One of the papers I wrote was about Emily Dickinson’s Because I could not stop for Death.

I loved that poem.

I still do.

At twenty, I could have told you about Dickinson’s personification of Death. I could have written about the carriage, the passing schoolchildren, the setting sun. I could have analyzed the strange gentleness with which she imagined the end of a life.

What I couldn’t have explained was why I found it so comforting.

I think I understand now.

I grew up in a house where there was NO peace.

My father was angry.

That sentence is true, but it isn’t big enough.

People get angry. They raise their voices. They slam doors. They say things they regret.

My father’s anger was different.

His anger lived in the house with us.

We never knew exactly what we were coming home to. Violence was always possible. And a fight didn’t necessarily end when the yelling stopped.

Sometimes the aftermath was its own kind of violence.

My father destroyed our things.

He smashed them.

He set the house on fire.

He burned our belongings in the backyard.

My birth announcement: my adopted mom saved it from the fire, but it got marked (bottom left) - just like everything my dad touched

Imagine being a child and watching your possessions burn because an adult is angry.

Children don’t own much. A favorite toy. Clothes. Photographs. Stuffed animals. Little collections of things that would be worthless to almost anyone else.

They are the first pieces of the world that belong to you.

Except ours didn’t really belong to us.

Anything could be destroyed.

Anything we loved could become leverage.

Even our pets.

My father threatened to kill them.

There is an overwhelming terror in understanding that something small and innocent you love might be hurt because someone is angry with YOU.

A child cannot explain to an animal why the house isn’t safe.

You cannot promise to protect it when you cannot protect yourself.

So you learn something else.

You learn to monitor.

Listen to the footsteps.

Listen to the doors.

Listen to the voice coming from the other room and calculate how much danger is inside it.

Notice his mood.

Notice what has moved.

Notice what hasn’t.

Figure out whether tonight is going to be okay.

Don’t relax yet.

And maybe don’t love anything so much that losing it could destroy you.

My father’s anger wasn’t only explosive.

It was possessive.

He controlled my mother so thoroughly that having a job could become dangerous. He was jealous. He would go to her workplace. He threatened people there.

Work couldn’t simply be work.

It was another place he could reach her.

I learned early that there wasn’t necessarily a boundary between a person’s life and my father’s anger.

His anger went wherever we went.

And growing up didn’t make me exempt.

In my twenties, I went away to college. I had my own life. I was, by any reasonable definition, an adult.

But when I came home to visit, the old rules returned.

If I didn’t come home when my father expected me to, he called the police.

I remember coming home and finding officers waiting for me.

I wasn’t a runaway teenager.

I was in my twenties, dropping off a friend in the next town.

It almost sounds funny now in its absurdity: a college student staying out too late and coming home to law enforcement.

It wasn’t funny then.

The message was unmistakable.

You are never outside my reach and the authorities are on my side.

And eventually I learned that even enormous distances weren’t enough.

Not adulthood.

Not estrangement.

Not even prison walls.

After the FBI raid in 2006, my father went to prison.

That’s when he became 23079-009.

You might imagine that prison would finally create a boundary he couldn’t cross.

Instead, the telephone became another way into my life.

If he called from prison and I didn’t answer, he called again.

And again.

And again.

Once, he called 27 times in a row because I wouldn’t pick up.

Twenty-seven times.

There is something about that number that captures him better than almost anything else I can write.

One unanswered call wasn’t information.

It wasn’t She doesn’t want to talk to me.

It was defiance.

And defiance had to be overcome.

Later, after I stopped speaking to him, he called my workplace.

When he couldn’t reach me directly, he tried to find me through customer service representatives.

I had watched him do versions of this to my mother.

Now he was doing it to me.

Home wasn’t far enough.

College wasn’t far enough.

Work wasn’t far enough.

Prison wasn’t far enough.

No was not enough.

Silence was not enough.

There was no place where I could be completely certain that my father’s anger couldn’t find me.

And somewhere in the middle of all of this, when I was twenty, I sat in a classroom reading Emily Dickinson.

“Because I could not stop for Death —
He kindly stopped for me —”

Kindly.

I think that word means something different to me now.

Dickinson’s Death didn’t kick down the door.

He didn’t set anything on fire.

He didn’t threaten what she loved.

He didn’t call 27 times.

He didn’t send the police looking for her.

He didn’t show up at her workplace demanding access to her.

He simply stopped.

And then they drove slowly.

“He knew no haste.”

No haste.

What must that have sounded like to the nervous system of a twenty-year-old who had spent her life waiting for the next explosion?

I have spent a lot of my life wishing for death and made several attempts.

That is difficult to write plainly, but it is true.

For years, I understood that primarily as something being wrong inside me.

Now I wonder whether at least part of it was something much simpler and much sadder.

I wanted peace.

I had just never learned to imagine peace without disappearance.

I didn’t know what it felt like to be completely unreachable by danger.

I didn’t know what it was like to stop monitoring the room.

I didn’t know how to imagine a world in which nobody was coming after me, nobody needed something from me, nobody was angry with me, and nothing terrible was about to happen.

But I could imagine death.

And Dickinson gave death a carriage.

She gave it stillness.

She gave it civility.

She gave it someone who knew no haste.

Maybe twenty-year-old me wasn’t only fascinated by a poem about dying. [And the thoughts of suicide started much earlier, at 8, once I realized no savior was coming.]

Maybe she had stumbled across an image of rest.

Trauma is often described as a collection of terrible memories.

Mine is that.

But it is also a collection of rules my body learned.

Watch the room.

Listen for the footsteps.

Protect what you love.

Get home on time.

Answer the phone.

Explain yourself.

Don’t make him angrier.

Don’t relax yet.

Something might happen.

And perhaps the deepest one:

There is no safe distance.

You can leave and still be found.

You can say no and still be pursued.

You can stop answering and the phone will keep ringing.

You can grow up and someone can still behave as though your life belongs to them.

Those rules made sense once.

That is the terrible intelligence of a child surviving an unpredictable adult: you become exactly as vigilant as your environment requires.

The problem is that eventually you leave the house.

And the rules come with you.

Decades later, another person’s anger can still become enormous inside me. Conflict can feel bigger than the conflict actually happening in front of me. My body can react before the adult part of me has had time to look around.

But now I can look around.

There is no fire.

Nobody is smashing my things.

Nobody is threatening my animals.

There aren’t police waiting at home because I stayed out too late.

The phone doesn’t have to be answered.

Nobody gets to hunt me through my workplace.

My father’s anger cannot enter this room.

I’m not there anymore.

My mind has known that for years.

My nervous system is taking longer.

And perhaps that makes sense.

It spent decades learning that anger could follow me anywhere.

I still love Dickinson’s poem.

But at forty-seven, I think I understand my twenty-year-old self better than I did when I wrote that college paper.

She thought she was writing about Death.

Maybe she was trying to write about peace.

I wish I could go back and tell her that the two are not the same thing.

There are other ways to become unreachable by the man who frightened you.

There are doors you can close.

Phones you don’t have to answer.

People who are allowed to be angry without becoming dangerous.

Homes where belongings remain exactly where you left them.

Animals who sleep safely beside you.

Evenings when nothing happens.

There is a kind of quiet that doesn’t require you to disappear.

It took me decades to discover that.

Maybe healing is partly teaching the twenty-year-old who loved that poem that she doesn’t have to climb into Dickinson’s carriage to finally rest.

She can stay.

And the world can become quiet around her.

Today’s mood:

And this week, it crossed a line that feels both thrilling and slightly terrifying:

Beyond the Spiral is officially in development.

I signed the contract. The developers have started building.

This is real now.

Why I wanted this to exist

Beyond the Spiral grew out of something I know intimately: the space between therapy sessions.

I’ve spent years in therapy. DBT. IFS. EMDR. CBT. TMS. Neurofeedback. I have learned an almost ridiculous number of acronyms.

And I’ve learned skills that genuinely help me.

But there has always been a problem.

When I am actually dysregulated - when my nervous system has decided something is an emergency - I often can’t access all the things I know.

The calm version of me can tell you exactly what she should do.

The spiraling version of me would like the calm version of me to kindly shut the fuck up.

That gap became the idea behind Beyond the Spiral.

What if technology didn’t just give you a giant library of coping skills and ask you to choose one?

What if it first tried to understand what state you’re in?

What if it recognized that someone who is furious, someone who is terrified of abandonment, someone who is dissociating, and someone who is calm enough to reflect probably shouldn’t be given the exact same intervention in the exact same way?

And what if, over time, it could learn what actually helps you?

State first

That became the central idea behind the app:

State first. Intervention second.

Beyond the Spiral will use short, rotating check-ins to estimate someone’s current nervous-system state and adapt what happens next.

When someone has very little cognitive capacity, the experience should become simpler - not demand more from them.

When someone is regulated and curious, the app can offer more room for reflection and exploration.

