Triggers, Shadows and the Art of Not Giving a F**k by Patrick Kitana Ettenes

Hey, it’s your mixed-race Carrie Bradshaw. I like that name, and I’m sticking to it.

After my last article, I sat down and tried to work out how my next piece would unfold. To be honest, I wrote what I thought was a nice piece.

Well…

It turned into a rant instead.

What I thought would be interesting really wasn’t. But then the universe throws me signs.

I wanted to write a piece about the power of goodbyes. I got the inspiration from Ugly Betty, because yes, it’s a classic.

But then something happened in my personal life that made me reconsider everything.

I found myself in a situation where I was triggered.

Apparently, one article about it wasn’t enough, and those signs I mentioned kept repeating.

So, brace yourselves slut puppies, because I’m going to dig a little deeper into the world of triggers.

I was speaking to my mother one evening and explaining that no matter how far you go with recovery, you don’t always know what will trigger you.

It’s like you’re constantly healing with an open wound, but you’re unaware of where the wound is.

The location? Your mind? Your emotions?

For instance, I wanted to write an article about goodbyes. Then a family member, who is also my chosen family — received some disturbing medical news.

I could feel his worry that I might relapse.  His words “ I need you to be strong for me ’’ echoed through my mind, body and soul.  Even the voices in my head were worried. To be honest, I was alright but I wasn’t careless about everyone’s concerns.

Many years ago, I watched one of my best friends die from liver cancer. I numbed myself so much to cope. History does seem to have started to repeat itself once more. Another friend, another biopsy, another possible cancer diagnosis. F**k.

I spent years missing my friend, and I still do.

This friend helped bring me up from the age of fifteen. They were like a second mother to me, a brother and a father. Someone who guided me throughout the years, a person who was honest and encouraged me to be myself.  I could feel the worry, and loneliness start to creep in.  You see, death and I go hand in hand. I’ve experienced so much of it around me that I’m not numb to it, but I am alright with it to some degree.

Being the little loving weirdo that I am, I still sometimes see those who have passed. I’ve accepted that odd part of myself. I don’t see death as a scary thing. I see death as a pathway into another world that not many people are able to witness.

When my father passed, I would hear him talk to me. He would calm me down, sit on the side of my bed and watch over me. I accepted that but it doesn’t mean I play chess with him.

When I found out another friend might be ill, all those thoughts came flooding back.

I’m forty-three years old. At this age, some of your family and friends will pass. After receiving that phone call telling me my dad had died, I came to terms with the fact that this is how I might receive future news. I live in the UK alone, I don’t have any family members nearby. They are literally 5000 miles away.

A phone call. A message. A knock at the door.

No matter how much death you witness, no matter how much you intellectually accept that it is part of life, you still have to deal with the emotional reality of it

I wasn’t emotionally mature enough to cope with death, back in the day when I still had a lot of cartilage in my knees ( wink wink.)

I drugged myself constantly, sometimes just as an excuse to jump onto the derail Train, Choo- Choo.

So, on that weekend, I had to hear the voices worrying about whether, I could handle another relapse which could have been a possibility.

It takes a lot to write all of this craziness, as some would say.

Back in the day, I wouldn’t have discussed hearing voices or seeing things in this much depth with anyone, never mind writing about it but it’s my reality. I wonder how many of us are similar?

We in our community bottle so much inside our minds and our experiences of the world, and then we’re told to hold intense emotions in around situations that genuinely affect us.

I’ve sat at Chem sex parties with what I can only describe as the goonies. Everyone there bouncing around but when I dug deep into their stories, I found out the following:

1.     A person had a boyfriend who just killed himself

2.     Another just got diagnosed with HIV

3.     Another had been through a breakup

4.     One didn’t like doing them alone

5.     Another was an addict and would steal

6.     A random person actually liked to have sex.

7.     I also didn’t want to be alone,  but I wanted to fuck and was recovering from a breakdown.

No-one wanted to be there, none of them wanted to have sex. They all needed help but the drugs numb you, the sex distracts you and that cycle repeats itself over and over again until eventually someone passed away, lost their job, went missing, overdosed or some got their lives back on track, got the therapy they desperately needed and started to live again. 

For many LGBTQ+ people, we don’t  always have the luxury of a lot of support networks when it comes to our own personal shit. All of us are running around with no idea how to love ourselves or others properly. Your mother and father didn’t know you would be one of us, so you didn’t have a normal childhood, where you were able to love the person you wanted to, and instead hid a part of your sexual and personal identity in the shadows.

Our minds never had the chance to emotionally mature. Not all but for those of us that turned to drugs indirectly to cope with intense emotions related to our LGBTQ+ lives.

Back to the present day, how was I going to rewrite history for myself when I was staring at a possibility of emotional overload that usually resulted in a relapse?

That pressure to relapse was something I felt when I was told the news while staying at one of my girlfriends.

She came downstairs in the morning and asked:

“Are you okay?” And I said: “I’m fine.”

You see, my friend had asked me not to tell anyone and I thought, sure.

Then the pressure, the emotions and everything else started going around and around in my head and I realized something.

My relapses have, at times, been triggered by mental pressure.

Holding everything inside. Not telling anyone. Not sharing.

I’m not talking about gossiping or offloading onto people. I’m talking about allowing the people around me to actually be there for me. You see, I have some amazing souls around me that I never trusted, and part of my recovery was learning to trust because in the future, I will need them.

When you are sick, you learn that your friends are important.

They should be there for the worst parts of your life as well as the best. I needed them now because I am prone to breakdowns and turning to drugs to cope.

I don’t want that cycle to repeat itself so I broke a promise to save myself. I cried for the first time in the arms of a friend. I cried in a taxi with another. I didn’t cry when my father died. That says a lot.

