Back in my day, says the granny, they were called buttons, or hot buttons. When someone was emotionally manipulating you, they were pushing your buttons. I don’t think, or at least don’t remember, an expression for getting triggered. Perhaps ‘trip’, as in having a bad trip, which could happen even without pharmaceuticals.

I do have buttons that are going to guarantee setting me off. Injustice. any-ism. Inequality. Abuse. I get angry.

I had recently watched an Australian show about a woman with 2500 ‘split personalities’, which they now call Dissociative Identity Disorder. I didn’t buy it at first, come on, 2,500 of them? But by the end of the show, I was willing to concede it could have happened. A couple of weeks later, I saw a show about Sybil. Rember that movie/book? With Sally Fields. Sybil had 12 ‘personalities’. This show was called Sybil; a brilliant hysterical? Filmed in 2014. The premise for this show was Sybil was a con, her psychiatrist was a con. It was all faked – seriously, 12 personalities?

I don’t have any triggers about Sybil. I watched it with my kids, I only had good memories of it. So I wasn’t sure what had triggered me. And boy, was I triggered. I couldn’t sleep, my heart was racing. My hands shaking. My mind spun around. They wanted us to believe 2500 personalities in one person, but not 12 in another? And my god – hysterical? They called Sybil hysterical?

And boom, that was it. They called her hysterical. She was angry. She was hurt. She was defending herself. Hysterical? Oh, hell no.

That’s how it happens. A woman get angry? no no no. She’s hysterical. A man can be angry. He can be enraged to the point of murder. But its women who are infantized. Demeaned. Crippled by the social expectation to eat it. Swallow it down. Don’t show anger. If you don’t, you will be called ‘hysterical’.

Fine, you think the Sybil case is just a big con. Fine. Say that. But say she was hysterical? Fuuuuuuuuck no.

I am not hysterical. I’m angry. I am fucking pissed. In the immortal words of JI Jane, ‘Bite my dick‘.