Mental Health Matters: Triggered (Part I)

“Can you imagine living here?” my husband asked, “or near here?”

He was asking me if I could ever think of how life would be if I’d lived near or around Covert, Michigan, the place I was sent when my father threw me out of the house. It was September 2020.

Three months prior, a birth chart reader told me I had been seeking higher consciousness, and apparently, there are certain places on earth, where I can be closer to achieving that goal. Florida is one of them. Chicago and Michigan, those places where I was born and raised, are not.

I knew this before the reader mentioned it. I could feel it.

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In 2014, I visited my grandmother in Covert on a stop to Western Michigan, the university where I’d received my bachelor’s degree. My then job had paid for me to go anywhere in the country for professional development, so I chose my pre-professional roots. Maybe my methodology professor, the person who taught me how to teach, would impart some sage words on a journey that seemed foggy at best.

I couldn’t tell if I was holding my breath or if my breath shortened on its own, but something physically happened to me as I entered her driveway. I ignored it and slept soundly that evening.

The following morning, I awoke to soft mounds of white snow in the driveway. My grandmother and I shared breakfast and then we sat across from one another in the living room; she sat in the armchair and I on the couch.

“Where is the shovel?” I asked.

“It’s in the garage. I’ll go get it,” she said.

But she didn’t. We sat there for thirty minutes as a daytime show blared on the television, audible to anyone outside of the house, her hard-of-hearing status at its beginning stages.

“Grannie, are you going to get the shovel? I have to meet my professor,” I said.

“I’ll get it,” she said.

My grandmother is good at controlling a situation so that by the time it’s over, you don’t know if you gave away your power or if she took it.

I felt the heat rise from my abdomen, but I said nothing. Time travelled backwards. I was no longer forty-one. I was seventeen. I was alone and powerless. I should keep my mouth shut and wait for the shovel. An overwhelming sense of sadness overcame me. Breathing was hard, but yoga had taught me pranayama. I sat and practiced. Inhale. Hold. Exhale. I waited for her to liberate me from her house, whenever she saw fit.

Eventually, we walked to the garage together and she handed me the tool. It never dawned on me that I could’ve found it myself.

FB, February, 2014

The cold air, constant digging, and solitude served as therapy. I held onto the residual anger of being forty-five minutes late to my meeting and turned my fury into a cute social media post about perseverance, perhaps someone would be inspired by my resentment.  

I never processed what happened at her house. In fact, I ignored that it did.

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• Triggered Part II
• Triggered Part III

Watch Dr. Dinardo’s keynote, “Emotional CPR: Catch Triggers Before They Escalate” to learn how to recognize and rein in triggers before they get out of hand.