My friend means more to me than I care to describe. Sometimes that lack of emotion is self-protection. You can imagine that wanting to write an article about the power of goodbye felt too raw and too deep at that moment. Everything I faced that weekend, the following week and even now kept coming back to the same thing: Triggers. Emotional triggers. I thought:

How the fuck am I supposed to help you all with that?

Someone messaged me yesterday; a guy I have a crush on. Don’t ask which one. I have many. He said something that made me realize just how far I’ve come since my last relapse:

“It was so refreshing to meet someone who is so authentically themselves, and honestly, it was amazing, as I know how tough it is to do.”

What he said was correct. But what is the authentic part?

My masculinity mixed with my femininity? Accepting what I see? Accepting what I hear? Accepting the parts of myself that I once thought I had to hide?

That release of pressure alone has helped me move forward. I guess what I’m getting at is that we all have identities we hide from when it comes to substance misuse.

Carl Jung once suggested that, when it comes to addiction, we can continue returning to the same destructive patterns until we face our ‘shadow’ self.

The idea is that there are parts of ourselves we hide so deeply that they emerge through our behaviour, including when we are using drugs. Until we acknowledge those parts and integrate them into our waking lives, we can remain trapped in a repetitive cycle.

My Shadow Sides

I have multiple Identities

I have a feminine one, so I accepted her.

I have a masculine one.

I’m learning more about him.

And then I have myself.

Piggy in the fucking middle.

I’m a Gemini.

A true split.

(FYI, a lot of actors are so don’t think it’s too weird ) As one of my favourite actresses Angelina Jolie once said : ‘People think Gemini have two personalities, but in truth we have about 20, and they are all us’.

Boundaries

I dug deep after my last relapse and faced the darkest parts of myself.

I accepted what I saw. I accepted what I heard. I accepted the darkness I felt. Then I stepped away and thought:

Fuck it. Fuck this. Fuck you. Fuck that bullshit!

Girl, I am too old and too tired to have to deal with all this shit over and over again. Fuck off!

I told the voices to go fuck themselves. I told some of the things I saw at night to screw a lamp post or go and possess a goat. I’d had enough. I didn’t fucking care that they had issues with my painted nails, the insecurity about a man who can rearrange your organs — with consent, of course — or the belief that I should have to prove my TOPness or masculinity to you.

Bitch, get over yourself. Actually, just bend over and go.

I meant all of it. I literally have my mantra as:

“I don’t give a fuck. It’s not my fucking business, and I don’t fucking care.”

And yet, I do care. But I know when to care and when not to.

I am everything and anything. I told people that just wanted to use me for my kindness NO. Learning your boundaries is vital for recovery

That level of acceptance and the integration of your boundaries and shadow self leads to a strange kind of confidence. The confidence of knowing that you are a crazy bitch and being completely alright with it.

So, this time around, this crazy person did things differently. I opened up to my friends. I allowed myself to be vulnerable.

I listened to the voices and prepared myself. Things did happen but I was prepared. I trusted my intuition. I trusted that I would also be protected. I don’t do all of this on my own. I never have. I have people — and things — around me that help me and protect me.

But so do you.

How many of you find that things start happening the second you relapse?

Maybe everything goes well to begin with, and then suddenly starts falling apart, as if the world is conspiring against you.

That’s your guardians telling you: “Enough HOE. Stop!”

Or maybe you get that feeling immediately.

That little voice that says: This is a bad choice.

We, as humans, have strong intuition. A lot of us accept it but the majority of us numb it and run away from what we don’t understand. I did myself.

Half of that comes down to a lack of emotional maturity. By God, I am the worst for this, but I am learning. Emotions are not the problem.

The problem is growing up in communities where feelings are denied, bitchiness is treated as a personality trait, being emotionally unavailable is considered cool, and avoidance is somehow a turn-on.

And yet we want someone who is everything.

Someone who is supposed to know every part of us without us ever actually talking about it.

Girl… Really? God didn’t give us vocabulary to not use it, even brail is available - use it! You don’t have telepathy. Even if you did, you probably wouldn’t want to hear that shit in your head all the time. Accepting that I used drugs to escape feelings and situations was step one. Or step ten. I can’t remember.

Nevertheless, even as I’m typing this, I can feel that bubble in my chest saying: “This conversation is triggering.”

But that’s what I have to face. I am not perfect.

Life will throw fucking things your way but I don’t want to escape the way that I used to. I drugged my emotions so deeply that I am now learning how to feel them and to feel them with acceptance. With confidence. With boundaries. With vulnerability.

How many of us are terrified of our own emotions? How many of us are afraid of being vulnerable? This is where I want to leave you with one final observation.

So many people I’ve met recently don’t have someone they can turn to. Someone to cry with. Someone to open up to. Someone they can talk to about their addictions without feeling judged and yet, they share their secrets with me. I try to help but many of them refuse therapy.

Therapy, as I said in my last article, can help save your life. I feel that a lot of you might need to change some of the company you keep because, in order to recover from substances, you may have to do one of the hardest things imaginable: Step away from the people who no longer support your recovery.

If someone genuinely loves you, they will want what is right for you. Sometimes what is right for you means letting them go. That vulnerability, that emotional maturity, can only happen when you are ready to change your life.

And then, bitch… the hard part starts.

It’s not going to be easy. Or maybe it will.

Maybe some things will be easier than you expect.

But we all need help.

Which part of your life are you willing to face — the part that triggers you, exposes your vulnerability and forces you to feel something you have spent years trying to escape? Maybe the trigger isn’t there to destroy you. Maybe it’s there to show you where you still need to heal.