I got unexpectedly triggered last night, and it’s Elton John’s fault.

Not really, bless his heart. But indirectly, just a bit.

With the start of the new year comes a fresh new reading challenge, yay! So my first book of the year was Elton John’s autobiography, aptly titled Me. It’s an honest, reflective, at times humorous, and deeply personal narrative; man, what an extraordinary life he’s lived and continues to live. There were many things I didn’t know about Elton John, and chief among them was that he had a very difficult childhood, born to two parents who were grim and troubled people that seemed to have no real love for each other or their son. In particular, his mother was very toxic and verbally abusive, narcissistic and manipulative to the very end.

It sounded all too familiar to me. The way he described trying over the years to find some sort of redemptive moment with his mother, the way he would mentally retreat, even well into adulthood, into being a scared little boy desperate to avoid her wrath and win her approval…it all hit home too much. I tried to stay focused on reading Elton’s description of his mother’s toxicity, on maintaining a level of separation from the narrative, but my body lost that thread by yesterday evening. I started feeling extremely fatigued, and sad, even a bit nauseous, and at first I wasn’t sure why. I’d been sick the day before so at first I thought maybe it was still a bit of that. But within an hour I realized that my body was resorting to its old standby coping mechanism of shutting down and going to sleep to avoid further trauma and pain.

I haven’t felt this way, hadn’t dealt with my shutdown mode, in quite some time. In the evening after I got my daughter to sleep, rather than reading or playing a game or watching TV, I went to sleep to deal with it, having come up with no solution other than to just let myself reboot.

For years, I’ve said that I can’t bring myself to read about narcissistic abuse or survivor accounts or psychoanalysis of narcissists or their victims or the psychology of trauma. It’s been hard enough for me to live through it as it is, I can’t relive it every time I pick up a book or turn on the television. I read to escape my troubles for awhile, not to spend even more time with them. I know that it helps some people to process — I know that people have told me that reading my blog is really helpful for them, and I’m so glad for that — but I deliberately do not seek out that material for my own consumption. Elton’s book demonstrated ironclad evidence for me that my boundary with said material makes perfect sense for me.

I expressed to my therapist this morning that I felt frustrated that I had allowed myself to get triggered by Elton John’s autobiography, of all things. She told me this was too judgmental of myself, which is fair, but I think Elton and I feel the same way about our trauma; we’d like for it to go away, to stop cropping up and making us feel like small children in the face of of it, when we haven’t been small children for a long time (him much longer than me, of course). But that isn’t how trauma works. That’s especially not how trauma you endure as a very young child at the hands of your parents works. When it happens at that stage of development, it isn’t just an experience; it becomes a building block, a part of your foundation in learning how to make sense of the world around you as you continue to grow. The trauma I endured as a child will never not hurt. It just isn’t as front and center as it once was, with all the work I’ve put into healing and recovering and moving forward. Figuring out my boundaries and sticking to them, both in relationships with people and with my own personal needs, have really helped with that. On the flip side, though, it means I get caught by surprise when I do get triggered by something, because I’m not used to it anymore. Yes, that is a good thing. But it’s also hard.

What I suppose I’ve done is take those trauma-filled building blocks and use them to establish boundaries I need in order to keep myself safe and heal. What’s next is to let go of the idea that there’s a finish line to this process. There isn’t. It will ebb and flow like the sea. I am grateful that at least that sea is much less choppy than it once was.

Not that he’ll ever read this, but, I send wishes to Sir Elton that his sea is also less choppy these days. Based on his book, it seems to be. Because the truth of it all, which I’ve said before, is — and I believe he would agree — no one has the right to make you feel like shit, no matter who they are.