Transforming Triggers: Lessons from an Old House and Personal Growth

There’s an old house near where I live, built sometime in the 1800s. It’s charming and a little wonky, the kind of place that looks increasingly improbable as everything around it gets newer, busier, and louder.

Once, it sat among open farmland. Then came a small town. Now it occupies the corner of a busy suburban intersection, surrounded by traffic, power lines, and all the other evidence that progress rarely asks whether the scenery is ready.

I pass it often, and I’ve always wondered about the people who lived there. What would they make of everything that eventually grew up around their home? Cars streaming past. Utility lines overhead. Neighborhoods where fields used to be.

For years, mature trees partially sheltered the house from all of it. Unfortunately, the power lines running through those trees meant they had been subjected to some truly unfortunate trimming. They looked like the botanical equivalent of a haircut administered by an irritated mother ten minutes before school picture day.

Recently, the property sold, and crews began clearing the land. The fence came down. Then the trees started disappearing. Huge limbs became awkward trunks, then stumps, then small remnants barely visible above the ground.

Eventually, even those were gone.

Around the same time, I happened to be listening to an episode of Michelle Chalfant’s The Adult Chair podcast about emotional triggers and the beliefs we carry with us. I’m fairly new to her work, but something about that conversation, combined with watching those trees disappear a little at a time, stayed with me.

We all have things that get under our skin faster than they probably should. A comment. A situation. A particular kind of criticism or rejection. Sometimes we know exactly why. Other times the reaction arrives first and the explanation has apparently missed its flight.

I’ve become more interested in that gap as I’ve gotten older. Not in diagnosing every uncomfortable emotion or turning ordinary human behavior into a pathology, but in asking why some things have so much power over us.

The tree stumps kept coming to mind.

Even after most of the tree was gone, the evidence remained. You could avoid the stump, walk around it, mow around it, complain about it, or simply get used to the fact that it occupied that particular piece of ground. Removing what was visible didn’t necessarily mean the whole thing had disappeared.

Human beings are considerably more complicated than landscaping, obviously, but I liked the image. Sometimes the things we react to are connected to something older than the moment in front of us. Maybe we understand the connection. Maybe we don’t. Either way, noticing it can change what we do next.

What struck me most about the old house was what happened after the last remnants were cleared. I could see the house differently. Not necessarily better. I actually miss some of those trees. But without them, details I’d passed hundreds of times suddenly became obvious. The proportions of the house. The porch. The way it sat on the property. Things that had always been there but had been partially obscured.

That thought followed me back to my writing.

I was finishing my debut novel at the time, which meant I was also approaching the deeply uncomfortable part where the characters I had lived with privately would soon belong, at least partly, to readers.

Harper Brasfield, my protagonist, is bold, stubborn, capable, and very good at fighting whatever is directly in front of her. She is considerably less skilled at recognizing the old things she carries into those fights. That matters.

Some of her worst decisions aren’t made because she lacks intelligence or courage. They happen because she doesn’t always understand why certain situations hit her as hard as they do. Like most of us, she can see everyone else’s blind spots with impressive clarity while remaining somewhat less enthusiastic about examining her own.

I suspect that’s one reason I like writing flawed characters. Perfect people aren’t very interesting, and I’m not sure I’d trust one anyway.

What interests me is what happens when someone who believes they understand themselves is forced to reconsider. When the thing they’ve stepped around for years suddenly blocks the path. When they realize that survival sometimes requires more than defeating whatever is outside them.

The old house is still there. It looks more exposed now, sitting beside that busy intersection with nothing shielding it from the modern world that grew up around it. Maybe that’s what made the image stick. Clearing something away doesn’t erase what came before. The history remains. But sometimes removing what no longer belongs there lets you see what was underneath all along.

And sometimes that’s where the interesting part of the story begins.

Photo by Chris Lawton on Unsplash