And after an intervention, it asks a very simple question:

Did that help?

Because eventually, I want the app to learn from those answers.

Not what should work for you.

What actually does.

And then there’s Nova

One of the things we’re building is a voice-based check-in.

Instead of having to stare at your phone and tap through a questionnaire while your brain is on fire, you’ll be able to talk.

Nova will ask short questions, listen to your answers, and help the app determine what kind of support might fit the state you’re in.

The clinical routing itself isn’t supposed to be AI improvisation. The rules and interventions are bounded and intentional.

AI can help make the interaction feel human.

It doesn’t get to make up mental-health treatment.

That distinction matters enormously to me.

This is not therapy

I want to be very clear about this part.

Beyond the Spiral isn’t intended to replace therapists.

It exists partly because therapists cannot be there at 11:47 p.m. when somebody gets a text message that detonates their nervous system.

It is meant for the in-between.

A companion to the work.

A way to practice what we’ve learned when accessing those skills is hardest.

Maybe even a way to understand our own patterns a little better over time.

Now we build

I’ve spent months thinking through the logic, the language, the safety architecture, the state questions, the interventions, the tracking, and what I desperately wish had existed during some of the hardest moments of my own life.

I’ve made prototypes.

I’ve made spreadsheets.

I have made so many spreadsheets.

But eventually an idea has to leave the spreadsheet.

I’ve found a development team I genuinely love working with, and we’re beginning a four-month build toward a testable version of Beyond the Spiral.

There is still an enormous amount to figure out.

There will be bugs.

There will undoubtedly be things I was completely convinced would work that testers immediately prove are terrible ideas.

That’s what building something is.

But somewhere along the way, this stopped being an app I might build someday.

People are writing the code now.

That sentence makes me a little emotional.

Because Beyond the Spiral came from years of asking:

Why can I understand myself so well when I’m calm and still lose access to everything I know when I’m overwhelmed?

I couldn’t find the tool I wanted.

So I’m building it.

And now—

we’re officially underway.

There is a particular kind of damage that happens when the people hurting you don’t just claim that they are right.

They claim the universe agrees with them.

That God agrees with them.

That’s the part of religious abuse I’ve been angry about lately.

Because when you’re a child, there isn’t much room to argue with God.

Adults can tell you that obedience is goodness. Questioning authority is rebellion. Anger is sinful. Suffering has a purpose. Forgiveness is required. Your body is dangerous. Your sexuality can make you unacceptable. And somehow, no matter what happens to you, you’re supposed to search your own heart for the problem.

It is an extraordinarily effective way to silence a child.

Especially a child who is already being hurt by a pedophile.

Religion didn’t exist separately from the other things happening to me. It became tangled up with them. Ideas about authority, obedience, shame, sexuality, forgiveness, family, and what made someone “good” all became part of the same architecture.

And when I look back now, I’m fucking furious.

I’m furious that adults had so much power over a child and could invoke an even greater authority to reinforce it.

I’m furious that I learned to question my own reactions before I learned to question the people causing them.

I’m furious that anger could be treated as a moral failure instead of information.

I’m furious that forgiveness could be emphasized more than accountability.

I’m furious that parts of myself had to become secret before I was old enough to understand why anyone thought they should be.

And I’m furious about the years afterward.

Because that’s something we don’t talk about enough when we talk about childhood trauma.

The child experiences the abuse.

The adult gets the bill.

We get the nervous system that learned danger too early. We get the shame that has to be painstakingly dismantled. We get the relationships affected by things that happened decades before those relationships existed. We get therapy. We get triggers. We get the exhausting work of figuring out which beliefs actually belong to us and which ones were installed when we were too young to consent to them.

And then, sometimes, we’re told we’re too angry.

Of course I’m angry.

Do you understand what was taken?

There is grief underneath my anger. I know that.

But I’m tired of treating grief as the more respectable emotion.

Sometimes anger deserves its own room.

Sometimes anger is the part of us that finally understands the magnitude of what happened and says:

No. That was not okay. You should not have done that to me.

For me, one of the hardest questions underneath all of this has become:

Why was their God always protecting their authority instead of protecting me?

I don’t have to answer that question anymore.

I don’t have to reconcile what happened to me with somebody else’s theology.

I don’t have to make my story less threatening to preserve somebody else’s faith.

And I don’t have to forgive an institution, a belief system, or a person simply because forgiveness makes other people more comfortable with my pain.

I know all of that religious stuff is made up by man to control women.

I am allowed to look directly at what happened.

I am allowed to call religious abuse abuse.

And I am allowed to be fucking angry about it.

Sometimes they are.

But often, they are architects.

Not of buildings.

Of stories.

And of silence.

My father didn’t just abuse children. He built an environment where speaking became almost impossible. I was mute until age 6.

You don’t maintain abuse for years through violence alone. You maintain it by controlling reality.

You isolate.

You convince a child that no one else understands them.

You become the center of their world while quietly cutting away everyone who might challenge your version of it.

You lie about who they are.

I grew up with a false origin story - one that left me believing there was something fundamentally wrong with me. If you can make a child ashamed of where they came from, they’ll spend less time asking whether you are the problem.

You teach them that other people are dangerous.

That outsiders won’t believe them.

That family can’t be trusted.

That love is conditional.

That secrets keep everyone safe.

You threaten.

Sometimes directly.

Sometimes with a look.

Sometimes with the certainty that terrible things will happen if anyone ever finds out.

You don’t always have to say the words. Children become experts at reading danger.

You move constantly.

You separate them from friendships before those relationships become deep enough to offer another perspective.

You make sure there are very few adults who know the child well enough to notice something is wrong.

You don’t just steal childhood.

You steal witnesses.

And perhaps the cruelest part is this:

The child often grows into an adult who believes all of this was somehow their own doing.

That they were too sensitive.

Too broken.

Too dRaMATic.

Too damaged to be loved.

That is the masterpiece of abuse.

Not the abuse itself.

The belief that the victim is responsible for carrying it in silence.

It has taken me decades to understand that none of those beliefs began with me.

They were planted.

Carefully.

Repeatedly.

Intentionally.

Today, I know something my father never wanted me to know:

Silence was never proof that I agreed.

Isolation was never proof that no one would have cared.

My shame was never evidence of my guilt.

It was evidence of his.

And every time a survivor tells their story, another brick comes loose from the architecture that perpetrators spend years building.

That’s why so many of us write.

Not because we enjoy reopening old wounds.

But because truth is the one thing abuse cannot survive forever.

Dad's signature on his court docs

Today’s mood, with regards to Oklahoma:

Years ago, I was held hostage for hours by someone in the middle of a psychotic break. They believed they were God. They believed they were protecting me from demons crawling across the floor. They believed I was the Virgin Mary, pregnant with the new Savior of the world.

To them, it was all real.

To me, it was terror.

When you’ve spent hours trapped inside someone else’s religious delusion, religion doesn’t feel abstract anymore. It lives in your nervous system. Certain words don’t sound comforting. They sound like danger.

So when people who know that story still tell me they’ll pray for me, I wish they understood what they’re asking me to carry. I know they usually mean kindness. I don’t doubt their intentions.

But intentions aren’t the same thing as impact.

The same is true when people quote the Bible to me.

I’m a bisexual woman. I grew up hearing verses used to explain why people like me were sinful, broken, or deserving of less. Those passages weren’t theoretical debates. They shaped how I was treated. They shaped my family. They shaped the shame I spent years trying to survive.

When someone quotes those same scriptures as if they’re universally comforting, I don’t hear comfort. I hear the echoes of every sermon that said I was fundamentally wrong.

For me, context matters.

If a book has been used to tell an entire group of people they are morally inferior, why would I experience hearing it quoted as an act of love?

You wouldn’t read racist passages to a Black friend and expect gratitude. You wouldn’t quote misogynistic texts to a woman who’s been abused and expect comfort.

So why is it so surprising that someone who has experienced both religious trauma and anti-LGBTQ teachings doesn’t find the Bible soothing?

I’m not asking anyone to abandon their faith.

I’m asking for the same respect we extend in every other area of trauma: don’t assume that what comforts you comforts everyone.

Sometimes love looks less like speaking—and more like listening.

“I’m so tired of fighting and worrying that maybe I just want the fascism we are marching towards to arrive already.”

Not because I want authoritarianism. Not because I believe democracy isn’t worth protecting. But because my nervous system is exhausted.

That realization stopped me in my tracks.

We often imagine the greatest threat to a free society is that enough people wake up one morning and suddenly decide they don’t value freedom anymore. I don’t think that’s how it usually happens.

I wonder if something quieter is at work.

What if people simply become too tired?

Too tired to argue.

Too tired to read another headline.

Too tired to wonder whether every election, every court decision, every policy, every conversation with family will become another battle, another vote against their right to exist.

Eventually, the mind starts bargaining with certainty.

