Triggered

This post basically is one big trigger warning, so do with that as you will.

Wednesday was a weird day because it was the anniversary of the surgery and it was the last day of me seeing clients at one agency, so I was saying goodbye to them.  I mostly spent the day running around like a headless chicken trying to get everything done.  On the way home after my last client, though, I started falling apart in the car.

I texted one of my cousins who has also experienced loss, and that helped.  I was physically feeling like crap, but I also had a meeting that evening that I needed to drag myself to, and that was another distraction.  When I got home from the meeting, though, I was still feeling awful and I lay down with a book.  I love fantasy, and I love being able to escape into another world.  My husband suggested going to bed after all the kids did, but I wanted to read for a few more minutes.

Then I picked up my phone and flipped through Facebook.  Big mistake.  Wednesday was the day that alligator took that little boy in Orlando.  That little boy that's the same age as my son.  There's a post going around by Melissa Fenton or something like that that one of my friends had posted.  DON'T READ IT!!!  Not unless you can handle your heart breaking into a million pieces.

When it was talking about cases from the past, it was okay.  When it started talking about the boy in Orlando, in graphic detail of that family's experience of the loss, that's when it got to be too much to take.  I started shaking and crying.  I wanted to blog about it, but I couldn't.  I was up for another hour because I couldn't face the thought of going to bed and I needed to escape into another world again.  I'm tearing up again now just writing this.

I'm sure part of it was the timing and the day I read it, but it would have still ripped me apart at any time because the baby was the age my son is and that'll be the case any day of the year.  Any time I look at Facebook on my phone or the computer, I'm actually scared and tentative now, looking to make sure that I'm not seeing the beginning of that article again, clicking away fast if I do.

I don't feel like everyone needs to be protected from everything that could possibly be thought provoking or challenge their beliefs or anything like that.  And I'm not saying that it was the author's responsibility or the reposters' responsibility to put a trigger warning in place.  But for me, I needed one, so this is that warning for others.