December 9, 2008 sits in my body like a bruise that never finished blooming.
It was that hour after sunset when the sky goes the color of a dirty dish towel and the house smells like someone should be cooking, but no one is. Four o’clock. The clock still mattered then. Time still pretended to be orderly.
My father fell from the second story of my childhood home. The drop was short enough to seem survivable. The concrete below disagreed. He struck his head, hard enough that his body revolted—vomit on cold ground, breath hitching, the animal panic of a system that knows something is wrong but can’t yet name it.
Cold moved in faster than help. December doesn’t wait.
At the hospital, I held his hand. It was still warm. That detail matters to me. Warm meant possibility. Warm meant walkers, physical therapy, the clean ache of rehab rooms, the promise of small victories—standing, swallowing, smiling at the wrong joke. I cataloged hope like a professional.
Then a man in a white collar entered the waiting room.
He did not rush. He did not sit. His shoes were quiet on linoleum. That’s how I knew. The body understands before the mind signs off.
After that, time stopped pretending.
Seventeen years later—seventeen years, ten days, a handful of stray hours—I still wake up thinking about his family. His brothers and sisters. The people who knew him before I did, or claimed to.
I have almost no stories.
My mother erased them before she died—unfriended, unfollowed, cut loose like diseased branches. When she spoke of them, it was with the flat, venomous efficiency of someone who had already made up her mind. Two brothers. Two sisters. Shadows with names.
The stories that reached me anyway arrived sideways. A teenage sister handed alcohol by an uncle like it was a secret handshake. Conversations about sex that didn’t belong to him. An uncle who teased girls onto his bare lap, shirtless, joking, smiling. The kind of memory that doesn’t shout, just stains.
I want forgiveness to be simpler than this. I want it to be a decision, not a daily negotiation with my nervous system. I tell myself everyone carries shadows. I tell myself families are messy. I tell myself I am not the judge.
And still—every time I try to contort myself into something palatable, something worthy, I am punished for it.
The racist remarks left on my page didn’t start the rupture, but they named it. They crystallized a truth I’d been circling for years: some people cannot bear witness. They scroll past discomfort. They disappear you quietly. The way they disappeared my mother. My brother. My sister. My father.
I learned early to take the blame.
I was difficult. I was too much. I was an addict. These were convenient containers, tidy enough for other people’s relief. On paper, though, the math doesn’t work. I’ve done the same training, the same hours, the same work as peers charging two hundred and fifty dollars a session behind polished clinic walls. There’s an irony in how often I sit across from clients whose wounds rhyme with mine.
Some days I want that to mean something noble. Some days I am just tired.
I listen. I bear witness. I help them stitch meaning out of rubble. And sometimes, quietly, privately, I wonder how I’m supposed to survive my own isolation. What does this kind of solitude do to a body over decades? What does it calcify?
The night I blocked my aunt, I did it slowly. Manually. Name by name. Even the uncle who once listened when things were darkest. On his page was a photo from my father’s funeral. My father—quiet, unassuming, deeply loved.
None of us were in the picture.
Not the people who lived with him. Prayed with him. Watched him read bedtime stories until his voice softened and the room went syrup-thick with safety. The funeral had blurred by then anyway. My workplace hosted a luncheon—white tablecloths, careful smiles. His family arrived dressed up, said almost nothing, and left promptly for their lives.
Grief, apparently, had a schedule.
My father mattered in a way that still feels untranslatable. I was a daddy’s girl without theatrics. We didn’t need constant conversation. I knew the smell of him. I knew the rough geography of his hands when we prayed together. His startling blue eyes. His soft hair, which he let me mess up before opening a book and launching into our beds like it was a holy calling.
The Boxcar Children became my cousins. Hobbits taught me how endurance works. Adventure wasn’t abstract—it was training.
I removed my aunt from the mailing list. Cut off her access to my life. The final offense was small and stupid: I named something true—that she and my other aunt orbit men like moons, regardless of the gravity involved. Since they aren’t reading, I’ll say it plainly: the men they’ve chosen are repugnant. Putrid. Whatever kept my father away from that family for years at a time lives in me now too.
They speak of my mother with a casual disrespect that still rearranges my bones.
I love my parents. I carry them everywhere. I wish—still, embarrassingly—that my family cared enough to see me clearly, or at all.
December 9 keeps ticking forward. The bruise never heals. I don’t need it to. I just need it to be named.
The essay arrived like a pressed wildflower—pretty, flat, already dead.
Someone forwarded it to me because they were worried about the man inside it. In a town like ours, worry travels by screenshot. Names don’t need to be written for a body to recognize itself in the outline.