It whispers, “Just let something happen. At least then I’ll know what I’m dealing with and people can stop accusing me of being “too sensitive.”

That isn’t the voice of conviction.

It’s the voice of burnout.

I’ve spent years in therapy learning that chronic stress changes how we think.

When your nervous system has been activated for too long, it stops asking, “What’s best?” and starts asking, “What makes this stop?”

Those are very different questions.

The first comes from wisdom.

The second comes from survival.

I don’t think this only happens to trauma survivors.

I think societies can experience something similar.

When every week feels like another crisis, every headline another emergency, every conversation another referendum on who deserves dignity, people don’t necessarily become more extreme.

Sometimes they just become emotionally numb.

And numbness can sound surprisingly similar to agreement.

There’s another layer to this for me.

This year has been one of the biggest of my life.

I finished writing my memoir, Yet Another Survivors Story.

I built the first working prototype of Beyond the Spiral - a project born from years of trying to understand why some interventions helped me at certain moments while others made things worse.

These are things I dreamed about for years.

Yet somehow, I still found myself lying awake worrying about the future of a country instead of celebrating what already exists.

That’s when I realized something uncomfortable.

The staircase never ends.

We think we’ll finally rest after the promotion.

After the book.

After the app.

After the election.

After the next crisis.

But life keeps handing us another step.

If we’re waiting for the world to become peaceful before we allow ourselves to feel peace, we may wait forever.

I don’t have a neat conclusion.

I’m still tired.

I’m still worried.

I still care deeply about the direction our society takes as someone who experienced a lot of bullying in the 80’s and 90’s.

But I no longer want to confuse exhaustion with surrender.

Those are not the same thing.

Maybe one of the most radical things we can do - for ourselves and for each other - is recognize when our nervous systems need rest before they start mistaking fatigue for belief.

Because I don’t think democracy is only sustained by laws.

I think it’s sustained by people who are rested enough to remember why they cared in the first place.

If you’ve found yourself feeling emotionally worn down lately, you’re not alone.

Maybe before we ask one another to fight harder, we should first ask a gentler question:

How tired are we?

Today’s mood:

For years, I carried around a spreadsheet.

Not just any spreadsheet.

A spreadsheet with dozens of columns tracking panic attacks, urges, sleep, anger, grounding skills, emotions, medications, mindfulness, victories, setbacks, and whatever else I thought might help me understand why some days I spiraled and others I didn’t.

It evolved over seven years.

Every new column existed because I had learned something the hard way.

I wasn’t trying to build a product.

I was trying to survive my own nervous system.

Eventually I noticed something surprising.

The question wasn’t usually:

“What’s wrong with me?”

The question was:

“What kind of support fits this moment?”

Those are completely different questions.

Sometimes I didn’t need encouragement.

Sometimes I needed my body to slow down.

Sometimes I needed to remember one small thing that had gone well.

Sometimes I needed permission to do absolutely nothing.

Over the past few months, that diary card slowly transformed into something else.

An app.

It’s called Beyond the Spiral.

Instead of asking people to identify with labels, it tries to understand signals.

How much energy do you have?

How fast is your mind moving?

Does that energy feel welcome?

How much room do you have for one small choice?

What would actually help right now?

Then it offers a handful of practices that seem to fit—not because they’re universally “best,” but because they appear manageable from where you’re standing.

Every recommendation is optional.

Every estimate is tentative.

The goal isn’t to diagnose or replace therapy.

It’s to help shorten the distance between overwhelm and your next workable step.

The strangest part?

Over the last week, I used Codex to turn my 7-year-long data collection of my own symptoms into a working prototype.

Watching software emerge from ideas has been one of the most unexpectedly joyful experiences I’ve had in years.

The prototype isn’t finished.

Honestly, that’s why I’m writing this.

I’d love to find 10–20 thoughtful people who would be willing to help me test it over the next few weeks.

I’m not looking for people to tell me it’s amazing.

I’m looking for people who will tell me:

• “This question confused me.”

• “That recommendation didn’t fit.”

• “This wording felt judgmental.”

• “I wanted to do two exercises instead of one.”

• “I felt understood here.”

Those are the comments that make products better.

A few things to know:

• This is an early prototype.

• It is not a crisis service.

• It isn’t intended to diagnose or provide therapy.

• It’s a usability and concept test.

• Everything is changing quickly based on feedback.

If you’re curious, thoughtful, and don’t mind using something that’s still evolving, I’d love your help.

Just leave a comment or send me a message.

I’d be incredibly grateful.

One last thing.

If this project ever becomes something meaningful, I hope it isn’t because it has clever algorithms.

I hope it’s because someone opens it during a difficult moment and, instead of feeling judged or categorized, thinks:

“Yeah... that actually meets me where I am.”

If it can do that, I’ll feel like all those years of spreadsheets, therapy, false starts, and tiny observations were leading somewhere after all.

Today’s mood: Way Less Sad

I expected to cry.

I expected to shake.
To scream.
To finally feel all the feelings that had been waiting decades for their turn.

Instead, I mostly felt... nothing.

This week, I learned another piece of my story.

I already knew that I had been taken from my birth mother by my father as an infant. That wasn’t new.

The new part was how.

A recently discovered family member told me that my biological father arrived in the middle of the night, threatened to shoot the family and burn their house down, took me, and disappeared. It corroborated stories I’d heard from someone else years before.

If you’d asked me before that conversation what I imagined I’d feel after hearing something like that, I would have guessed devastation.

Instead, I folded laundry.

I answered a few text messages.

I made dinner for a party that night.

It almost felt disrespectful.

How could I learn something so enormous and then... just continue existing?

Trauma has a strange relationship with emotion.

People often imagine healing as finally “feeling everything.”

But sometimes the nervous system does the opposite. Sometimes it quietly says, Not today. This is too much.

So it lets the information in without letting all the emotion in.

That isn’t denial.

It’s protection.

I’ve learned that numbness isn’t always the absence of feeling.

Sometimes it’s feeling that has been put in the waiting room until the rest of you is strong enough to meet it.

Years ago, I would have judged myself for this.

“Why aren’t you crying?”

“Why aren’t you more upset?”

Now I wonder if my nervous system is simply wiser than my expectations.

Maybe it knows that there is work to do tomorrow.

Maybe it knows I have meetings, responsibilities, and a life that still needs to be lived.

Maybe it knows that if it opened every floodgate all at once, I couldn’t function.

So instead, it lets me borrow normal for a while.

One day, I might be driving to the grocery store and suddenly cry over a stoplight.

Or I might hear a song.

Or smell someone’s aftershave.

Or watch a father holding a baby.

Trauma rarely keeps the schedule we would prefer.

It arrives when it believes we’re safe enough to survive it.

One of the hardest things I’ve had to learn is that numbness isn’t evidence that something didn’t matter.

It’s often evidence that it mattered so much my brain decided to wrap it carefully before handing it to me.

So if you’ve recently learned something about your own past—whether it was an adoption secret, childhood abuse, a family betrayal, a medical diagnosis, or simply the truth after years of wondering—and your first reaction was... almost no reaction at all...

You’re not cold.

You’re not broken.

You’re not failing to process it.

You may simply be witnessing one of the nervous system’s oldest acts of mercy.

Sometimes survival doesn’t look like collapsing.

Sometimes survival looks like making dinner after your entire life story changes.

And only later realizing why the onions made you cry.

Today’s mood:

One.
Then another.
Then another.

I could feel it happening.

My spoons were gone.

If you’ve never experienced it, it’s difficult to explain what emotional flooding feels like. It isn’t simply being upset. It’s as though your nervous system suddenly decides you’re fighting for your life.

My thoughts sped up.

My chest tightened.

Everything around me began to feel dangerous.

I wasn’t thinking clearly anymore - I was reacting.

For years, I thought moments like this meant I was “too emotional.”

Therapy taught me something different.

Sometimes your brain isn’t malfunctioning.

Sometimes it’s overwhelmed.

One of the most practical skills I’ve ever learned from Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) is called TIPP.

It’s not designed to solve your problems.

It’s designed to help your brain become capable of solving them.

When we’re emotionally flooded, the thinking part of the brain becomes much harder to access. That’s why trying to “just calm down” or “be rational” rarely works in the moment.

TIPP works by calming the body first.

Because sometimes your body has to believe you’re safe before your mind can.

Here’s what it stands for.

T — Temperature

Cold water on your face. An ice pack against your eyes and cheeks. Something cold enough to tell your nervous system, We’re not running for our lives anymore.

It sounds almost too simple.

But biology doesn’t always care whether something sounds sophisticated.

I — Intense Exercise

Not because exercise fixes trauma.

Because your body has already dumped stress hormones into your bloodstream.

A brisk walk. Running up stairs. Jumping jacks.

You’re giving those chemicals somewhere to go.

