My grandmother made the best pork chops, but that recipe died with her. She also made the worst hamburgers I’ve ever tasted, and that’s a recipe I know. When I miss her, I make them. It triggers all those warm, fuzzy, grandma’s kitchen memories and feelings. But the madeleine moment of those lousy burgers are not what I’d call a trigger in a trigger warning sense. The burgers evoke, awaken, arouse.
Triggers, on the other hand, are always about the bad things, unpleasant memories, feelings you were never able to process.
More than thirty years ago I was kidnapped; both my stupidity and a pair of rust-colored corduroy jeans played a big part. I escaped and didn’t think much about it until the same man murdered two friends of mine and the police let him slide. I’m told I got out of my mind angry over that, but I don’t remember the angry. I don’t remember having any feelings about it all, other than the unfairness of the imbalance in whose lives mattered and whose didn’t back then. Not that much has changed and that continues to fuel my righteous indignation in defense and support of women in general, and sex workers in particular. Perhaps I forgot to mention that I, and my two friends, were exotic dancers / go-go girls / strippers / sex workers / women.
With the exception of when I’m writing about that time or telling the story of the kidnapping (perfect when dinner conversation gets dull), I rarely think about that man or those women. Only one friend I still know today remembers any of them. When we talk, I’m prepared to remember any number of things that would give a normal person nightmares and it’s as if we were talking about an episode of Transparent or OITNB. Good stories, but we don’t have a lot of feelings around them.
This no feeling thing, it’s part of a thing called dissociation, and I’ve talked about that before here and here and here and even all the way back here. Apparently, I have lots of feelings about my having no feelings. What I also don’t have, is control over these feelings I don’t have. Because they’re actually there. You know that. My under-brain know that. It’s just my front brain, my awake-brain that doesn’t know it. Until something accidentally flips the switch and feelings I didn’t know I had come rushing out, wrap a plastic dry-cleaning bag around my head, and try to suffocate me.
It’s why people often put a trigger warning before an article or story they think might do that to someone else. Stories about hard things like rape, kidnapping, or suicide. But, if I know I’m reading a story about some teenager who gets raped by his kidnapper and then commits suicide, if I know that going in—and you can usually tell by the headline or pull quotes—then everything inside me is hyper-aware, fully armed and ready, and all the feelings stay on lock down.
It’s the stuff you don’t see coming.
Like when I’m with someone who knew my friend Lyle before he passed away twelve years ago, I’m ready to hear Lyle’s name and it won’t upset me. But when someone random mentions him or repeats something he used to say, it’s a punch to the gut and all the wind gets pounded out of me. My feelings barrier wasn’t up and those missing him feelings weren’t prepared to be called on. They’re like an ADHD, over-sugared, over-caffeinated kid when that happens. Sometimes I have to leave the room in a self-imposed time-out.
I have to be on the lookout for the thing that doesn’t look like an emotional shoe-bomb.
Such as the rust-colored corduroy jeans at Old Navy that tried to kill me today. The original pair were a gift from the man who would later that night turn out to be my kidnapper. I don’t know how much he paid for them, they were from a rack of clothes that had “fallen off the back of a truck” and they fit me like a second skin at a time in my life when that was a flattering look. The pants that stopped me dead in my tracks today, in the middle of Old Navy, some thirty years later, were $34.99. I didn’t see the price tag right away. I couldn’t see anything right away. It felt like I’d been transported back in time, and I was standing in a Times Square pimp bar called “The Pork Pie” watching younger me eyeballing the pair of jeans she’d just been gifted, but with the knowledge of what was to come and no way to warn younger me. At the same time it seemed like those jeans had been transported forward in time—meaning there was a tear in time, and anyone or anything could come through and no one was safe—fuck no one—I wasn’t safe from anything or anyone from my past. If thought I was tough enough back then and turned out to be wrong, I am in no condition now to know how to handle the people and things that could come back looking for me if that tear was real.
I walked away from the counter where the jeans were stacked, and dodged into the dressing room for safety from the ghosts, and to try on a couple of pair of regular blue denim jeans. The sales-girl in the dressing room was folding some leftover clothes. Specifically, she was folding a pair of the rust-colored corduroy jeans. I couldn’t speak. Or take my eyes off them. I couldn’t move. When I finally did, I was grateful for the lock on the door to my little dressing cubicle. I guess I did have feelings about that night. About that man. About who I was then and what happened.
I’m a big believer in don’t worry about finding your feelings, they’ll find you when you’re ready to handle them. These feelings were only there for a few minutes, maybe seven minutes all told. I’ve lived perfectly well without them for over thirty years and while I may be ready to handle them it doesn’t necessarily mean I want to or even need to.
For a moment, I considered buying the rust-colored corduroy jeans. But I wasn’t sure what else I’d come back with once I stuck my arm through the rip in time.
