"… I had [a] boyfriend. He was an artist. We also wanted to get married. Everything was fine until this one thing happened. I came into his studio and heard him yelling into the phone: "You're lucky! You have no idea how lucky you are!" He's usually so calm, even phlegmatic, not a single exclamation point in his speech. And then this! So what is it?

Turns out his friend lives in a student dormitory and he looked into the next room and there's a girl hanging there. She strung herself up with some panty hose. He takes her down. And my boyfriend was just beside himself shivering: "You have no idea what he's seen! What he's just been through! He carried her in his arms - he touched her face. She had white foam on her lips. Maybe if we hurry we can make it." he didn’t mention the dead girl, and didn't feel sorry for her for a second. He just wanted to see it and remember it so he could draw it later on.

And I started remembering how he used to ask me what color the fire at the station was, and whether I'd seen the cats and dogs that had been shot, were they lying on the street/ were people crying? Did I see how they died? After that… I couldn't be with him anymore. I couldn't answer him…

[After a pause] I don't know if I'd want to meet with you again. I think you look at me the same way he did. Just observing me and remembering. Like there's an experiment going on. I can't rid myself of that feeling. I'll never rid myself of it."

But I remember the first time I had to recite something in there, written from a real memory, how the room went quiet and everyone looked at me with this disgusting pity mixed with awe, a reaction they didn't grant anybody else. I do not doubt the people in that room had lived their own pains, but standing out as the minority I in all immediate identifiers, I felt uncomfortable as if what I had just articulated to them was some exotic misery they delighted to partake in firsthand. I felt dirty.

The next session the topic veered to inspiration, and the workshop leader spoke with such a greed in her eyes, something about how 'exciting' it is to meet tragic people with tragic stories, how her mind mentally catalogues them for writing, how she hopes she doesn't scare them off, and I really did feel like vomiting.

A little later I read Ursula K. Le Guin's essay, Fact And/Or/Plus Fiction, informing me this was a catalogued phenomenon:

"…Writing workshops and programs all over the country now offer courses in “creative nonfiction.” The arts of scientific, historical, and biographical narrative are rarely if ever taught in such programs (or anywhere else). Autobiography, however, has been increasingly popular in the writing programs. It may be taught as journal writing or as therapy through self expression. When it has more literary goals, it is called creative nonfiction, personal essay, and memoir.

The writer of a memoir, like the responsible biographer, ethnographer, or journalist, used to describe what other people did and said, leaving what they may have felt and thought as implications to be drawn by the reader or as authorial speculation identified as such. The autobiographer limited her account to her own memory of how her uncle Fred looked as he ate the grommet, what she heard him say when he’d swallowed it, and what she thought about it. The only sensations and emotions she described were her own.

According to those who defend the use of fictional devices and elements in nonfiction, the memoirist is justified in telling us how, as he swallowed it, Fred vividly recalled the slightly oily taste of the first grommet he ever ate, fifty years ago in Indiana, and how bittersweet the memory was to him.

Many writers and readers of creative nonfiction hold that such ascription of inward thought or feeling, if it’s based on a knowledge of Fred’s character, is legitimate. It does no harm to Fred (who died in 1980 of a surfeit of grommets), and no harm to the reader, who after all will almost certainly know Fred only in and through the story, just as if he were a character in a novel.

But who is to certify the writer’s knowledge of her uncle’s character as accurate, unbiased, reliable? Possibly her aunt, but we’re not likely to have the chance to consult her aunt. The memoirist’s responsibility seems to me to be exactly that of the ethnographer: not to pretend to objectivity, but also not to pretend to be able to speak for anybody but oneself. To assign oneself the power to tell us what another person thought or felt is, to my mind, cooptation of a voice: an act of extreme disrespect. The reader who accepts the tactic colludes in the disrespect."

"…The notion that fictional characters are all portraits of actual people probably arises from natural vanity and paranoia, and is encouraged by the power fantasies of some fiction writers (you’re nothing to me but copy)."

To bring the point back to my job, well, it's exactly this relationship that causes me to fear even articulating to myself the painful parts of it. Every day I read these things and have to draft those facts in first person, then in third. I remember one of the first things my team lead taught me was: "Put yourself in the client's head." Now I feel stuck there even when I don't want to be. I feel like for some time, I went home with them all in my head, or my head back in the word documents.

