How not to be triggered

A mostly sincere guide to not flipping the F out

Don Draper: Absolute king of not letting you get to him™

Before we get to today’s piece, a few updates! BUT YOU SEEMED SO HAPPY is included in poet Maggie Smith’s post “Books As Permission Slips” detailing the 20 books she read as she was writing her new book, YOU COULD MAKE THIS PLACE BEAUTIFUL. BYSSH is also on the list of “Valentine’s Day Picks for the in Love, the Jilted, and the Ex” by Zibby Owens. I was quoted in Kathryn Jezer-Morton’s article “Starting Over With a Divorce Registry” on The Cut. And one of my old New Yorker pieces was included in this fantastic roundup on The Hyphen by Emma Gannon!

---

If you’re a paid subscriber today is your lucky day! OR today is a terrible day and a complete waste of your money! Your call! As part of a paid subscription, you (the reader) get access to previously unpublished pieces by me (a person who had an exhausting, extremely stupid week and cannot write anything new right now).

The piece below was in early drafts of BYSSH. If you’ve read the book you’ll likely agree that it’s sort of neither here nor there when it comes to fitting into that particular book. It’s actual advice but not totally serious. And it has its funny moments, but isn’t a humor piece. And it really has nothing to do with marriage or divorce, but more like all of life. So. I ended up cutting it. Was I right? Was I wrong? (I was right, but I like to give you the illusion of choice). Go get ‘em, tiger!

---

How not to be triggered

As a sentient being with a hair trigger temper and an inflated sense of self-importance, I get mad. I get mad so much. But I’ve learned that getting mad often just leaves me mad. The person making me mad? Probably doesn’t care why I’m mad. They’re probably not thinking about me at all. Me? Now even madder. Doesn’t it sound exhausting? It is. I’ve been mad for no reason since I was, like, six.

But as I get older and my battery wears down, I just don’t have it in me. And navigating people’s bullshit through the thick fog of my own bullshit gets harder and harder with each passing year. That’s just math. Unfortunately, I still find myself having to interact with less-than-ideal human people in real time using our two faces and our myriad expressions, grudges, and vibes.

And so do you. I’m talking about people who have some sort of legitimate claim to being in our lives but can also piss us off with hardly any effort. The slightest pause, the whispered, “Well” and we’re ready to launch them directly into the sun. They probably hurt us at some point, but we’d never admit it. It’s just so much easier and socially acceptable to say we’re mad. We might only see them on holidays or every Sunday when we’re transferring kids back and forth, but either way we’re stuck seeing their human forms. Gross. And ugh.

In an effort to put less effort into my life in general and the less-than-ideal relationships it contains specifically, I’ve honed these methods with the unwitting and unintentional participation of people who keep trying to ruin my life. When I share my methods with friends, they’re startled by the simplicity. And they’re in awe that me, a faux victim and giant baby, can pull any of them off. They often report trying one, if not all, of these approaches in high stakes environments (Thanksgiving, a family reunion) and they work.

But I knew that.