Triggers Help Heal You

A few weeks back I went to dinner with two of my girlfriends and we were talking about a couple of people that we had followed and what not and it was amusing because I’d just seen that a few of them had brought out books recently and I was really triggered by that. I can’t even say was yet. I still am triggered.

They wrote books. And got them published. And that’s all I’ve ever wanted to do since I was first exploring the word of writing.

But the real thing here is that I didn’t say anything until I saw a mutual follower between one of my friends and I pimp out a particular book and person that left a bad taste in my mouth. You see I’m working hard, studying further to help my credibility for writing coaching and editing because I want to have all of the tools and experience under my belt to better help you. But it’s time consuming and my business has taken a back seat to trying to focus on my Masters degree. It rubs me wrong when I see people who don’t have a writing background and they have these books going out in the world and I don’t.

And maybe it’s part of my self sabotage, to keep studying and working on my words and my writerly insides, but I know that it’s the right thing to do. So I’m doing it.

The triggers are something that I usually brush off and don’t really pay much attention to. I’m a bottler and I internalise until I break. This time, I did something different. I reached out to my friend and told her how it made me feel and she told me that it actually triggered her too and suddenly felt less crazy. Because that’s how I had been feeling.

Why did that make me feel so uncomfortable?

Because I knew that I wasn’t doing everything I could. My writing was taking a backseat to my life and it’s frustrating. In my last blog about writer’s block it’s the same. I fill up my days with procrastination when I should be focused.

Triggers are important because they show us what we need to spot light. But they show us that we need to feel through the triggers and do it anyway. Write that book. Schedule in that exercise and delete UberEats so you can get back on top of it all.

It’s hard but I’m dedicated to do it. My books will be out for the world to read and whether it’s by my own hands or those of a publisher it doesn’t matter. It’s my life. And my books deserve to be out there.

I think it’s time to keep myself accountable and start blogging about what I’m writing, I won’t bore you with that though, that’s what morning pages will be all about.

I’ve deactivated Facebook to work on my degree better but also to give me more time because I spent endless hours, just scrolling. I’m learning that scheduling is definitely not the worst thing in the world but it can, in fact, help keep me accountable. And I’m also realising that my word for the year: Boundaries, is not something I’m actively working with, I got really sick and had to push through it because of my retail job, but I’ve come through the other end and I’m going to be better at it.