I have people whose horrible recollections come back to me with every psychogeographical anchor (the beach, Arby's, Wendy's, the city an hour's drive from here). When I'm about to have sex, I have to be wary to banish the voice going 'Don't think about rape, don't think about sexual torture, don't think about how so and so happened to so and so in that document last week.' I don't want to even admit to myself at times that what I may read stays with me. I've tried lots of things: writing a few words about my feelings and ripping them up, saying prayers, taking a walk after every case, and none of these ritualizations really work. I don’t know what the solution to that really is.

I really want nothing more but to respect my clients, and to even acknowledge that what they share stays with me feels like I'm betraying them. So many of them, I stare at their pictures and wish I could meet them and tell them something inane like "You're so strong," inane even though I would mean it when I say it. So old a sentiment in response to pain, I only hear Cassandra's response to it each time I say it: "Only the unfortunate hear such praise."

I think I consider myself quite comfortable admitting all the miseries of the world, and perhaps that's what makes me good at my job. The other day I won my third core value award in a row at our quarterly company wide meeting. I've got three little mugs in a row on my desk, and three floppy certificates in a folder at home now. It's nice to be appreciated. It's nice to think this depressing disposition may aid itself to something good. It's nice to think my moral qualms about even my own thoughts may manifest themselves positively.

I've had to rewrite entire papers because of coworkers that have a reflex to paper over the horrible stuff or discuss it with the same casual attitude you'd describe a bad meal at a restaurant. Do they even know there's people on the other side of this!? Of course, my coworkers are not all like that though. I had one once who told me about how his mom once stood across a "real, honest to god, pedophile" in a court room once during jury duty. That someone just two years younger than me really made some mythic monster out of so common an evil left me a little aghast. I answered him honestly, "Well, they're not that uncommon. You've probably come across more than you know, given how common it is." And he looked at me as if I'd just told him that for the sake of shocking him, dismissing, or even teasing him.

But is it normal, I asked my husband tearfully the other day, to just spend all your time thinking about how down-to-the-bone evil this world is? That everything you touch, everything you see, every person you pass by was most likely touched by that evil? When I say evil I mean violence, not disaster or grief or generic suffering, but violence. It feels like every brick in this world was built with violence and set with malice. This world disgusts me. I feel now like I can't even say what I wanted to say when I set out to write this, because here I am once more caught in the muck of having to bear this disrespectful witness.

I wonder if this is good for me in the long run. I wonder how much more I can handle. I wonder how I can turn off my brain. I wonder how much this is affecting my psyche. I wonder if every story I've heard recollected will stay with me. I wonder how everybody else here copes with it? I wonder if it's OK to ask, or just weird. I wonder.

At night, I recited a message to every year of me before and thanked them all. I rewatched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind with my love. I opened the most lovely present, an ink pen that I hope will be my companian for a long long time. I talked to my brother who called right at midnight despite our timezones. I spent the day sleeping, went out for dimsum with my beloved, to pet the cats in the forest at the park near my home while we narrated our games and stories to one another, then out for a few rounds of Overwatch before we end our subscription at the gaming cafe we play at and never do again.

I have many questions in my heart that I hope to answer to myself through this year. I have many wishes that I will strive to fulfill. I have a need to life by my principles, and find out what that means to me. I have a compulsion to speak and make that has finally stirred after lying dormant for three years now in the blur of daily survival. I hope to never lose it again.

And a happy Eid, Nowruz, and spring equinox as well.

September was vivid, slow, and a flurry of change. Work was good, I studied a lot, and I finally got the clear from my doctor that the health issues I've been dealing with are (hopefully) FIXED! The final crown of this journey was moving out with my fiance from his mom's house - we've still got boxes all over, but it feels like the days have gotten longer ever since. To come back to a quiet home, cook and eat in peace, clean at your leisure, keep clutter out of the way, to go out without questions and come home whenever you feel like it.. These are luxuries I had a hard time imagining. I have never judged myself at the pace of other 20-somethings, because all my life I scarcely dares to hope for something like this.

September 2025

It's going to be a slow process making this neocities, but my goals for it are,

making a longer entry blog so i don't have to resort to tumblr (bc that website is pissing me off lately)

review books and films i read on here

share my art, writing, and projects eventually

August 2025