P — Paced Breathing

When we’re panicking, we tend to breathe quickly and shallowly.

Slowing your exhale—making it longer than your inhale—helps tell your nervous system that the emergency is passing.

One simple rhythm is inhaling for four seconds and exhaling for six.

P — Progressive Muscle Relaxation

Tense different muscle groups for a few seconds.

Then let them go.

It sounds almost backward, but intentionally releasing tension helps your brain notice the difference between danger and safety.

Here’s what I want people to know.

Using TIPP doesn’t mean your feelings aren’t real.

The three things that happened to me were still painful.

TIPP didn’t erase them when I dunked my face in ice water.

It simply stopped my nervous system from turning three painful events into a fourth one that I would later regret.

It gave me enough space to choose my next move instead of letting adrenaline choose it for me.

As a pharmacist, I think about this a little like rescue medication.

We don’t use an inhaler because asthma isn’t real.

We use one because biology sometimes needs help before the body can settle down.

TIPP feels similar to me.

It’s not a cure.

It’s not avoidance.

It’s first aid for an overwhelmed nervous system.

If you’ve never tried it before, I hope you tuck it away somewhere.

Not because life will always be easy.

But because one day, three bad things might happen in a row.

And on that day, your nervous system deserves as much compassion as your mind.

Today’s mood:

“They’re not the same.”

They’re right.

They are not the same in scale.

They are not the same in brutality.

They are not the same in outcome.

History deserves precision. The Holocaust was a unique atrocity. Jim Crow was its own uniquely American system of racial oppression. We should never flatten those histories into false equivalencies.

But history also teaches something equally important.

Systems of discrimination rarely begin with their worst atrocities.

They begin with laws.

They begin with exceptions.

They begin with deciding that one group deserves fewer protections than everyone else.

Jim Crow did not begin with its most violent acts. It began with governments writing inequality into law and declaring that unequal treatment was acceptable.

The Nuremberg Laws did not begin with extermination camps. They began by stripping Jewish people of citizenship, excluding them from public life, and making discrimination official state policy.

The pattern is disturbingly familiar.

First, a minority becomes a political issue instead of a group of human beings.

Then they are portrayed as dangerous.

As threats to children.

As threats to families.

As threats to society itself.

Discrimination is reframed not as prejudice, but as protection.

Eventually, unequal treatment becomes ordinary.

That is why many LGBTQ+ people react so strongly when courts or legislatures remove legal protections.

Not because we believe today’s America is Nazi Germany.

Not because we think every discriminatory law inevitably ends in genocide.

But because history teaches us that governments normalize discrimination one legal decision at a time.

Laws do more than settle legal disputes.

They teach society who matters.

They teach employers.

Schools.

Hospitals.

Neighbors.

Families.

Children.

When the law says one group deserves fewer protections than another, that message does not stay inside a courtroom. It spreads into culture. And culture shapes lives.

I’ve heard people dismiss these concerns with, “This isn’t Jim Crow.”

Of course it isn’t.

But Jim Crow wasn’t born fully formed.

The Nuremberg Laws were not the Holocaust.

They were part of the legal architecture that made later atrocities imaginable.

History does not ask us only to recognize injustice after it has reached its most horrifying conclusion.

It asks whether we recognize the early warning signs.

And perhaps the most important warning sign of all is this:

A society reveals its true character not by how it treats the powerful, the popular, or the protected.

It reveals itself by what it is willing to do to the most marginalized.

That is why these moments matter.

Because discrimination is never only about the group being targeted today.

It is a test of the society doing the targeting.

When a government decides that some people are less deserving of safety, dignity, healthcare, family, privacy, or equal protection under the law, it tells us something profound about its own moral compass.

The question is never only:

“Why are they doing this to people?”

The deeper question is:

“What kind of country becomes comfortable doing this to anyone?”

As LGBTQ+ people, we don’t need to believe that the worst is inevitable.

We only need to remember that equal rights have never been permanent.

Every generation inherits the responsibility to decide whether equality expands or contracts.

History doesn’t repeat itself exactly.

But it does repeat a question.

Who will we decide is fully worthy of protection under the law?

The answer to that question has always defined civilizations more than their wealth, their military, or their slogans about freedom.

Because in the end, a nation is remembered less for what it promised than for whom it chose to protect when protection was politically inconvenient.

(The watercolor portrait was created for my father by a friend while he was serving a federal prison sentence for CSAM offenses. The red drawing surrounding it represents how he felt to me as a child.)

People often ask survivors why we’re still angry decades later.

But I think they’re asking the wrong question.

The better question is this:

What happens to a child’s nervous system when everyone notices something is wrong and nobody stops it?

Many survivors did not grow up in secret.

People knew.

Neighbors heard the screaming.

Relatives called the family “a war zone.”

Teachers noticed bruises, exhaustion, fear, or sudden changes in behavior.

Church members whispered.

Friends stopped coming over because the house felt unsafe.

People knew.

And then they went home.

As adults, we sometimes think the primary injury is the abuse itself.

But for many children, there is a second injury that cuts just as deeply:

The realization that adults will sometimes choose comfort over protection.

Children are not philosophers. They do not analyze denial, family systems, trauma dynamics, or the bystander effect.

Children turn everything inward.

They do not conclude:

“The adults around me are frightened and avoiding conflict.”

They conclude:

“Apparently this must be acceptable.”

“Apparently I am not important enough.”

“Apparently keeping the peace matters more than keeping me safe.”

“Apparently I am alone.”

Those beliefs do not remain thoughts.

They become nervous system instructions.

The body learns:

• Stay alert.

• Do not trust appearances.

• Safety can disappear without warning.

• No one is coming.

• You must protect yourself.

• Love does not guarantee safety.

Years later, people wonder why survivors struggle with anxiety, hypervigilance, emotional intensity, difficulty trusting others, or fear of abandonment.

But these responses make perfect sense.

If the adults responsible for protecting you failed to act, your nervous system learned that danger must be managed alone.

That wiring doesn’t change because you hit 18 years of age.

And perhaps the cruelest part is this:

Many survivors are told to forgive the person who caused the harm while rarely being given space to grieve the people who witnessed it and did nothing.

Because silence leaves marks.

The neighbor who looked away.

The family member who changed the subject.

The church that protected appearances.

The relative who said, “That’s just how he is.”

Every act of inaction teaches something.

Children are always learning.

The question is:

What are we teaching them?

When adults intervene, children learn:

“I matter.”

“What happened to me is not okay.”

“Someone will help.”

“I deserve protection.”

But when adults choose comfort over courage, children learn something else entirely.

Some of us spend decades trying to unlearn those lessons.

And then, years later, many survivors encounter one final cruelty.

After spending childhood trapped, dependent, frightened, and often threatened into silence, they finally tell the truth.

And instead of asking:

“Why didn’t the adults protect you?”

People ask:

“Why didn’t you tell someone?”

Think about what that question assumes.

It assumes a child has equal power to the adult hurting them.

It assumes a child can override terror.

It assumes a child can report the very person responsible for feeding them, housing them, transporting them, and deciding whether they are safe when the front door closes.

It assumes children understand abuse.

Many don’t.

If screaming, humiliation, violence, or sexual abuse are all you’ve ever known, you don’t necessarily recognize them as abnormal.

You recognize them as Tuesday.

And many abusive adults work hard to ensure children stay silent.

They threaten them.

Manipulate them.

Tell them nobody will believe them.

Tell them they will destroy the family.

Tell them they are responsible.

Tell them everyone will leave.

Tell them, as in my case, they will kill the child.

Children are biologically wired to attach to caregivers because their survival depends on those attachments.

A child cannot simply stop loving the person they depend on.

A child cannot simply pack a bag and leave.

A child cannot simply call the police and then drive themselves somewhere safe.

Children have almost no power.

Adults do.

Which is why the burden should never have rested on the child in the first place.

The real question has never been:

“Why didn’t the child say something?”

The question is:

Why were the adults expecting the child to save themselves?

Why did the neighbors not act?

Why did relatives ignore what they saw?

Why did institutions protect reputations?

Why did churches preserve appearances?

Why were children expected to perform acts of courage that the adults around them were unwilling to perform themselves?

We ask survivors why they stayed silent.

Perhaps we should ask ourselves why everyone else did.

Children are not responsible for ending their own abuse.

Adults are responsible for protecting children.

Always.

I ended my memoir with a simple sentence:

If you see abuse, do something.

Not because you’ll do it perfectly.

Not because you’ll always know what to say.

But because somewhere nearby there may be a child desperately trying to answer one question:

“Am I worth disrupting things for?”

The answer should always be yes.

Today’s mood:

Chapter 1, Inherited

Chapter 2, She was Not the Story They Told Me

Thank you for reading!

Once my mom and dad got together, dad landed a job in Ohio, necessitating a move for us.

My adopted brother, Garrett—9 at the time—remembers my mom’s four children being “given custody” of themselves by the judge in Alabama when our mom and their dad divorced.

