I Choose What I Do With It

You never know when a trigger will hit you. It’s gets easier. The triggers start to disperse with time. The more you face them the more you heal. It stops being an all day constant where there is a trigger at every step. The triggers stop effecting you for days, weeks, on end and you can deal with them quickly. But you never know when another one will come to smack you upside the head. It could be a person that looks a certain way, a smell, a sign, the way someone says hello or shakes your hand or a song.

Today it was a song. We were waiting in the doctors office and the music overhead was just a tuned out part of the atmosphere until that song came on. It was the song my father got his “nickname” for me from and a song many tramatic memories are attached too. The music was no longer tuned out. I nearly came out of my chair, my heart pounding. At first I thought it was my phone alerting me with his, once was his ringtone, that he was calling me. And then my brain realizing of course he would never call me now and I moved on to frantically scanning the room and out the windows of the waiting room my initial expectations of seeing the looming figure of my perpetrator standing by his head now hanging, hands shoved in his pockets like an ‘innocent weak humble man of god’ he was able to hide behind. It didn’t take but even a minute for me to realize it was just a trigger and calm my panicking heart from imediatly putting myself back into those days long ago.

I went about the rest of my day without letting the trigger affect me. But yet it was still haunting in the shadows of my mind the rest of the day as well. As I get into bed tonight the memories are crawling along the borderlines of my brain looking for cracks to seep through and haunt my sleep. It gets easier. But it never goes away. It is something I will face until the day I die. But it will not have power over me. Not now. Not anymore. Because it lost power over me the day I stood up and said they could not longer HAVE power over me. It looses power over me more with each day. The memories will always haunt. But they will not destroy. I no longer let them. I now defeat them with good, with true with beauty. My memories are my fuel to own what has happened to me that I could not control, to own my story. To come to terms with the fact this is the one I was given to write and to live and to do what magic I can with it for my myself, for my kids, for my siblings, for the world. I can not change any of it. But I can choose what I do with it.