[insomniac-arrest]

reasons I’ve seen people staying on tumblr:

• don’t understand twitter
  
• don’t understand twitter
• posts are in chronological order
• spite
• no other website has the same ambiance of gothic confusion and unrelatable obtuse content
• they are a hapless pornbot who knows not of the end coming for their quivering female presenting nipples
• mega spite
•  like normal spite but you’re posting dick pics before The End
• Direct Contact with the Memes
• god, wht the fuk even is twitter
• they tried to leave but woke up again on tumblr like it’s the Groundhog’s Day movie

[thankyousirmayihaveanother]

just to be clear, I’m staying here as long as this site functions. I have 0 intentions of deleting this blog, I will go down with this ship if only to see exactly how bad it gets

[worldsworstfather]

admit it, we’ve all fantasised about slow-dancing in the kitchen barefoot in our pyjamas at 2am in the arms of someone we love while old romantic jazz songs play softly on the radio

[plasticroyal]

bye

[evilqueens]

when a deadline is looming but the stress still isn’t enough to motivate you into doing something:

[open-plan-infinity]

“Oh so now you sorry??! You sure as hell wasn’t sorry when..”

[greelin]

*feels nothing* mmm, don’t like that
*feels something but like, too much* mmm not a fan of that either

[owlsofstarlight]

In case anyone wants some perspective on how utterly random triggers can be. I haven’t lived in a house with a garage door in four-ish years. Right now at this moment, I honestly can’t recall what they sound like, except something metallic moving and rather clanky.

There was one on tv. I wasn’t even paying attention to it, I had my headphones on and was actively trying to tune the show out. My ears picked up on the sound of the garage door, and a jolt of adrenaline shot through my body as I grabbed my laptop and moved to get out of my seat and run to my room.

I realized what happened after about two seconds.

The sound is gone from my ears, but my heart is still racing and I’m waiting for the door to the house to open, to hear the jingling of my mother’s keys and her footsteps moving through the house. My muscles are still tense and I’m fighting the urge to run to my room and stick a board in front of the door.

For years, the sound of a garage door was my warning to pack up what I was doing quickly and retreat to my room if I was out of it.

I can’t remember the sound of the garage door right now, but I can’t tell my brain to stop trying to react to it.

[owlsofstarlight]

This can be reblogged, if anyone was wondering. I wrote up this post with the intention that hopefully people who read it and didn’t really get triggers would understand a bit.

[the-real-seebs]

So, a thing that’s particularly important here: The trigger here is not the bad experience itself.

[jumpingjacktrash]

after my super funtime medical adventure, i had to change all my bath products, because my brain had associated the scent of them with being terrified and in extreme pain.

these were products i had chosen myself because i liked the smell. and they got connected to the medical phobia because i was using them to wash off the hospital reek and the fear sweat and so forth. i don’t know why they became a trigger. maybe because washing off the hospital smell didn’t make me not in pain. maybe because their ‘fresh pine ocean breeze bluegreen spicy stuff’ smell didn’t really replace the hospital stench, just mingled with it.

but for whatever reason, smelling these objectively nice soaps made me do flashbacks and get all hopeless and wobbly. so they had to go.

triggers are random. they’re often something that was simply present during a trauma, and you can’t guess what they’ll be. no one who hasn’t heard me explain this would ever associate suave naturals ocean breeze body wash with unbearable abdominal pain. so i guess the takeaways here are twofold:

- if you have triggers, remember other people can’t predict them, and don’t expect to be protected from them all the time. that’s up to you.

- if you don’t have triggers, don’t assume you can judge what a ‘real’ trigger is, and if someone asks you to accomodate them, don’t be a dick about it. even if you don’t want to make that accomodation, decline politely and apologize, don’t disparage their request.

[smokescreens-n-otherillusions]

Triggers are a case of classical conditioning, where association between a stimulus (In these cases, forms of trauma) and a neutral stimuli (such as the garage door or scent of bath products) becomes so interlinked that you associate them as one. This happens a lot to those going through chemotherapy, where the nausea they feel from chemo medication becomes linked with everything they interact with while feeling nauseous (it doesn’t help that this sort of conditioning is super strong when linked with nausea) so even after all chemo treatment is done, they can’t stand to eat what they ate at the time, can’t look at the doctor, or a white room, or smell cleaning products without feeling extreme nausea.

Triggers are subconscious, and we haven’t really got control of them. Even if you go through therapy for them, because they’ve now become learnt, they will still be there and mess with people. Don’t make assumptions about triggers, and try to be accommodating.

[thetwistedrope]

For those who are interested, EMDR has been shown to be able to lessen the effects of triggers.

[duessaherself]

I just learned the origin of pink lemonade and I need you all to hear this.

So this dude selling concessions at a circus back in like 1857 ran out of lemonade and he needed water to make more, but there wasn’t a stream or water pump, BUT the BAREBACK HORSE RIDER had just washed her pink tights in a bucket of water, staining the water pink. So, being the enterprising fella he was, dude just threw in the lemons and sugar and told everyone it was special strawberry lemonade. Well, the circus patrons saw pink lemonade and thought, “That’s fucking amazing!” and he ended up selling twice as much lemonade than usual.

To reiterate.

This dude sold people sweaty horse crotch water and it was so popular it became an Actual Fucking Thing.

DELICIOUS.

[ct-7567]

Thats pussy babe!

[goofy-ruthie]

I can’t believe it’s actually pussy babe