If 9-year-olds can’t drink or vote, I don’t know why we thought they could make custody decisions. But the court system back then didn’t give a flying fuck about the children. For years, Garrett bounced between households that ranged from abusive and dangerous to coldly neglectful.

Being the late ‘70s to early ‘80s, I don’t remember much of that time firsthand. What I do know—overheard, pieced together, third-hand—is that the children were often weaponized in my parent’s fights.

One visit from my dad’s daughter, my half-sister Christine, seemed to spark something extremely ugly. After Christine left, my dad told my mom, “If I can only have one kid live with me, so can you.”

And just like that, my mom told Garrett he’d be going back to Alabama at the end of fourth grade. I can’t imagine the heartbreak of being told by your own mother that you’re being shipped off again—especially to satisfy the cruelty of your new, abusive stepdad.

My dad eventually lost the Ohio job—one of many over the years. My parents, now broke and unstable, moved back to Alabama. Just the three of us. It wouldn’t be the last time it was “just us three.”

There’s a big gap in my memory from that move back south. I was young, and no one ever really filled in the blanks for me. Some days I don’t want to know more. I recently found a newspaper clipping that answered an internal question for me - why hadn’t my dad been caught up in the legal system earlier than 2001?

Answer: He was.

I read it twice. More proof I didn’t want.

I also remember that we lived on a houseboat when we returned to Alabama. I can still close my eyes and picture the cool lake water lapping at the side of the boat/house, mold and mildew all around, not recognizing at this young age that this would be one of my best homes - because at least there were a few other people we knew around. We were literally relying on the kindness of relatives to stay afloat. The boat’s insulation got eaten by muskrats, which for some reason still makes me laugh. Of all the enemies we had, the muskrats felt the most honest.

After that? Louisiana.

From muskrats to mudbugs.

We left the river still half-damp with muskrat stink, the boat smell baked into everything we owned. The drive south felt longer than it was—hours of highway that seemed to be deciding whether they wanted to lead us home or dare us to turn back. By the time we hit Lecompte, the air had changed. The water was gone but the humidity stayed, clinging to our skin like something we’d carried with us from the swamp. My mother called it a fresh start. I called it proof that some hells don’t end when you leave them; they just change their address.

And then there were the mudbugs.

In Louisiana, people didn’t just eat—they hunted their food in ways that felt almost feral to me. Turtle soup. Alligator. Things I’d never seen on a plate before suddenly showing up like it was normal. But the crawfish were the part that stuck. We’d lay nets in roadside ditches, set traps, dig our hands straight into the mud to pull them out. It took patience, mess, and a willingness to reach into something murky and alive. Then later, you’d sit there cracking them open, piece by piece, working for every bite. It was slow, gritty, and strangely satisfying. I didn’t know it then, but it felt familiar—learning how to pull something worth keeping out of the mud, even if it fought you the whole way.

🕯 Interlude: Before the Monster

Before I knew my father as anything terrifying,
he was a boy shaped by people I never chose.

My grandmother was not a gentle woman.
From what I understand now, she made him feel like love was conditional—
something earned, something withheld, something that could disappear without warning.
I don’t tell this story to excuse him.
Only to name the soil he grew from.

My grandfather was different.
He was steady in a way I didn’t yet have language for.
With him, I didn’t feel like a problem to solve or a presence to manage.
I could sit beside him without bracing for impact.

He was one of the first people I loved
who loved me back in a way I could feel.

He died in 1993. And with him went one of the only proofs I had that love didn’t have to hurt.

In 2026, I wrote a poem for my father, from his perspective:

Instructions for the Boy (1943)

First, give the boy a body

that hurts before language.

Twist the foot.

Split the lip.

Make his first mirrors

full of doctors’ hands.

Teach him early

that every mile toward care

is a burden to someone else.

Three hours to Birmingham.

Three hours back.

Let the mother sigh

loud enough for a child to hear.

Let her say the word trouble

as if it were his name.

When he learns to walk,

let the other boys notice the limp.

Let them practice mercy

by withholding it.

Now remove the mother entirely.

Send him to the grandmother

who mistakes loneliness for prophecy.

Tell him he is not a boy.

Tell him he is a vessel.

Tell him he is the return of something divine.

Give him a crown

instead of comfort.

Children cannot carry crowns

without breaking something inside.

Next step:

confuse love with power.

If he is special,

he does not need tenderness.

If he is chosen,

he does not need equals.

If he is above them,

he does not need empathy.

This is the crucial mechanism:

When the boy reaches for warmth

and finds only weight,

teach the nervous system

a faster solution—

turn the dial down.

Lower it again.

And again.

Soon the boy will discover

that feeling nothing

is lighter than feeling everything.

Record this as success.

Years later

he will grow tall inside the armor.

He will speak brilliantly.

Charm easily.

Construct stories where he is

the misunderstood center

of every room.

People will say:

If only he had been loved.

But the system is already complete.

It does not run on love.

It runs on absence

carefully maintained.

The dial was turned down

so long ago

that now

even when someone cries

the machinery only asks

What advantage is this?

People often ask trauma survivors why we’re “still so affected.”

Why we’re still angry.

Why politics feel personal.

Why certain words hit so hard.

Why we can’t simply “agree to disagree.”

Why we’re always bracing.

What many people fail to understand is that a nervous system does not respond to ideology.

It responds to safety.

As a bisexual woman raised in conservative religious environments, I learned very early that belonging could be withdrawn. Love could become conditional. Acceptance could disappear the moment I became fully visible.

I learned that some truths had to stay hidden.

I learned that who I loved could become a theological debate.

I learned that protecting other people’s comfort mattered more than protecting my pain.

And eventually, my nervous system stopped asking:

“Am I safe?”

It already knew the answer.

No.

When people live for years inside environments where parts of themselves are condemned, mocked, minimized, or treated as less worthy, the body adapts.

Hypervigilance isn’t a personality flaw.

It’s an adaptation.

Sensitivity isn’t weakness.

It’s what happens when your brain spends decades trying to detect danger before danger detects you.

People sometimes tell survivors we’re “too much.”

Too emotional.

Too intense.

Too political.

Too sensitive.

But what if we’re not “too much”?

What if we’ve simply spent our lives carrying too much?

What happens to a person when they repeatedly hear:

“Don’t talk about that.”

“You’re overreacting!”

“You’re making everything political.”

“We still love you, but…”

Those words may sound harmless to the people saying them.

To a nervous system shaped by rejection, they sound like:

“Become smaller if you want to belong.”

Eventually many survivors stop asking:

“Will they accept me?”

And start asking:

“Is there anywhere I can exist without apologizing for who I am?”

That’s not narcissism.

That’s grief.

Because beneath the anger many LGBTQ people carry is something much sadder:

We wanted family.

We wanted belonging.

We wanted the people we loved to choose us more loudly than they chose ideology.

Most of us weren’t asking for perfection.

We were asking for protection.

And there is a profound difference.

People often assume trauma survivors are angry because we enjoy conflict.

In reality, many of us are fucking exhausted.

We’re tired of explaining why our rights matter.

Tired of defending our humanity.

Tired of being told that our pain is the problem rather than the conditions that created it.

The truth is that no nervous system was designed to live indefinitely without safety.

Humans are built for connection.

For belonging.

For being held.

Not for constantly proving that we deserve equal dignity.

If you’ve spent your life feeling “too much,” perhaps the problem was never your size.

Perhaps you were simply trying to carry wounds that were always too heavy for one person.

And maybe the question isn’t:

“Why am I so sensitive?”

Maybe the question is:

“How much safer would I have felt if I’d been loved without conditions?”

Some wounds aren’t signs of weakness.

Sometimes they’re evidence that we survived environments no human being should have had to survive.

One of the strangest conversations I have with younger LGBTQ people is discovering that we can look at the same family, church, or culture and come away with completely different conclusions.

Neither of us is necessarily wrong.

We simply inherited different worlds.

Many younger LGBTQ people grew up during years of expanding acceptance. They saw marriage equality become law. They watched LGBTQ characters appear on television. Some brought partners home without fear of losing everyone they loved.

For many of us who came before them, the atmosphere was different.

And when I say atmosphere, I mean exactly that.

Not one sermon.

Not one Bible verse.

Not one disagreement.

An atmosphere.

I spent my life around multiple expressions of Christianity. My father moved through several traditions over the years and even served as a Nazarene preacher for a time. I grew up in Assembly of God churches. Throughout my life, I encountered Southern Baptist communities, Catholic environments, Unitarian spaces, and relationships with people from several of those traditions.

Some communities were kinder than others.

Some people showed genuine love.

Some individuals tried their best.

This is not an essay about one denomination.

It is an essay about what many LGBTQ people of my generation heard across multiple environments.

I remember hearing that homosexuality was sinful.

