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,…
What the Job Puts Back: Vicarious Resilience in Frontline Social Work A woman calls in on a Tuesday because her lights are about to be cut off, and I can hear a kid in the background asking her something, and she puts her hand over the phone so I won’t hear how she answers him. She’s three days from a shutoff notice, she’s already burned every extension the utility company will give her, and she…
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…
Writing the Quiet Boundary The tightness started in my throat, a knot of unspoken words that made every breath feel just a little too shallow. I was sitting at my desk today, surrounded by the physical chaos of packing up our lives into cardboard boxes, when I realized the heaviest thing I was carrying couldn’t be taped up and moved. For five years, I have lived in a state of suspended animation, wondering if I…
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…
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