sexual assault content warning
i don't want to be near him i dont want to be near them either i just want friends who love me i don't want to be abandoned because i stood up for myself i feel so alone i want someone to understand i'm so tired of navigating what feels like impossibly tricky interpersonal situations i thought i was a good person so why does this keep happening
august 4 2026
i've never felt this way before. my thoughts of death spiraled out of control in may; i was crying every two hours; i couldn't find relief for two days so i called the crisis number and went to the mental hospital. none of this is normal for me; i'm used to the long, numb depression, talking to therapists about problems that don't really matter, and coping on my own. the diagnoses, the referrals, and the serious talks were all very validating. my therapist leaned forward and told me to contact them the next time i'm in crisis and to be more open in our sessions. they hypnotized me and i washed away a bloody, throbbing piece of trauma in white water. the psychiatrist gave me two antidepressants and a sleeping med. i spent nine hours a week sitting at a desk with 10 other women and our DBT manuals, getting teary-eyed and laughing with them.
a guy in my friend group pulled my hair as a joke in front of everyone and i spent the next few days getting angry, dissociating, and panicking. i felt paranoid that someone was going to attack me in the street when i went for a walk. my therapists said it was a trauma response. now i walk around feeling high, still, and like i am always about to cry. my therapist wants to meet twice a week now for trauma work. i never thought i had been through anything bad enough to deserve trauma therapy. i just hope i'm not dreaming.
july 21 2026
WRITING MYSELF AS A SUBJECT
i've come into knowing myself as a subject after twenty-some years of the kinds of demeaning media and interactions every little girl and genderqueer kid remembers. it's our shared trauma, and it's so tired and mundane. or it's still too subversive or too raw to touch. if you don't know it by now, you should learn -- the subordination of woman is constantly constructed explicitly and implicitly through imagery (the inclusion and exclusion of certain bodies), and familial, pedagogical, and peer-to-peer teachings about the imperatives of thinness, docility, virginhood, and victimhood. we are all rape victims and rape perpetrators. while in the process of being raped, the first thought wasn't to defend my body, but to defend the legitimacy of the rape to others -- to evaluate the capital value of the rape; rape as social currency.
how to enjoy my interiority without that critical voice -- is it man? is it mother? when i'm flooded with positive feelings about myself, shame quickly follows. there's so much to enjoy; it's a shame to have to slash away the weeds before i can see any of it.