I remember warnings about God’s judgment.

I remember hearing that disasters, social decline, and moral collapse were connected to LGBTQ people.

I remember conversations about which relationships counted and which ones did not.

I remember hearing that some futures belonged only to straight people.

And I remember the jokes nobody interrupted.

People often ask former LGBTQ Christians why they left.

Years later, some even ask why we never came back.

The question assumes we left because of one disagreement.

But many of us did not leave because of a single verse.

We left because of the atmosphere.

People remember that nobody physically threw us out.

They remember that we were allowed to attend.

They remember moments of kindness.

But they often forget the environment surrounding those moments.

Children and teenagers absorb much more than official doctrine.

They absorb what is celebrated.

They absorb what is condemned.

And they absorb what is tolerated.

Sometimes the loudest message is not what was preached.

Sometimes the loudest message is what nobody interrupted.

Today, younger LGBTQ people sometimes see acceptance where older LGBTQ people remember pain.

That difference does not necessarily mean one generation is right and the other is wrong.

It means we are comparing the present to different pasts.

A younger person may remember being allowed to bring a boyfriend home.

An older person may remember decades of hearing that their love was sinful.

Both experiences are real.

And perhaps that is why recent shifts in public opinion feel so different depending on when you were born.

Some people see polling data.

Others hear echoes.

Because many of us remember when support for LGBTQ rights was lower.

We remember when marriage equality seemed impossible.

We remember hearing “love the sinner, hate the sin” long before society debated whether we deserved equal protections.

We remember what happened when entire communities decided that LGBTQ people were a moral problem to solve.

History teaches that rights are rarely lost all at once.

Social change often begins with language.

First a group becomes morally suspect.

Then restrictions seem reasonable.

Then exclusion becomes normal.

That is why many older LGBTQ people react so strongly when public support begins to decline.

Not because we hate religion.

Not because we cannot tolerate disagreement.

But because we remember.

And memory is not the same thing as bitterness.

Some generations inherited acceptance.

Others remember what it cost to build it.

History leaves fingerprints.

Some generations can still see them.

And perhaps that is why so many people ask us why we did not come back.

What they often forget is that we did not leave because of one sermon.

We left because of the atmosphere.

The Museum of Broadway in NYC, highly recommended. This was a powerful memorial to the victims of religious hatred experienced by the gay community in the 80s.

The only atheist.

The only queer person.

The only one who says, “That hurt me,” when everyone else wants to move on.

The only one who remembers.

People often assume the hardest part of being LGBTQ+ is coming out.

For me, it wasn’t.

The hardest part has been realizing that even when people love you, they may never fully understand what it feels like to live in a world that debates your humanity.

I grew up around religion.

Not the gentle kind that inspires people to feed the hungry or sit with the grieving.

The kind that taught me there was something wrong with me before I even knew who I was.

The kind that told me who could marry, who could belong, and who God approved of.

The kind that could speak endlessly about love while remaining strangely comfortable with exclusion.

I spent years trying to fit inside systems that were never built with me in mind.

I tried being quiet.

I tried being agreeable.

I tried being understanding.

I tried pretending certain comments didn’t hurt.

I tried convincing myself that if I were patient enough, kind enough, successful enough, healed enough, eventually I would feel like I belonged.

I was wrong.

Because belonging that requires silence isn’t belonging.

It’s compliance.

The older I get, the more I realize that many families have an unspoken contract.

You can stay as long as you don’t challenge the story.

Don’t challenge the politics.

Don’t challenge the religion.

Don’t challenge the family mythology.

Don’t talk about what happened.

Don’t mention who was harmed.

Don’t make anyone uncomfortable.

Most people can survive inside that contract.

Some of us can’t.

Not because we’re difficult.

Because our existence contradicts the story.

I am a queer woman.

I am a survivor.

I am someone who remembers.

That combination tends to make people uncomfortable.

Especially when religion is involved.

The painful thing is that I don’t actually need everyone to agree with me.

I don’t need them to vote the way I vote.

I don’t need them to share every belief I have.

What I long for is something much simpler.

Curiosity.

Compassion.

The ability to say:

“I don’t experience the world the way you do, but I can understand why this hurts when you survived similar abuse.”

For many LGBTQ+ people, religion isn’t merely a theological disagreement.

It’s personal.

It’s the memory of sitting quietly while people discussed whether your love was sinful.

It’s hearing jokes that everyone else treats as harmless.

It’s learning that acceptance often comes with conditions.

It’s discovering that some people can love you while still believing fundamental things about you are wrong.

That creates a grief few people talk about.

Not the grief of losing faith.

The grief of losing belonging.

The grief of realizing there may never be a version of yourself that fits comfortably inside the community that raised you.

For a long time I thought my anger was the problem.

Now I think much of it was grief wearing armor.

Because underneath the anger was a question I didn’t know how to ask:

Why is it always me who has to understand everyone else?

Why am I expected to make room for beliefs that wound me while being told my own pain is divisive?

I don’t have a neat answer.

I still struggle with it.

Some days I still feel like the black sheep.

The family heretic.

The one who ruined Thanksgiving by mentioning reality.

But I’ve started to realize something.

Being different from your family does not mean you failed.

Being unable to fit inside a system that excludes you is not a personal deficiency.

Sometimes the reason you never fit is because you were never meant to shrink enough to fit there.

Maybe belonging isn’t finding the people who tolerate your existence.

Maybe it’s finding the people who never ask you to apologize for it in the first place.

And maybe that search, lonely as it can be, is worth continuing.

Not when we are in pain.

Not when we are angry.

Not when we wake up at 3:17 a.m. with our bodies remembering things our minds would rather archive forever.

Not when we are exhausted from carrying histories that would have flattened some people completely.

No. They love us after the montage.

After the therapy language becomes elegant.
After the nervous system becomes socially acceptable.
After the grief becomes poetic instead of disruptive.
After we can discuss our trauma without accidentally bleeding on the furniture.

Then we become inspirational.

Then people repost our quotes.

Then they say things like:
“Wow. Your resilience is incredible.”

As if resilience is not just what happens when death keeps missing you.

I have noticed something over the years:
many people do not actually want intimacy with survivors.
They want proximity to survival narratives that reassure them suffering can be conquered cleanly.

They want us scarred but regulated.
Deep but easy.
Self-aware but never overwhelming.
Traumatized but convenient.

And if we cannot maintain that performance consistently, the cultural script arrives almost immediately:

“You need to heal first.”
“You need to love yourself first.”
“No one can complete you!!!”
“You have to stop looking outside yourself.”

What fascinating advice to give a species that survives almost entirely through attachment.

Especially when that advice is handed to people who survived things no child should survive.

I was kidnapped by my dad at birth though he lied and told me my birth mom wanted an abortion because I wasn’t a boy.

By age five I was already seeing things many adults still physically recoil from hearing about and aren’t allowed to be printed here.

There was domestic violence.
Constant moves.
Fear woven into the wallpaper.
The FBI raid.
The years of confusion and denial around my father and CSAM.
The realization that adults had seen pieces of what was happening and chose to do nothing.

One of his favorite ages of me, if you get my meaning

And later, because apparently the nervous system enjoys irony, I was held hostage in 2018 by the one person who had never hurt me before whilst he was hallucinating with a first ever psychotic break after 20 years of knowing him.

Do you know what repeated trauma does to a human attachment system?

It does not create a serene mountain monk who “just loves themselves enough.”

It creates a person whose body understands at a cellular level that love and danger sometimes arrive holding hands.

It creates hypervigilance.
Longing.
Fear of abandonment.
Fear of engulfment.
Pattern scanning.
Overexplaining.
Withdrawal.
Protest.
Intense attachment.
Difficulty trusting calm.
Grief that reactivates like old scar tissue in bad weather.

And yet despite all this, people still speak to survivors as though healing is a moral prerequisite for being loved.

As though tenderness is a graduation prize awarded only after perfect emotional regulation.

“Go love yourself first.”

What does that even mean after decades of surviving things that shattered the self repeatedly?

The self is not a ceramic mug you glue back together once and place triumphantly on a shelf.

For some of us, the self became a disaster response zone before kindergarten.

And I am tired of pretending otherwise to make other people comfortable.

I do love myself, by the way.

Far more than I used to, thanks to 7 years of therapy and the hard work of looking inward.

I fought for this life.
I built a career.
I learned emotional granularity.
I made art from wreckage.
I survived sacroiliac pain that made walking impossible.
I wrote the book and the app.
I stayed alive through years that did not seem survivable.

But self-love did not magically erase my grief.

It did not remove my anger.
It did not make abandonment painless.
It did not transform me into someone who no longer longs to be deeply known.

Because human beings are not meant to heal entirely alone.

That is the lie hidden inside modern self-help culture:
the fantasy that needing sustained tenderness means you have failed spiritually.

No.

