All writing

You explore how your trauma-driven hypervigilance manifested as disproportionate rage toward a neighbor's music in 2014, drawing a painful parallel to Susan Lorincz's case after watching a documentary about her shooting death of her neighbor. You grapple with the realization that your own unprocessed trauma has spilled onto people you love—especially Joel during your post-maternal grief healing crisis—and you confront the difficult question of whether you can hold yourself accountable for harm caused by wounded responses you didn't fully understand at the time.

You revisit November 2013, when your grandmother entered a masonic home and your mother disclosed her breast cancer diagnosis, while you were yourself living in an extended-stay hotel struggling to maintain stability. You move through the women in your family—your grandmother, mother, aunt Sheila, and Aunt Judy—mapping the different survival strategies they've adopted and the costs of those adaptations, ultimately recognizing that you and all the other transient residents of that hotel were fundamentally the same: people doing their best with what little agency and resources remained.

You constructed an elaborate philosophical framework around the idea of a third sex partner as someone emotionally inconsequential, then found Mike Burns through a Facebook matching game and slept with him in Stockholm. Afterward, you experienced profound dissociation and emotional distance, realizing that no external experience—travel, sex, novelty—can alter how you fundamentally process your own trauma and disconnection.