21- Opening Up

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Honesty circle is seriously the worst thing I have ever experienced before in my life.

Of course, that’s a complete exaggeration but I’m a huge fan of keeping things to myself and I think that everybody should do the same. Which is why, when Jake starts taking volunteers around our circle on Friday to start our conversation about triggers, I want to groan and just roll out of my chair and then out of the room and go be by myself. Not only do I want to keep my problems to myself but I don’t want to hear about other peoples’ problems either.

“I get bad when I see my uncle,” Shayla is the first one to share (just like she always is). “Because of what he did to me.”

I’ve heard her story over a bazillion times now and, don’t get me wrong, it’s a really sad and terrible story but I don’t want to hear it anymore. I didn’t even want to hear it the first time. We all have our sob stories, that’s why we’re here. Shayla, however, seems to think that our stories are inferior to her touchy uncle.

“And the smell of whiskey makes me go spastic,” She continues. “Because he always smelled like whiskey. Always.”

And then a guy tells us how he goes into a panic attack whenever he sees the movie Private Ryan (not because it’s a war movie but because of the unsanitary living conditions). A girl who’s sitting close to my left admits that she feels more depressed around Christmas because that’s when her mother died.

After a few more people share their triggers and some people explain the reasoning behind them, Jake gives me that look that he always gives me right before he’s about to ask me to participate, which he does every week, and I shoot him down every single week. “Ana, what about you? Do you have any triggers?”

I want to shoot him down again, to give a vague and dismissive answer and then deal with Shayla’s backfire but I take a deep breath and remember my deal with Dr. Lombardi that if I participate now, I won’t have to come back after next week. “Yeah, I have a few,” I find myself saying, telling myself to get it over with quickly so that they’ll move onto the next person and forget about me.

He raises his eyebrows at me, seemingly surprised that I actually answered the question. I see a few other mildly surprised looks around the circle as well. “Do you want to elaborate on that?”

I lean forward with my elbows on my knees and look down at the tile floor, ignoring all of the people staring at me. “Well, I hate the dark. It makes me really paranoid. Most of the male population scares the crap out of me too. The smell of pine. We can’t even have a real Christmas tree in our house anymore because one whiff of that stuff and I go into full on panic mode. People touching me when I’m not expecting it, like if they touch my shoulder from behind and I didn’t know that they were there. Some loud noises will set me off too. There’s a few more, I guess.”

“You’re afraid of the dark and Christmas trees?” One of the guys asks me with raised eyebrows and the girl beside him elbows his gut but she laughs as if that’s a joke. “Isn’t that kind of childish?”

“We’re not here to judge, Gregory,” Jake reprimands the guy.

“Yeah, Gregory,” I snap at the kid, who isn’t laughing anymore now that he got yelled at by Jake. “See? And you all think that I’m stuck up or something for not wanting to share but the second that I do, there’s somebody there to try and make fun of me or judge me or whatever. Why would I want to tell you people anything about me if that’s how you react to what I say?”

“That’s the real world,” Shayla justifies Gregory’s remark. “People are going to judge you all of the time, you just have to get used to it.”

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