Some wounds are relational injuries.
Of course they still ache in the absence of safe connection.

And I think many survivors eventually become furious because we realize the rules are rigged:

If we are visibly wounded, we are “too much.”
If we become high functioning, people use our competence as proof we no longer need care.
If we speak honestly about ongoing pain, we are accused of being stuck.
If we stay silent, we disappear entirely.

Meanwhile the same culture that tells us to “love ourselves first” consumes memoir after memoir written by people whose lives were nearly destroyed by the absence of reliable love.

Interesting.

I am not saying no healing exists.

It does.

But I think healing is far less about becoming untouched by what happened and far more about no longer abandoning yourself inside the aftermath.

And some anger never leaves because some losses never stop mattering.

That does not make us broken.

It makes us witnesses.

The truth is: I do not want to become a person who feels nothing about what happened to me.

I want to become a person whose life grows large enough that the pain is no longer the only thing in the room.

There is a difference.

And if you want a world to stop producing survivors with these scars - women like me - perhaps do something next time you hear a child being abused and also stop paying or donating to organizations that aid in the cover up of the abuse of children.

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Today’s mood:

Over the last few months, something unexpected happened.

People started gathering here.

Not around polished inspiration.
Not around certainty.
Not around “5 easy ways to heal.”

But around complexity.

Around nervous systems.
Around grief.
Around systems that fail people.
Around survival.
Around trying to remain human after too much.

And because this space is growing, I’ve been thinking more deeply about what I actually hope it becomes.

Part of that requires honesty about where I’m writing from.

I’m someone who has lived through:

• being born from rape when my father lied about having a vasectomy

• being stolen by my father and hidden from my birth mother while she searched for me

• losing my birth mother to suicide before I got to know about her at all

• years of domestic violence, coercion, and CSA while living with father and adopted mom

• LGBTQ discrimination

• growing up in chronic fear and instability

• having my college money stolen by the very parent meant to protect me

• witnessing an FBI raid connected to my father in 2001 and finding out my dad was a CSAM distributor

• a period of stability and obtaining a doctorate to being held hostage in 2018 by someone I loved during a severe drug-induced psychological reaction

• religious trauma caused by family who insisted their prayer would heal me after that 2018 event - even though I had to pretend to be Virgin Mary to escape the hallucinator

• decades of hypervigilance, dissociation, shame, survival mode, and rebuilding

I say all of this not for shock value.

And not because suffering makes someone wise.

It doesn’t.

Pain can just as easily isolate people, harden them, or destroy them. I’ve lost a lot due to trauma myself.

But I do think surviving certain things changes how you see systems, power, safety, care, and human behavior.

Especially when institutions repeatedly fail to protect vulnerable people.

For a long time, I thought my reactions meant I was defective.

Too sensitive.
Too intense.
Too emotional.
Too aware.
Too affected by things other people seemed able to ignore.

Now I think many trauma survivors are actually having profoundly sane responses to prolonged overwhelm.

Bodies remember.
Nervous systems adapt.
Humans contort themselves to survive environments that were never survivable to begin with.

Part of what I hope this space becomes is somewhere people can slowly stop mistaking adaptation for moral failure.

A place where:

• emotional granularity matters more than performance

• witness matters more than fixing

• curiosity matters more than shame

• systems can be questioned openly

• survival stories don’t need to become inspiration porn to have meaning

• people are allowed to be complicated

That’s also part of why I’m building Beyond the Spiral — a project focused on more state-adaptive emotional support tools.

Not because I think technology can cure trauma.

It can’t.

But because I think many people deserve support systems that respond to actual human states instead of assuming everyone is calm, linear, articulate, and emotionally regulated all the time.

Sometimes people don’t need optimization.

They need orientation.

Language.
Pattern recognition.
A pause before escalation.
A reminder that distress is not evidence of failure.

More to come on this project as safety features are beta tested.

I also recently finished a memoir called Yet Another Survivors Story — a title that is intentionally a little sharp, a little tired, and a little defiant because abuse has happened to far too many of us.

Because part of surviving trauma is realizing how many people are quietly carrying impossible histories while still going to work, paying bills, making jokes, answering emails, raising children, loving people, and trying to build meaningful lives anyway.

Mostly though, I hope this becomes a place where people feel less alien.

Less alone in their minds.
Less ashamed of their nervous systems.
Less convinced they’re secretly “too much.”

And honestly?

The fact that over 325 people subscribed to writing about trauma, systems analysis, emotional regulation, healthcare weirdness, memoir fragments, and existential dread with occasional jokes…

…means more to me than I can explain.

Thank you for being here.
Thank you for trusting me with your stories in return.
Thank you for reading work that isn’t always easy or tidy.
Thank you for helping this become something larger than survival.

Maybe we build rafts for each other after all. 🌈

In honor of the 325 people here, help me pick a cover!

And for those of you new here —

This space is for people who have lived through something

and are still trying to understand what it did to them.

Not just what happened—

but what it shaped.

What it cost.

What it built in its place.

I’m Jamie.

I was raised by a father with antisocial personality disorder in a society that did little to stop him from harming us.

I’ve also spent over 20 years working in healthcare systems,

and just as long trying to understand the systems inside people.

This publication sits at the intersection of both.

It’s part memoir, part analysis, part reconstruction.

What You’ll Find Here

Some pieces are personal.

Some are structural.

Most are both.

Because what happens to us doesn’t stay contained to “the past.”

It shows up in relationships, in institutions, in the way entire systems respond to harm.

If you’re new, I recommend exploring by theme:

🔥 Trauma & Survival

What it means to live through something that doesn’t resolve cleanly.

cPTSD, memory, fragmentation, and the long arc of survival.

Start here: Inherited

🧠 Systems & Accountability

How families, institutions, and cultures protect harm—and why.

Why the reaction becomes the crime.

Why victims get studied more than what hurt them.

Start here: They Paid the Church, I Paid the Price

Or here: Why Groups Protect Powerful People Even When Harm is Obvious

🪞 Identity & Becoming

The parts of us that split, adapt, disappear, or come back.

Desire, voice, expression, and the tension between being seen and being safe.

Start here: Split

⚖️ Power, Culture & Control

Where personal experience collides with politics.

Ownership, autonomy, and the ways systems try to define who gets to exist freely.

Start here: The Feeling You’re Not Supposed to Admit

🕊️ The Unclenching

Moments of relief, clarity, or shift.

Not healing as a destination—but as the return of choice.

Start here: Raised on Horror, Calmed by Rhythm (Jamie’s dramatic Poe reading)

Why “The Unclenching Project”?

Because for a lot of us, the body learned to brace before we ever had language.

Clenching becomes normal.

Hypervigilance becomes personality.

Survival becomes identity.

This project is about noticing that…

and, when possible, loosening it.

Not all at once.

Not perfectly.

Just enough to breathe differently.

Where This Is Going

This writing is part of a larger body of work, including:

• A memoir: Yet Another Survivor’s Story

• A mental health app in development: Beyond the Spiral

Both are built on the same idea:

distress is not a personal failure—it’s a logical response to what happened.

Today’s music mood:

One thing people don’t always understand about trauma is that it changes the meaning of language.

Some people hear violent rhetoric from powerful men and think:
“politics.”
“toughness.”
“posturing.”
“strength.”

Other people hear it and feel their nervous system begin preparing for impact.

Because when you grow up in violence, you learn that words are often rehearsals.

You learn that “I’ll kill you” is not just an expression.
That domination can hide inside “love.”
That terror can become ambient enough to feel normal.
That everyone else in the room may continue acting like things are fine while your body quietly calculates danger.

Children raised around violence become experts in tone long before they become experts in language.

We learn:
which footsteps matter,
which silences matter,
which moods matter,
which phrases are warnings,
which smiles are real,
which smiles mean run.

[This baby girl didn’t know what was coming for her.

The wonderful older brother beside her — her first protector — was still living there during this Christmas, one of about 3 of her years of all of her years of life. Dad got violently drunk that night too, as usual.

The brother was angry, you can even see it here I believe. I don’t know if he remembers this incident.

But most of the violent Christmases came later,
after the protector was gone.

And then the girl and her 5’1” mom had to run alone.]

And later, as adults, people sometimes wonder why we react “so strongly” to aggressive rhetoric, dehumanization, authoritarian posturing, or ideologies centered around enemies and punishment.

But for some of us, these things do not arrive as abstractions.

They arrive through the oldest circuitry in the body.

I think that’s part of why so many trauma survivors become exhausted trying to explain themselves politically, emotionally, spiritually.

People who grew up safe often experience systems intellectually first.

People who grew up unsafe often experience systems somatically first.

The body recognizes patterns before the conscious mind finishes the sentence.

And maybe the loneliest part is this:

When you spent your childhood correctly identifying danger while other people minimized it, ignored it, normalized it, spiritualized it, or explained it away…

you become very sensitive to that dynamic repeating in adulthood.

