#but i'll probably still be picking glass shards out of the carpet for a few years

[trans-cuchulainn]

it feels so stupid that i got like. actual trauma from a shitty job situation because it was objectively Not That Bad as a situation. but it was bad in a way that uniquely dovetailed with my existing issues and trauma, and thus this Not That Bad situation fucked me up to the point of missing work due to panic attacks eight months later, emotional flashbacks well over a year later, a destroyed or at least very damaged relationship with my faith and faith communities, and, y'know, an actual therapist going "yeah no that's complex trauma for sure"

and like. when i try to explain it to anyone without 10 years of backstory it sounds like i'm making a big deal out of quite a small thing but unfortunately there is ten years of backstory, and there's also two years of backstory where this situation was more or less my first sustained human contact since before the pandemic and i had been living completely alone for 18 months and was all the way fucked up already because of that, without having realised as much and therefore without having proper coping strategies in place for that

but that is the thing about trauma. and the thing you don't really get from pop-culture depictions of it. sometimes it's not capital-T Trauma, life-threatening event or obvious harm or anything that people would think of as trauma. sometimes it's somebody dropping an object onto the already cracked glass table of your brain and just fucking shattering it. wouldn't have happened if it wasn't already cracked. object wasn't that heavy. but if it hits at just the right angle... boom, glass everywhere