I don’t want this whole thing to be about trauma. I’m just trying to explain why it’s so hard to write.

I want to mean what I say. I want words to actually matter. I script my lectures, so every word has a purpose. I can feel confident claiming students’ attention, because I know I’ve labored over the right words—exact, interesting, me. I like to text in small chunks, so I can be sure each word is infused with potency. When I finish a book, I write a summary, then memorize it, so when I recount the book, my thoughts are accurate. When hard things happen in life, I feel most soothed when I can write a good story about it to tell myself. Words are my portal to security.

I don’t like when words are meaningless. That’s how it was growing up. One minute, my mom is affectionate, then in the next breath, she’s in a violent rage about how I must hate her, for me to be so deliberately harmful as to place the glass on the table without a coaster. Why can’t I be less exhausting? Why can’t I be better at loving? Why can’t I stop hurting her, when it’s so obvious and easy how?

Little-kid me concluded: when I love, it hurts people. My existence is burdensome. I need to be more resourceful, independent, caring, and attuned. I need to learn the obvious rules I’m missing, so mom knows that actually, I do love her, and I’m really sorry I hurt you, and I promise I’ll be better next time, won’t make dumb mistakes or ask for unreasonable things.

I want to hold this child and tell her that her mom was wrong about all of this. You’re a child, so your only job is to be loved. I want to stroke her head until she falls asleep, then set her in bed, kiss her forehead, and shut the door. I want to walk back downstairs, and make her mom a meal. I would say, your feelings make sense for your context. You grew up in public housing, witnessing raw pain. When you turned the lights on, swarms of cockroaches scattered. Your dad was committed to an asylum and received shock treatment to cure pathological levels of rage. You went to college at age fourteen, and followed the eighteen-to-twenty-one-year-olds into substance abuse and sexual trauma on the streets of Brooklyn. It makes sense why nothing ever feels safe and there’s no stable reality to ground into and your self-conception can evaporate in a second. Then I would say, a traumatic context does not abnegate you of responsibility for harm you inflict. Your child has not been set here to punish you. You fucked up big-time. You need to seek support, quick, because these are catastrophic failures. Like, crisis-mode abuse here. You need to own your part and be better.

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I don’t want to post this, because I don’t want this whole thing to be about trauma. I’m just trying to explain why it’s so hard to write. I’m starting this substack because I want to allow my words (and myself) to be non-complete.