Around ten months after we lost Aidan, I was continuing to have trouble controlling my flinching from the trauma. I would see something or think of something, then flinch. A quick shake of the head, like a sudden shiver. Not very often at work, but mostly during idle moments during meetings when I wasn’t engaged in some other immediate task.
It was not recounting the traumatic events of losing him that triggered me. It was little memories, the accumulation of tiny details. Simple things, like the color orange, his favorite, and how he said it was his favorite even though it was also my favorite, and I reminded him he could have whatever favorite color he wants.
I thought about how my brain was reacting to these memories. Why did they make me flinch? I actually talked with Aidan about it. What do you think is going on? (These conversations happen a lot when you grieve.) I realized it was as if the feelings they stirred up had no place to go. They felt all bottled up, and my flinching was the bottle exploding.
So I (we) came up with an idea. Any time I flinch, simply jot down what triggered it so that it has a place to go. I thought of keeping a notepad at first, but thought that might attract too much attention. People are on their phones all the time, so to make it easy, just make it a Twitter feed. I started tweeting under the @iflinch2much handler on Mother’s Day 2018. I did this for myself, so that I could occasionally look over the list and review all the things that had recently triggered me. It helped to be able to go back and remember how some memory made me feel.
I don’t care if other people can see it. I prefer that it’s out there, and not something kept inside me. Privacy is overrated. But some of the triggers would make no sense to anyone outside our family. Poom, for example. Aidan really liked the custom of clinking glasses over dinner. But instead of the usual sayings like “bottoms up” or “skol,” he preferred his own, “poom,” the sound of the glasses coming into contact. After a while, I would add a little extra detail in case I ever shared it with anyone else. You need to know “Bonebreaker Hill” up on the Nashawtuc Road loop is the best place in town to sled.
When tweeting out these triggers, I quickly fell into a pattern. If something I had already tweeted triggered me to flinch again later, I would ask myself, “did I already get this one down?” So, tweet them only once. Or sometimes, I’d tweet it much later after remembering it made me flinch earlier. It’s not always real-time. Pretty soon when something brought back a memory, I got a moment to ask myself, “is this going to trigger me to flinch?” As time went on, that short pause increasingly allowed the answer to be “no.” So I could learn to prevent it. Sometimes the answer was still “yes,” but delayed by a second or two. I was giving myself permission to flinch. Yes, I would say, I really do need to flinch about this one. But over time, it seemed more of a choice. I was gaining more control over myself. And that was the goal. I still flinch occasionally, but not nearly as much. Now I often don’t recall something that triggered me earlier when I didn’t have the opportunity to tweet it, like when driving. On more than one occasion, even that would trigger me.
So now I share it with others. A lot of it won’t make any sense, even if you knew Aidan. But I think it may help understand all the little fractures grief brings when interacting with the world.
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