• he/him

The challenge we face is not finding an alternative, but having the strength to drag those unwilling towards brighter possibilities. The future is not yet lost.


mcc
@mcc

Consequently whenever I was at work I would pick up a lot of static electricity. I had a constant problem with touching doorknobs and getting really intense static shocks, unusually intense, painful.

My solution to this was I developed a habit, whenever I touched a doorknob, I'd first gently knock against the door. Just a quick silent tap pressing my knuckles against the door surface. This would spread out the discharge, and also the shock would feel less intense against the bone. It worked very well.

This was 15 years ago. I still do this. I do it every single time I open a door. I don't even notice I'm doing it. The ritual is completely automatic. It is just a permanent part of my behavior now. I will probably be doing it the rest of my life.

Anyway, that's what trauma is.


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @mcc's post:

in high school the second floor corridors used recycled plastic (from bottles?) as the material for the floor boards, and we got static shocks all the time from touching the metal lockers. Everyone developed an habit of greeting each other with a little mutual foot tap, and shocking someone by touching them was an easy prank.

One of the ancient Google phones from like 2010 had its speaker on the back, so that if you put it down face up, the alarm would be completely muffled. I got into the habit of putting my phone down face-down, instead, and I still do that today. It's frustrating because phone screens are super slippery, especially new phones, so if there's any incline to the surface at all, they'll eventually fall off, and the screen gets scratched up.

it didn't use to happen to me, and then it started and never stopped, and it's so intense that I can never get used to it, no matter how prepared I am, it still makes my heart skip a beat. and so, what i started to do was to hit things. i slap doorknobs really hard, and the expected impact from the slap overrides the zap. this makes me look like i'm constantly roid raging

I had two accidental, mostly clear, viewings of the 2012 solar eclipse through (effectively) a 400mm lens (I didn't have a proper filter and the makeshift one didn't work well enough). A decade later I still have to fight the urge to close my eyes when I take a photo with an SLR.