You start noticing how often society asks people to tolerate rhetoric that frightened children would immediately recognize.

I don’t think trauma survivors are always “right” politically.
I don’t think hypervigilance is infallible.
And I don’t think fear alone should govern society.

But I do think some of us learned early that power without empathy is one of the most dangerous forces on earth.

And once your body has truly learned that lesson,
it never fully becomes theoretical again.

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This is the photo that activated this trauma survivor’s nervous system today:

I grew up believing that certain fights in America, while imperfect, had at least been settled.

Not solved.
Not healed.
But settled enough that we understood why the protections existed.

The Voting Rights Act.
Roe v. Wade.
Basic civil rights protections.
The idea that the government should move carefully when limiting personal autonomy or access to representation.

I don’t think everyone agreed on the details even then.
But I thought there was still a shared understanding that these protections came from somewhere painful.

That they were written in response to real suffering.

I grew up in Arkansas in the 1990s during the rise of Bill Clinton.

And for all of his flaws — and I think history has shown he had serious flaws as both a husband and a man — there was still a feeling in parts of the South then that the country might slowly become more open rather than more closed.

More complicated.
More diverse.
More willing to confront difficult truths.

Not perfect.
Not remotely perfect.

But moving, however unevenly, toward inclusion instead of retreat.

I think that shaped me more than I realized at the time.

Because growing up queer, bookish, scientifically minded, and painfully aware of social hierarchies in a conservative Southern environment, I carried this hope that America was gradually widening.

That maybe each generation would have to fight less hard to exist openly than the one before it.

I remember one conversation years ago with someone I cared about deeply.

He had grown up Catholic but no longer really believed in it himself. His parents still did.

And at one point he said something like:
“I know it hurts people like you, but I don’t want to challenge them because they’re old.”

I don’t think he meant it cruelly.

In his mind, he was trying to avoid conflict.
Trying not to hurt his parents.
Trying to keep the peace.

But I remember sitting there realizing something that would stay with me for years afterward:

My rights would always feel more theoretical to him than his discomfort.

My life was the abstraction.
His comfort was the reality.

And I think that’s part of what many minorities, women, and LGBTQ people are trying to explain right now.

For some people, these debates are intellectual.
Constitutional.
Philosophical.

For others, they determine whether you feel fundamentally safe, visible, protected, or disposable inside your own country.

That difference in emotional stakes changes everything.

So part of what feels disorienting now is not simply political disagreement.

It’s the feeling that some of the protections and assumptions that formed the emotional backdrop of my generation are no longer stable in the way we thought they were.

When I look at recent court decisions, I understand that many conservatives see them differently than I do.

Some see Roe as judicial overreach.
Some see voting-rights rulings as correcting outdated formulas or reducing race-based governance.
Some genuinely believe these decisions strengthen constitutional consistency rather than weaken democracy.

I want to say clearly:
I do not believe everyone who supports these rulings is hateful.

In fact, I think one of the biggest mistakes we make in this country is assuming disagreement automatically means malice.

But I also think many people who are frightened right now are not being irrational.

Because from where they stand, the pattern feels cumulative.

The Voting Rights Act weakened.
Roe overturned.
Book bans expanding.
LGBTQ protections debated state by state.
Growing political rhetoric about who counts as a “real” American.

A general open hostility toward institutions unless they produce the “correct” outcome.

At a certain point, people stop experiencing these as isolated policy disagreements and start experiencing them as instability.

As uncertainty.

As a question:
Which rights are considered permanent — and whose rights were only temporary all along?

Yours?

Mine?

I think what scares many women, minorities, LGBTQ people, and other marginalized groups is not simply one ruling.

It’s the feeling that rights can become negotiable once political power shifts enough.

And history makes that fear difficult to dismiss entirely.

The United States has done extraordinary things. I fucking love it here.

But we have also repeatedly restricted rights first and apologized later.

That’s part of our history too.

I know some conservatives get frustrated hearing comparisons to authoritarianism.
I understand why.
Most conservatives I know do not see themselves as authoritarian.
Many believe they are protecting order, stability, tradition, or constitutional limits.

And honestly, I think reducing half the country to caricatures is dangerous for all of us.

I’m not perfect, I’ve done it myself at times when I’ve been very emotional, like about the generation of girls under me losing their right to their body, their potential for earning, and their dependence on unsafe men and broken systems of protection.

But I also think democracies rarely erode all at once.

Usually the changes arrive legally.
Procedurally.
One ruling at a time.
One emergency at a time.
One exception at a time.
One “this probably won’t affect most people” at a time.

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Until suddenly people realize the ground beneath them moved while everyone argued about whether movement was happening at all.

Maybe I’m wrong.
I hope I’m wrong.

I would genuinely rather be accused of overreacting than wake up ten years from now realizing the warning signs were easier to see than we wanted to admit.

I don’t want revenge on conservatives.
I don’t want humiliation for liberals.
I don’t want endless cultural warfare where every election feels existential.

I want a country where rights feel durable enough that losing one election does not make entire groups of people fear for their bodily autonomy, representation, safety, or future.

And I think the fact that so many people do feel that fear right now should matter — even to those who disagree with them politically.

A song for my country: Taylor Swift - Out Of The Woods (Lyrics)

There’s a feeling women are not supposed to admit out loud.

Not because it’s rare.

Because it’s recognizable.

Last night, I watched If I Had Legs I’d Kick You and it hit that feeling with almost surgical precision.

Not just exhaustion.

Not just resentment.

Something heavier. Quieter.

The feeling of being slowly… sealed in.

The film captures a kind of suffocation that doesn’t look dramatic from the outside.

It looks like caretaking.
Like responsibility.
Like being “good.”

But underneath it, there’s a pressure building.

A sense that your life is no longer your own.

That every need around you takes up oxygen.

And eventually, there isn’t enough left for you.

Watching it, I had a memory I hadn’t touched in a long time.

Sitting in a college classroom in 1996, reading The Awakening by Kate Chopin.

I didn’t fully understand why it hit me the way it did at first.

Until the ending.

Edna walking into the ocean.

Not as spectacle.

Not as impulsive despair.

But as something that felt… inevitable.

I remember sitting there, listening to that ending, and feeling something shift in my body.

Not agreement.

Not even approval.

Recognition.

A quiet, internal:

Oh.

There are other women who have felt this.

Because that feeling—the one no one teaches you how to name—isn’t exactly “I want to die.”

It’s something more precise.

More dangerous, in a way.

It’s:

I don’t see a way to exist and still belong to myself.

And when that’s the equation…

Disappearing can start to feel like the only solution that preserves anything at all.

Not because life has no value.

But because you don’t exist inside the life you’re living and the men and women around you don’t seem to care to help you escape control.

What struck me most, watching If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, is how modern that feeling still is.

We like to believe we’ve moved past the world of The Awakening.

That women aren’t owned anymore.

That we have choices now.

And we do.

But the structure didn’t disappear.

It just got quieter (though misogyny is currently roaring back loudly)

More internalized.

More easily mislabeled as love.

Caretaking becomes identity.

Self-erasure becomes virtue.

Exhaustion becomes proof you’re doing it “right.”

And if you start to crack under that weight?

If you feel anger, or suffocation, or the urge to run?

You become the problem.

Not the system that created it.

So you learn to push it down.

To keep going.

To be needed.

To be good.

Until something breaks.

Or…

until you see it.

And then there’s the present.

Not theoretical.

Not symbolic.

Concrete.

A headline I saw this week:

An appeals court siding with Louisiana in its attempt to restrict access to mailed abortion medication—even when it crosses state lines.

Not just controlling what happens within its own borders.

But reaching outward.

Trying to extend its regressive rules into places that did not choose them.

It’s hard to describe how familiar that feels.

That quiet assumption:

That someone else gets to decide what happens to your body.

That dad can rape you and we’ll look away, but don’t you dare have an abortion if you get pregnant with his child.

AGREE WITH US:

Even if you live somewhere else.
Even if you disagree silently.
Even if you never consented to that system.

Especially because women don’t deserve consent.

We frame these laws as moral debates.

As legal questions.

As political differences.

But underneath all of that is something much older.

Much simpler.

Ownership.

Because abortion bans don’t just regulate procedures.

They regulate autonomy.

They redraw the line between a person and a role.

And when states begin trying to control not just their own residents, but anyone who might access care across borders…

It starts to echo something deeper than policy.

It starts to echo that same feeling:

That your life is not fully yours.

The one I recognized in that classroom.

The one I felt watching that film.

The one women have been quietly naming—
or not naming—
for generations.

There have always been women standing at the edge of that ocean.

Not because they are weak.

But because society cornered into a life where existing meant being owned.

And maybe the shift we’re in now—the one that still feels unfinished—is this:

Refusing both options.

Refusing to disappear.

And refusing to be owned.

Today’s mood: King of Anything