Bushra

The books taught me that when we live through traumatic experiences, our brains take in the things around us that are causing the greatest threat, and they encode these things deep into our subconscious as sources of danger. Let’s say, for example, that you are hit by a car. Your brain registers the noise of the car screeching to a halt, the grille speeding toward you. It shoots out an onslaught of stress chemicals like adrenaline and cortisol that elevate your heart rate and blood pressure, narrowing your focus to the thump of the impact and the pain and the sound of an ambulance. But at the same time, your brain is subconsciously taking in thousands of other pieces of stimuli: the foggy weather, the Krispy Kreme at the intersection, the color and make and model of the car, the Midwestern accent of the guy who hit you, his blue Wolverines T-shirt. And your brain imprints deep inside itself the powerful connections between these stimuli and this pain. These associations are stored in your brain along with the corresponding emotions from that day. And they often do not come with full stories. Therefore, your brain might not encode the logical connection between the Krispy Kreme and the car crash. It might simply encode: KRISPY KREME. DANGER. The result is that when you see a glazed doughnut or a blue Wolverines T-shirt, you might become uneasy without understanding why. Your brain is recognizing a pattern that it has flagged with life-or-death importance, and reflexively shoots out what it believes to be the appropria emotional response. This reflex might manifest in a big wa like a panic attack. Or it might manifest in a smaller way, like suddenly feeling very grumpy. You might decide that you’re irritated at your girlfriend for a mildly stupid thing she said that morning and text her to say so. None of this, of course, is reasonable or rational. But your brain is not trying to be reasonable. It’s trying to save your life. If someone pulls out a gun near us, we shouldn’t need to ponder for a few minutes about the make and model of the gun and how guns work and what caliber the bullets might be and the amount of damage they might do. If we see a gun, we need to know one thing, and we need to know it fast: GET DOWN. MOVE. RUN. What we might think of as emotional outbursts—anxiety, depression, lashing out in anger—aren’t always just petty, emotional failings. They may be reflexes designed protect us from things our brain has encoded as threats. And these threatening inputs are what many people call triggers. No, having triggers doesn’t make you a fragile little snowflake. It makes you human. Everyone has them, or wi have them eventually, because everyone will experience some form of trauma. That annoying blank stare your ex used to give you. The sound of the ventilator your grandmother was hooked up to in the weeks before she died. Having an emotional response to a trigger is perfectly healthy. Those triggers are only considered PTSD when an event is so traumatic that its triggers cause symptoms like panic attacks, nightmares, blackouts, and flashback when the emotional response becomes debilitating. And here’s what makes complex PTSD uniquely miserable in the world of trauma diagnoses: It occurs when someone is exposed to a traumatic event over and over and over again—hundreds, even thousands of times—over the course of years. When you are traumatized that many times, the number of conscious and subconscious triggers bloats, becomes infinite and inexplicable. If you are beat for hundreds of mistakes, then every mistake becomes dangerous. If dozens of people let you down, all people become untrustworthy. The world itself becomes a threat. PT 2

you dont like reading you despise reading thats why youre constantly shitting on the classics and ‘literary’ fiction because when confronted with these profound works of art you become uncomfortably aware of how narrow your own world view is, how shallow the depths of your emotion. you want books you can squee about with other people like you and you want porn that fills your bookshelf and makes you seem quirky and well-read and intelligent even though you can’t read any fiction of a high standard bc the big words make ur head hurt. you want collectors items you want badges that signify your acceptance into the soulless echo chamber of booktok. you believe books should only ever make you feel turned on or compelled to write a viral tweet and when people challenge this way of reading even slightly you lash out bc you are incredibly insecure and deep down are keenly aware of how performative your entire way of being has become. same music same books same clothes as everyone on your fyp and you dont *like* any of it not really you like fitting in you like being a part of the ingroup and live in absolute terror of being othered in any way. its fine tho the first step of getting out of this cycle is learning to love ‘ugly’ people and reading some ursula le guin 

(observes you)

(you behave like a particle)

(behaves like a wave while you’re not looking)

When people ask me what I see myself doing in the future, sometimes I genuinely don’t know because I can’t see myself getting past 20 years old.

As someone who used to feel the same way, I wanna tell you it gets better than that.