I opened the link on my phone and felt my throat tighten, the way it does when a sermon starts to sound like marketing.
Outside, morning was doing its Wyoming thing: pale light, wind that never asks permission, the sky stretched thin as gauze over whatever you’re trying not to remember.
Inside the essay, there was the familiar arc: a woman returns from a bad love and climbs toward “trust again,” one clean insight at a time. Boundaries. Courage. Vulnerability. The tone was tender in that curated way—like a porch swing photo staged for a brochure.
Then a line: I wish he had shot me in the leg so people would believe me.
I stared at it and the room changed temperature.
Not because I doubted her. I didn’t. I don’t. Abuse is common; it’s just rarely described honestly.
But that line—sweet as a slogan, sharp as a pin—told me she’d never watched belief evaporate after a weapon was real. It told me she still thought the world was a courtroom where injury earns credibility. It told me she still believed in proof-as-salvation.
And the worst part is: I knew why she wanted to believe that.
Because if a gunshot would “fix” disbelief, then disbelief would be rational. Then the world would be coherent. Then you could stop asking the question that eats women alive: What did I do to make him do that?
I know that question. It’s the house I lived in for a while.
In 2022, when I was trying to get out, a man microwaved my phone.
It sounds absurd until you’ve lived in the kind of fear that makes the absurd practical. He took the one object that could tell the truth outside the room. He didn’t need to break my bones; he only needed to break my witness.
When I picked up the phone afterward, it was warm in a sick way—like a fever you can hold. The plastic smelled wrong. Chemical. Burnt-sweet. My stomach flipped because my body recognized the tactic before my mind could name it: isolation, sabotage, control.
That’s the part a lot of glossy “healing” essays don’t touch—the way abuse isn’t one scene with a villain, it’s a long, quiet campaign against your access to reality.
There’s a phrase for it: technology-facilitated abuse—using devices and digital access to monitor, harass, isolate, threaten, impersonate, destroy evidence, or cut off help. It’s documented, studied, and common enough to have its own research literature now.
And it’s close kin to what the law calls, in plain language, interfering with getting help. Multiple states explicitly criminalize preventing someone from calling 911 or seeking medical aid—Washington’s statute says it directly. Texas does too, down to “preventing or interfering” with someone’s ability to make an emergency call. California has a specific law about damaging a communication device to prevent someone from calling for help.
So when I read that line about wishing for a leg wound, I didn’t just feel anger.
I felt the old chemical smell rise in my throat, and with it, the memory of what it’s like to be brave in a world that calls you dramatic.
Because here’s the grim truth: people do not automatically believe you when you have “proof.” They measure you first. They scan for likability. They check whether your terror is convenient for them. They ask if you “led him on,” if you “stayed,” if you “made him mad,” if you “could have left sooner.” The drama triangle is not created by abused women—it’s created by spectators who need a simple story so they can go back to brunch.
The essay wanted an enemy. Not the man—he was already positioned for that role. The real enemy in that piece was ambiguity: how messy it is when a person can be charming and dangerous, wounded and predatory, tender on Tuesday and terrifying on Thursday. The essay wanted a clean moral: here’s what happened, here’s what it means, here’s how to heal, and here’s how to date again without getting hurt.
But danger doesn’t care about your personal growth plan.
Danger cares about access.
And access is what coercive control is built from: a pattern of tactics—surveillance, intimidation, isolation, sabotage, threats, financial pressure, social pressure—stacked over time until a person’s freedom shrinks to a narrow hallway. Governments and researchers define it that way because survivors kept insisting, for decades, that the story wasn’t just bruises—it was a system.
So here’s the antithesis:
Healing isn’t learning to “trust again.”
Healing is learning to tell the truth without needing anyone’s permission to believe you.
And vulnerability—God, that word—vulnerability is not a virtue you perform on Instagram. It is not a leadership hack. It is not a cashmere throw blanket draped over the ugliness of power.
There are real critiques of the Brené Brown universe that finally say the quiet part out loud: when vulnerability is framed as a choice and a personal practice without accounting for power, money, race, safety, and institutional cruelty, it becomes a privilege sermon—most usable by people already protected. Black feminist critique makes the point even sharper: for many women, especially Black women, “being vulnerable” in public doesn’t reliably produce empathy—it can produce punishment.
Which is why “be brave, be open, trust again” can be not just shallow, but dangerous advice—because it treats the world like it’s mostly safe and occasionally unlucky, instead of acknowledging that some environments are optimized for predation.
And therapy—real therapy—has to be able to look at that without flinching.
