Triggered
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I am baaaaack!
The rainy season is finally here ! I couldn’t have asked for a better time to get back to writing. The cold and rainy season is my best season!
After so much outcry due to dry crops, hunger, dust and shortage of water among other challenges in no particular order of importance, it feels really good to experience some rain.
Yet here I am, in the middle of the night, unable to cook, clean or sleep, because I may have ruined my favorite season when I took my first ever “sip” of smoked weed on a rainy day back in December 2019.
See, one of my favorite things to do is dress up. I like the feeling of putting together an outfit that makes me see my creativity; and feel great, powerful and sophisticated all at the same time. I love how I can go from a terrible mood to a great-elated feeling due to the excitement I get from looking at myself in the mirror and knowing I look great even before anyone says it.
I live for those moments, and there is no better time to dress up like the rainy seasons. You can wear layers upon layers of different pieces to put together an amazing look that makes you feel unique, wonderful, and fantastical even.
How I wish that this were all there is to this rainy season for me though.
In truth, it is that I cannot sleep because this rainy season is turning out to be one of my worst triggers. My trigger back to the “happiest” days of my life yet since I stopped dreaming, as I had found a “better” fix than any fulfilled dream, or at least so did it feel.
This season is triggering me back to the days of my most “wonderful” blissful abandon, when I smoked the most weed in my life, and it was amazing! Before you judge any drug user, dependent or addict, just research the meaning of drugs. It is that there is a great high attached to the drug. The brain thirst for the dopamine the drug provides then takes a life of its own and it becomes almost impossible not to seek it out. If you are fortunate enough, you have not tried any psychoactive drug; as then, your normal life dopamine does not have to compete with the dopamine high of a drug.
Now, let me first clarify something. I have considered the full repercussions of making this confession. I have considered my possible worst nightmare out of making this confession of my experience with weed, which is a psychoactive drug, and I am okay with it. I am okay with if I were to lose my job, or get weird stares out of this confession, and I am okay with that. This is for my 7th generation into the future. That the generational burden of addiction and slavery to drugs in their family ended with their great great great grandma seven generations back.
Now we can go on.
It is true that I had the most joyful reckless utopic experiences of “happiness” in my life as I smoked away on the rainy days of March-April-May 2021/22. Oh, the ecstasy of this fake joy. I would kneel on my bed, which was next to my window in this bedsitter I was living in alone. I would look outside through the window, stare at the emptiness and just feel pure bliss. There was this large acacia tree outside that I would stare at feel extremely inspired.
You ain’t ever felt euphoria like the feel of a cold breeze blowing over your skin, when you’re high on a drug, at night, and all you hear is silence or the music you’re lost in, and the only lights you see are the few beams of security lights piercing through the darkness. I would feel like I that is how heaven felt. Sometimes I would feel like I was this great artist who could write the most romantic poetry describing that feeling.
So yes, I feel triggered. I am so tempted to call my Pedi and ask for the “good stuff”. Oh yes, there are levels to this stuff as the kids say nowadays.
When I see the dark of the clouds, feel the cold of the weather, see and almost feel the dump soil soaked in rain, I feel some major nostalgia. Nostalgia of my “happiest brain” days. My days of weed with reckless abandon.
See, thing is, I have been a bit happy lately. And to me, joy is strange. Sometimes I catch myself at peace amidst a stressful workday and I feel like something could be wrong. As if there could be something I am doing wrong.
Oh yes, joy can be strange, uncomfortable even. And for me, this is the case. I have been so used to unhappiness, that I have often sabotaged myself when I get joy beyond the “normal”, just so that I can have some level of “problems” to deal with.
I know all this sounds strange to you if you are not someone with a history of self-sabotage. However, for those who can relate, then they know we tend to self-sabotage when we are at our happiest, because then we have reached our upper limit of happiness, and anything beyond that feels strange, because it is a new experience.
No one wants new experiences. At least not our brains. To our human brains, anything new, whether good or bad, is a threat. Our brains are wired to fight and protect us from threats. So no, self-sabotage has never been due to hate against oneself. It is our brain’s mechanism of “protecting” us from the perceived threat of a new experience. At least that is what I have discovered from my latest Read, “The Mountain is you” by Brianna Wiest, a great book I would recommend for anyone struggling with, or seeking to understand self-sabotage.
As humans, apparently, we are wired to seek out comfort, not good things. We seek familiarity. We look for certainty. So even a joyful experience that could be outside of our “best joy” will be perceived as a threat by our brains. We self-sabotage to “go back to our base settings”, even if that baseline destructive things like fear, anxiety or even shame. “Regardless of how bad it might be, it is familiar,” our brains tell us.
Anyway, the point is that of late I have been making good progress, slow but sure. It is not progress in tangible things, but I can tell. It is not even due to age. God has just be doing some work in me, and I can feel the difference.
Different is good, but different is bad, at least that is what my brain knows. Therefore, I would be lying if I said that I have not sabotaged myself this year; and not necessarily with weed. Some days it is just scrolling on Instagram for so long, knowing too well that afterwards, I will experiencing terrible anxiety over uncompleted work, and yet I wasted the time looking at photos of people make money from my views. I have realized that I have sabotaged myself even by just contemplating on buying weed, because then there will be “unholy” thoughts to judge myself over. At least judging myself is familiar. It is not like this strange thing God calls joy.
So yes, I am triggered. I am triggered by the newness, the weather and the classical music pieces playing in my ears as I write this, because even the first time I painted using water colors I was high on weed, and listening to classical music, as I drew to describe and illustrate the sounds that were playing in my head.
I am grateful for courage this time though. The courage to write about my trigger instead of succumbing to it. I am grateful for the courage to own up to the struggle, instead of hiding in shame behind it. If someone gets encouraged to name a shame or struggle, that has been keeping them captive out of this article, then I would just be even luckier.
I would just not find peace if I did not point us that; we need to consciously observe how selectively our brains romanticize the “good times” that have probably led us to some of our worst decisions.
My brain is out here romanticizing my days of reckless ecstasy and abandon with weed, but leaving out all the guilt and shame and hiding I have had to do, and the shame of feeling like a hypocrite.
My brain is out here romanticizing my “amazing” weed moments, while conveniently forgetting the part where I was isolated from my community and support system, so I could indulge myself in destructive habits without anyone holding me accountable.
What are you romanticizing?
I am not saying I judge anyone who is a stoner or even in any kind of habit that could be harming them and they know. Far from it. I know first hand how one can remain mud even when they hate it there.
However, I am challenging us to consider this: could we be romanticizing habits that no longer serve who we are and who are becoming? Could we be self sabotaging and remaining stuck in a person we have outgrown? Is the dysfunctional joy we have known all the joy we could possibly experience? Just so we remain with what is familiar? Is it worth it? Is it worth us?
What if we travelled the world instead? What if we tried sending that email we have been postponing to send? What if we quit that job we have been saying we need to quit? What if we took a chance on ourselves?
What if there is higher joy in sobriety than any I have known under the influence of any drug? What if we developed new baselines, even if slowly?
What if you took a chance on yourself and bowed differently to that trigger?
Yes, I am triggered, but today I am grateful.
My triggers did not get the best of me.
P.S
Welcome back to my writing, we’re about to have a great year this year and onwards, because this time it is not by might, nor by will power, nor by any power really, but by the spirit of God.
