This is an essay about trauma-informed writing and desire — about what it means to spend your days reading shame in strangers’ voices, and your nights trying to write fictional desire without shame at all. It comes from the overlap of three things I carry: frontline eligibility work, a psychology background, and a life writing queer erotic fiction. The Voice on the Line She called at 9:14 on a Tuesday, and I could hear she’d…
The woman on the line told me it was fine. Twice. The first time when I explained the packet needed to come back because the signature landed in the wrong box — a box nobody had told her client to skip. The second time when I said the backlog meant another two weeks before anyone could even look at the resubmission. Both times, the same bright, fast of course, I completely understand, thank you so much for explaining that — pitched a half-step too high, no pause before it arrived. The fawn response, if you know how to listen for it. I don’t sit across from clients anymore. I work the phones now, authorized representatives only — discharge planners, facility business office staff, the people hospitals and nursing homes designate to deal with Medicaid eligibility so the person in the bed doesn’t have to. But I still know that voice when I hear it. It isn’t agreement. It’s someone doing math in real time: is it safer to push back here, or to be easy.
There’s a box in the corner of our new place with KITCHEN written on it in my handwriting. I’ve walked past it so many times it’s turned into furniture. Gillian has her own version, a stack of her own, and we’ve settled into a quiet agreement not to bring it up. We moved this fall on a timeline so tight the packing didn’t happen so much as get survived. I’d put it off for weeks,…
Every day, I sit across from human crisis and translate it into eligibility categories. The clipboard demands clean data—verified income limits, confirmed household compositions, calculated benefit determinations—while a messy, bleeding narrative spills out just beyond its edges. I’ve written before about the woman who told me she was sleeping outside as an aside, mid-sentence, on her way back to asking about verification — there was no box on the form for the thing she was…
Fifteen Minutes and a Headset: Why People Fall Apart With Strangers She was doing fine until she wasn’t. That’s how it usually goes. The call opens with the recitation — the dates, the last paycheck, the hours cut, the number that has to be repeated twice because the connection is bad or because saying it out loud is harder the second time. People come to these calls prepared. They have the documents in front of…
Somewhere in the middle of explaining why she couldn’t get that letter, she told me she was sleeping outside. She didn’t stop to let it land. She said it the way you’d mention a bus route, as context for why the mail was a problem, and then she went right back to asking about the verification. There is no box on the form for what she told me. That’s the part I keep turning over. People don’t lead with the real problem. They lead with the version of it that the room can receive.
A look inside the gap between a system’s “noncompliant” ledger and the reality of executive function under the chronic stress of poverty—and how writing combats compassion fatigue.
On trauma-informed care, administrative burden, and writing trauma survivors realistically — from behind an eligibility desk. A woman called on a Tuesday because her son’s dental coverage had closed. The appointment was in two days. Somewhere between the last review and this one, a form hadn’t been returned, a deadline had quietly passed, and a switch had flipped from open to closed — no malice in it, just the mechanics of a system doing exactly…
A Craft Guide to Nervous System Safety on the Page A man is standing at my counter, and his voice has climbed an octave in the last ninety seconds. I don’t raise mine to match him. I slow down. I drop half a register. I say his name once, quietly, and wait. Somewhere around the fourth exchange, his shoulders come down an inch. That’s co-regulation: one nervous system lending its steadiness to another until the…
What The Form Doesn’t Ask Yesterday I read a woman’s handwriting where I was expecting a job history. The field asked what work she’d done in the last thirty days. What she wrote instead was one line: sleeping on the streets. That’s not what the box was for. Nothing on that form was built to hold it. She wrote it anyway, because it was true, and because somewhere underneath all the boxes was a person…
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