the misfit west

Tag: writing

  • porch gospel

    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.

    _____________________________________________

    ⚠️ 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.

  • extinction events

    There are places that never recover from the moment they become a symbol.

    They keep functioning—streets plowed, classes taught, houses sold—but something essential slips out of alignment, like a joint that never quite sets. You learn to compensate. You call it resilience. You don’t talk about what hurts when the weather changes.

    That’s how Laramie feels to me now.

    I came back expecting familiarity and found production instead. The outlines were right. The scale was wrong. From a distance, the town still looked like itself, but up close it felt thinner, as if something interior had been scraped away and replaced with a surface designed to photograph well.

    I was born in Gillette, where work announces itself plainly and early, where nothing pretends to be delicate. In 2002, I moved to Laramie and stayed until 2016—long enough for the town to shape my nervous system, long enough to confuse proximity with belonging. When I left, I thought I was leaving a place. When I returned, I realized I was returning to a story already being told without me.

    The first thing that stopped me wasn’t a person.

    It was a house.

    The house on Railroad Street used to be a dare.

    In the early 2000s it sagged under its own age, a late–nineteenth-century structure that had never learned how to perform charm. The porch leaned. The boards were soft. The windows were filmed with dust and years of weather. You could smell it before you went in—sun-warmed rot, old paper, something animal, the unmistakable scent of long abandonment.

    We’d push the door open with our shoulders and step carefully, afraid the floor might give way—not dramatically, just practically, the way you move across ice you don’t trust. Inside, sound lagged. Each step landed a fraction of a second late, as if the house had to consider whether it agreed to hold you. The boards didn’t creak for effect; they complained. You learned the dips by feel. You learned where the floor was weakest. You learned how not to ask too much.

    I remember the walls more than the rooms: flaking paint gritty under my fingers, plaster that crumbled if you pressed too hard, a doorframe warped just enough to make the doorway feel narrower than it should have been. Light came in dirty. Dust floated slowly, like the house was breathing on its own schedule.

    It didn’t feel sad. It felt permissive. The house allowed error. It allowed curiosity. It allowed you to exist without proving anything.

    That looseness mattered, though I didn’t yet have language for it.

    When I came back years later, the house had been corrected.

    New siding. New windows. The porch squared off and reinforced. Gravel where weeds used to grow. Every softness disciplined. It stood straighter, like it had learned how to behave in front of strangers.

    I don’t remember the exact price—only the sensation of it, the quiet shock of realizing that fear had been converted into value. What once threatened collapse now promised return.

    I stood on the sidewalk longer than necessary, trying to locate the place where I had once been afraid I might fall through the floor. There was no trace of it. Even the yard looked coached—contained, legible, resolved.

    That was my first clue that I wasn’t just returning to Laramie.

    I was returning to a version of it that had been produced.

    The West Side—right over the tracks—has always been misread. People talk about it now as if it were a blank slate, as if its small, tightly spaced houses were an aesthetic choice rather than a historical one. Those houses were built small on purpose. Mexican and Mexican American families were pushed close to the railroad, close to industry, close to work that didn’t come with leisure or long-term security. City maintenance thinned there. Investment passed it by. Neglect wasn’t accidental.

    What grew out of that wasn’t picturesque. It was relational. Families fed each other. Yards blurred together. Kids knew which houses were safe. The neighborhood took care of itself because no one else was going to.

    That kind of culture doesn’t survive being rebranded.

    Now the West Side feels like a set dressed to resemble “the West.” All reference, all surface. Like an old Hollywood Western where John Wayne rides through a town that never has to live with the consequences of his violence. The buildings look right from a distance, but the scale is wrong. The intimacy is gone. The houses are still small, but the prices are not. The people who made the place legible to itself are being replaced by people who need the place to perform.

    I used to walk the neighborhood in the mornings with my dog, Angel.

    Birds came first, loudest near the Lincoln Center where the old trees still stand. Their calls overlapped and argued, sharp and territorial. Then came the dogs behind glass, nails clicking against window sills, bodies launching at whatever passed. Sometimes a human voice, flat with repetition: shut up.

    Angel always slowed near the boarded church.

