Being Triggered Isn’t Always a Bad Thing
Opportunities to regulate our nervous systems are gifts our bodies give us
Lately stories have been doing strange things to me — things they haven’t done since I was a teenager. When I was growing up, stories were my primary mode of a escapist fantasy. I would read for hours on end, in the corner of a living room while my cousins rolled around screaming; quietly on the porch looking out at the pungent water of Sheepshead Bay where I spent summers as a kid. The act of reading — or writing fan fiction — was at once an act of dissociation (as all fantasies are; they bring us from our reality usually into a world where we feel we have a bit more agency) and embodiment, because, as a neurodivergent and highly empathic kid, I felt stories in my body.
Recently I’ve been experiencing this again, specifically with two works of fiction: Black Water Sister by Zen Cho, and Station Eleven, a new limited series on HBO Max, which is an adaptation of a novel by the same name by Emily St. John Mandel. I reread Station Eleven in 2020, while sheltering in-place in rural Pennsylvania with my boyfriend at the time; we moved in together despite having only known each other for five months, something I never would have done Before. Apocalyptic fiction for me at that time was comforting: I also re-read Octavia Butler’s…