Not with moralistic scripts. Not with a Pinterest checklist. With craft. With ethics. With a willingness to say: sometimes the system is the abuser. Sometimes the “support” network is a hallway of closed doors. Sometimes your own community will smile at the man who harmed you because he’s charming, or because he’s useful, or because everyone has already decided you’re “a lot.”
That’s what made me remember why I blocked that clinician back in 2022.
It wasn’t personal drama. It wasn’t me being “too sensitive.”
I reached out because a man had pulled a gun on me, and my world had narrowed to survival math: who will answer, who will help, who will believe me without charging me an emotional tax.
She didn’t.
And later—later—her essay shows up in my inbox with its soft lantern language and its curated pain, and I can’t help noticing the collision: she can write about abuse, but when a real woman asks for help, she can vanish.
Maybe she was overwhelmed. Maybe she had no openings. Maybe she froze. I can grant that without turning her into a villain.
But I will not grant the lie underneath it: that telling a pretty story about trauma is the same thing as responding to it.
In small towns, therapists don’t get to play pretend about impact.
When you write publicly about “a man” in a way your community can decode, you may think you’re just being brave—but you are also shaping the social weather. You are putting someone on a map. You are inviting people to speculate. You are encouraging the public to pick sides, to label, to hunt for a moral.
Ethics doesn’t only live in paperwork. Ethics lives in whether a survivor can walk into a grocery store without becoming a plotline.
The professional codes say confidentiality is a cornerstone. The ACA even publishes specific guidance on social media because confidentiality risks spike the second clinicians start posting stories for attention.
And then there’s the porch.
I’ve heard the porch stories too—therapy on a porch like it’s a frontier romance. Maybe it’s just branding. Maybe it’s true. But privacy isn’t an aesthetic; it’s a safeguard. The federal guidance on telehealth privacy is blunt: reasonable steps to prevent being overheard matter.
A porch is not automatically unethical. But the posture—the performance of cozy accessibility while the real world’s risks are minimized—that is where harm sneaks in wearing linen.
Because if you are going to write about abuse, if you are going to invite readers into the room, you have to tell the harder truths too:
That leaving is often the most dangerous time.
That abusers don’t always look like monsters; sometimes they look like men you once loved.
That “proof” doesn’t guarantee belief.
That safety is logistical, not inspirational.
That the nervous system doesn’t care how empowered your caption is.
When I finished the essay, my phone sat on the table like a small animal—alive, vulnerable, necessary. I thought of the microwave again. I thought of how quickly a person can be cut off from the world. How quickly your story can be stolen and rewritten by whoever has the louder voice.
And I thought: if I were going to write about abuse, I would not write toward hope as a product.
I would write toward clarity.
I would write the part where the body learns the smell of chemical plastic and calls it danger.
I would write the part where the silence after honesty isn’t empty—it’s architectural, walls rearranging to keep you out.
I would write the part where you don’t get saved by evidence, you get saved by one person who believes you without making you earn it.
And I would write the part no one wants to sell:
Sometimes you don’t “trust again.”
Sometimes you learn to trust your own perception so completely that you stop negotiating with anyone else’s disbelief.
That’s not a healing arc.
That’s a survival skill, sharpened into a kind of mercy.
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⚠️ Reader Support & Content Notice
This essay includes reflections on experiences of coercive control, isolation, and intimate partner harm that some readers may find emotionally intense, distressing, or triggering. If you are currently in a situation where you feel unsafe, coerced, or under threat — or if this writing brings up past trauma — know this without sugar-coating: your safety matters more than anyone’s story.
You don’t have to endure harm alone.
If you are in immediate danger:
📞 Call 911 (U.S.) right now — your life and wellbeing are priority one.
National and Confidential Support (U.S.):
📞 The National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1-800-799-7233 or Text START to 88788 — 24/7 confidential support, safety planning, and referrals to shelters and advocates near you.
💬 RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline: 800-656-HOPE (4673) or online chat/text options — trained listeners available 24/7.
Find Local Help:
🏠 DomesticShelters.org — searchable directory of shelters and support programs across the U.S.
Emotional and Mental Health Support:
📘 To Write Love On Her Arms (TWLOHA) — hope and connection for people struggling with depression, trauma, or crisis.
💛 Reach out to a trusted therapist, counselor, or mental health provider who uses trauma-informed care principles, which recognize how power, fear, and control shape survival responses.
If you’re supporting someone else:
Listen without judgment, believe what they tell you, and help them connect to professional resources at their pace.
You deserve support and safety. If this piece resonates, take a breath — and take the next step toward care that feels right for you.
the misfit west 