Another Unexpected Zinger

I got tagged last week, completely unexpectedly, and it’s the ones you don’t see coming that hit you the hardest…

Walking around our university, in route to a meeting, I saw a first responder team parked on the side of the road with their lights flashing. No biggie: I’ve seen that team around town plenty of times in the last 3.5 years, and the lights have not been a triggering event for me (thankfully). But as I got closer, I realized: ‘Oh s*%t, they’re parked out in front of Chelsea’s old office building,’ and that was what sent me spiraling downward.

It started slowly, then built more and more to the point where the episode took me back in time to the specific moment I realized Chelsea had died. While I don’t think I have PTSD, and I try to be very careful and respectful of that diagnosis, I did experience a traumatic episode, and the emotions from that day are still present. My partner K asked later if I’ve adequately processed those emotions around that specific experience: I think so? Or at least, I’ve done work similar to how I processed other aspects of Chelsea’s passing (e.g., counseling, transparency, active work to ‘accept’ the emotions associated with that day). But it’s hard to know what ‘success’ looks like for processing what was probably the worst moment of my life. Is this what success looks like? 99% of the time I’m fine, but 1% of the time I get zinged when I least expect it? Is framing this in terms of success even the right way to think about it? As is often the case, I don’t know, so I’ll have to keep walking forward and approach each new episode with a learning mindset: accept what is happening, reflect upon the experience, and try and learn from it.

I do want to draw a distinction between this situation and something I wrote about on a trip a few months ago: I got triggered on that trip, and my goal was to ‘have a quiet conversation with Chelsea in my head in which I tell her I miss her and express hope that she would be happy with what I was doing in that particular moment.’ But the triggering event there was different than the one last week: that experience was more about Chelsea’s absence in my life (and the associated memories I had of our experiences in that place) than it was the traumatic experience of her passing. And I feel like ‘success’ looks very different for these two types of triggering events.

Fortunately, I continue to have a great support community, so I leaned into that community to help me get through last week’s episode. Sometimes, a few good hugs and friends willing to listen are sufficient to get through the tough moments.

What did I learn from it? Perhaps some insights into how my brain has been processing the grief. As I said before, sirens and flashing lights don’t typically bother me, nor does walking past Chelsea’s old office (to be fair, I do remember it being hard to walk past her office those first few times, and I had to do some work to sit with those emotions). But sirens + Chelsea’s office is a combination I haven’t yet experienced, and the unique nature of that combination clearly hit hard. The hope is that, now that I’ve worked through that combination, I’ll be in a better position if it happens again. But it’s hard not to wonder what other combinations are out there, just waiting to activate the seismic emotions that still live just below the surface.

Also a good reminder of how hard it has been to predict what will and won’t activate those emotions. Again, it’s the ones you don’t see coming that knock you off center the most, so the ability to predict tough moments can be a good way to provide some level of emotional anchoring. But that assumes you can see them coming, which has been a challenge.

I remember watching an old episode of the West Wing in which one of the characters, who had been shot, was talking with a therapist about how he was processing the trauma. The therapist said, “I know it’s gonna sound like I’m telling you that ‘2+2 = a bushel of potatoes,’ but at this moment, in your head, music is the same thing as sirens.”

That line always resonated, even before Chelsea died, because it captured how difficult it can be to rationalize our emotional and psychological reactions to really heavy life events.

One of the lessons that I had to learn early on in the journey was that emotions were never wrong (e.g., why do I feel guilty for still being alive?), they were just speaking a different language than my mind, and I had to learn that language and create space to listen to what emotions were trying to communicate.

I still struggle with that. Hell, even the premise that I can somehow create a predictive framework for what will/won’t activate traumatic memories is in tension with the idea that thoughts and emotions are speaking different languages.

But, returning to that episode of the West Wing: Josh asks his therapist if he’s always going to have traumatic episodes when he hears music (which was his trigger) and the therapist says, “No….because we get better.” I might be bold enough to slightly edit Aaron Sorkin’s dialogue by adding, “…we get better if we do the work.”

The body has an amazing capacity to heal, provided we carve out space and create the right conditions to let it heal itself. And even though that process may appear to occur inside of a black box, hard to predict and understand, sometimes the best thing we can do is just accept what is happening and try to learn from the experience.