, as far as I can tell on a conscious or subconscious level.
Recovering my sense of self was always going to have led to facing triggers like this. I don’t need to back down, but I also don’t need to take action. Acting from a place of catastrophic thinking can only make situations like this worse, whether the trigger was valid or not. In the end, resolving my own inner conflicts, rather than blindly lashing out, is the fastest path out of this moment as well as the best long-term solution.
Which sucks. I don’t want to be calm because that will be the most effective thing I can do. But at least it’s not telling myself to calm down because I’m being irrational.
The part of me that wishes to choose violence and confrontation (whether it would be effective or not) still sits in my back pocket. I feel uncomfortably aware of it but I’m not banishing it, either. It is me, I am it.
And, like the tree said, “this is human too.”
…
I got new shoes today. Check them out!
Goddess of Winter, rolled up in honor of a Very Pale Friend with a Terrible Temper. She liked it.
The same shoes, when they’re at rest.