    It doesn’t look ruined. It looks paused. Plywood covers the windows from the inside, cut unevenly, grain running in different directions, as if the decision was never meant to last this long. Snow gathers where people once scraped their boots. Power lines still run to it, as if the city hasn’t quite accepted that whatever lived there no longer needs electricity.

    Feral cats slip in and out of the basement through the egress. Angel would lean forward there, ears tilted, curious. I never let her stop. Curiosity has consequences. The cats weren’t symbolic. They were just trying to live.

    Next door sits another boarded building, newer, with a satellite dish still attached, tilted skyward like someone shut the door mid-sentence. It’s one of the last boarded places on this side. There used to be more. Anything close to downtown gets bought now. The boards come off quickly.

    Some mornings, when I don’t walk, I drive.

    Past the house on Railroad Street. Past places that once felt unfinished and now feel resolved in a way I don’t trust. One day there was a husky in the yard of that house—thick coat, pale face, eyes so similar to Angel’s that she stopped short and tilted her head. Same alert softness. Same question-mark posture.

    That unsettled me more than the renovation ever did.

    Not because the house had been fixed, but because it had become ordinary again. Lived-in. Claimed. The kind of place where a dog might nap in the sun. No longer provisional.

    I keep wondering why it costs so much now.

    The streets are still uneven. The wind still rearranges you. Downtown has been polished just enough to photograph well, but step one block off the main drag and you’re back in a town that hasn’t fully decided what century it belongs to. Infrastructure limps. Services thin out quickly.

    And over all of it hangs the thing no one wants to touch anymore.

    Matthew Shepard.

    The town never repaired from that—not really. It tried to outgrow it, outbrand it, soften the edges. But the crime fused too cleanly with the place. The geography matched the violence. The isolation. The way harm could happen and be carried out into the dark without interruption.

    Laramie became a lesson instead of a location.

    People learned just enough about it to feel informed, then stopped listening. The town learned how to perform progress because performance felt safer than excavation. Pronouns appeared. Statements multiplied. Prices rose.

    There’s a therapy practice here that presents herself as grounded, inclusive, careful. Pronouns on the page. Mountain language. Wellness aesthetics. And fees that none of the families who built the West Side could ever afford.

    It isn’t hypocrisy. It’s extraction with better branding.

    Long before I had language for any of this, I cared about extinction.

    I was ten years old, in a gifted-and-talented program, competing in Odyssey of the Mind. We built fragile balsa-wood structures that had to hold weight. We wrote plays about complicated problems—environmental, civic, moral. The point wasn’t winning. The point was thinking.

    Our team chose the black-footed ferret.

    At the time, it had been declared extinct and then—barely—found again in Wyoming. A ranch dog brought one home. That was how the story restarted. Not with a plan. Not with a speech. Just an animal crossing a threshold.

    In our play, I was a poacher.

    We were ten years old, trying to understand how something could disappear without anyone meaning for it to happen. Trying to understand how care could arrive too late and still matter.

    That shape has never left me.

    Extinction isn’t drama. It’s narrowing. Life pushed into smaller spaces. Survival dependent on being unnoticed.

    At the vet, Angel pressed her weight into my leg the way she does when a room smells wrong. The floor was slick. She shifted carefully.

    I was already crying—quietly—when a woman in a mask said my name.

    It took me a moment to recognize her.

    Angel’s old babysitter.

    Her Rover profile had vanished weeks earlier. One day there, the next gone. No message. No explanation. I had wondered if Angel had done something wrong. If I had.

    We separated politely. No argument. No repair.

    Wyoming is very good at this.

    At home, a squirrel startled when I opened the door too fast. Instead of choosing ground or tree, it chose air—belly exposed, legs splayed, a brief refusal of the available options. Then it landed and disappeared.

    The moment stayed with me not because it was brave or symbolic, but because it was efficient.

    Some things survive by learning how to vanish.

    Some disappear by being made present in the wrong way.

    The house on Railroad Street stays finished.

    The church stays boarded.

    The cats keep moving in and out of the dark.

    I don’t think about healing anymore. I think about what remains unrepaired—and why.

    Because some damage, if you rush to fix it, only gets buried under better lighting.