How not to write a thing so people will read it

I apologize if this post is a little scattered. I’m blaming the soap I bought that said eucalyptus and citrus but it was a lie. I smell like a Republican, like I’ll rub your dry labia for a minute or two then ask you to go down on me. (It’s called Huron. It was sealed so that I couldn’t smell it. And now I can smell nothing else.)

Smells bother me. I hate the smell of whatever this is, but not as much as I hate sandalwood. Sounds bother me. I can happily work through chatter in a coffee shop or TV in the next room or the same room. But jazz, I want to fight someone and I won’t know why until I’ve removed myself from the vicinity of jazz. Door slamming makes me think we’re about to fight. Not just door slamming. There’s a way people close a door that means I’m in danger. I’ve mentioned this before. It’s likely because someone used to close a door behind him like that—deliberate, no use for the door handle, why twist the knob when you mean to get my attention, scaring your target is half the fun. Metal on metal. Click.

This is the problem with trigger warnings. One of the problems. The main problem is trigger warning cause more anxiety than the content they’re meant to warn you off reading. The other problem is triggers aren’t what you think. Not that jazz is a trigger. I just hate jazz. Sandalwood and the door thing though, they’ll shut me down, right circumstances, or wrong, and I’m gone. Best circumstances I’m pissed off because I can’t be scared; pissed off is safer.

Our fears and hopes and sorrow are so goddamn personal and often entirely unique. How can you attach a label to the smell of too many people in one house or the smell of sandalwood or the sound of a door latch hitting the strike plate then slapping into place. How do you ask the world to stop wearing sandalwood when they think it smells warm or just use the goddamn door handle when it means nothing to them, unless you tell them, and maybe you don’t want any to announce these things to everyone you meet. You think writing it down will help. Not in my experience.

Anytime I give a talk, someone asks about what I tell and what I leave out. I’ve given a lot of answers because they—students or interviewers or friends or writers, they’re asking different things. Every answer I give is different and every one of them is true. I got asked on instagram recently in a comment on a post. But I don’t see how I’d fit much of anything into a reply.

I tell students that you don’t owe anyone every trauma. Students are very interested in writing trauma. So are memoir groups but I don’t talk to them and they don’t like me much because I say things about trigger warnings that students surprisingly find funny while very non-problematic women my age find heresy. In any case, the students have been on tiktok where trauma is all the rage, and they’ll eventually run into a memoir group online or a hashtag or however these come about. I feel like someone should warn them, the students I mean, that you don’t owe anyone your trauma. They need to know because there’s an entire goddamn industry ready to feed off them and spit them out, leave them with $200 and a year’s subscription.

You don’t even owe them the truth, but it works better if you tell it. Not the trauma, the truth of it. Not all the truth either.

As you can see I’m great at answering this question.

Maybe there’s another reason, in one sort of way. We make evil too special sometimes. We grow up watching out for the guy with the facemask and the knife in the bushes. When it turns out it’s just the guy who walked you home, the guy who smelled like sandalwood, with a dimple in his chin, you think, no. That wasn’t it. It couldn’t have been that. He didn’t even have a knife. Didn’t even really hurt. So why can’t I sleep anymore.

If the evil in the books and the movies is the guy breaking your teeth. You don’t notice when the guy who loves dogs tells you that your friends are trying to ruin the one good thing, him. And he’s good. He’s sweet. And he’s funny. He’s a hell of dancer. He just gets a little angry sometimes. Then he breaks your teeth.

And if the good, if the real good, if the good is butterflies and head over heals and a boombox in your driveway, maybe you don’t realize for a real long time that the good, the real good, snores sometimes, but their very presence calms you. And it feels boring. And it’s the goddamn best.