Each page starts the same way with “Client name,” and this is followed by uniform boxes, and lines with questions. Everything looks so organized. And of course there is my list. My new therapist has me writing about what are called “stuck points.” The beliefs I have that keep me in the grips of PTSD. I am in week 4 now and my assignment for this week is to test myself on my own stuck points. My list is long. It reads a bit like lessons learned from a true crime series. My number one stuck point is “Men cannot be trusted,” followed by “I will never be truly safe.” Early on in the process I asked my therapist, Well, what do I do if my belief is accurate? She responded with a question of her own, What do you mean? Is there no man that you can trust? Perhaps, I think tentatively. Perhaps that is what I mean. But what if it is true that men cannot be trusted? And I am lulled into giving up that belief. What will that do to my second stuck point – that I will never be truly safe? And I wonder, am I really stuck? Or just keenly aware of the reality I live in?

Setting aside these questions, I endeavor to complete my assignment. As soon as I start typing into the boxes, the formatting of everything changes and the neat page becomes a disjointed and jumbled mess. I cannot tolerate the level of visual chaos on the page and so I abandon it and start a new document, adding my list of “stuck points” to the top of it. I set about the task of testing my stuck points. Interrogating them even. For example, I am to ask myself what is the evidence for or against each of my stuck points, and then whether they are based on habit or facts. I look through my growing list of stuck points. Because I must engage in this work every day, my list keeps getting longer. When there is a new “activating event” that causes me to remember one of my traumas, I am to add it to the list, write about my beliefs about it, and then the consequences in terms of how it makes me feel.

Every time I look at my list I see myself shrinking. Last week’s new addition was “I am blamed for things that are done to me.” But of course this stuck point is not new, it is just a new addition to this list. I wonder how it is that it did not make it onto the original version of the list, given that I’ve spent the last several years deeply focused on the stories of sexual assault survivors and the ways we are often blamed for what has happened to us. What has been done to us. Which we are not to blame for. Yesterday I was talking with a woman who told me that for many years she thought that it was her fault that she was gang raped in college. Why? Because she was drunk. As if being drunk could ever justify or excuse gang rape, or if it could ever be an appropriate punishment for being drunk. It happened in the 1970s, when no one talked about these things. She knew them. They were her friends. She trusted them. They videotaped it, too. So much for the sexual revolution.

But I digress.

I dutifully examine my stuck points list and ask myself what the evidence is in support of or against them, returning again to consider whether they are based on habits or facts. I’m certain that I am going to fail at this therapy. First of all, I didn’t identify a single stuck point on the very long list of sample stuck points I was given as a guide. Not one of them actually resonated with me. No, I don’t think I am to blame for what has happened to me. Or that bad things should happen to me. Or that I’d be better off dead. My stuck points are different. The reality is that I am painfully aware of the fact that I live in a culture where violence against women is widespread and pervasive, and yet is treated as somehow normative and inevitable. Hence: I am always at risk of violence at the hands of men. My therapist tried explaining to me that I need to assess my stuck points for words that are exaggerated or extreme, because these are warning signs that they cannot be “trusted.” I linger on “always.” Ask myself, always? What if I take out “always”? I decide to leave it in. I am also charged with assessing whether I am relying on dependable sources for my stuck points. What is the evidence, and is it credible?

I am relieved to get a break from this work when I receive a call from a friend in California. She tells me that she saw a woman on TikTok explaining that the California wildfires were actually started by the government because they wanted that land back to create some kind of dystopian city. She seems convinced this could be true, “I can send you a link - she’s even got the paperwork that proves it.” My friend is there in LA, seeing what is happening, watching the city burn all around her. I tell her that I heard a celebrity podcaster posted a video online that he claims shows a group of men starting a fire in an act of arson. He was criticized because it did not actually show the men starting the fire, though they could clearly be seen standing by casually watching it spread. It is getting late. I tell her I need to get back to my writing. We get off the call and I return to my assignment. Am I relying on dependable sources? There is the fact of my memory. My mind. History. Habits. Experiences. Facts. Truth. I am a philosopher, after all. What is the evidence? My mind goes to Wittgenstein. Logic. Math. War. I wonder if he had PTSD after he returned from the war. That is when he gave up on grounding truth in math and turned instead to culture and language to explore reality. Wittgenstein asked how we can ever really know what another is feeling. If we can ever really know that. Is it even possible? He invites us to contemplate questions: Does it feel like this? How can we ever know what another’s experience of this is like? And then there was Aristotle who taught that virtue is a matter of habit. That we are what we repeatedly do. And I wonder if this counts as evidence: A writer is someone who writes.

I show up to my therapy session with an incomplete assignment. Me, the overachiever who in school would not give up until my work was perfect. I tell my therapist not only that I haven't completed the work, but that the document formatting was off and so I abandoned it. She smiles at me and says Thank you for keeping an open mind. And I have to admit that over the course of the last several weeks my mind is opening to all kinds of things. Like the other day when I woke up at 3:30am and realized that part of my “problem” is that I have to come to terms with the reality that I will never actually be able to know everything about my own life. Even the times when I was there and should in fact have been able to know what was happening. Should have had access to all available information. I give my therapist a whole week’s worth of work I did that culminated in this realization. It started with my being born after my parents’ almost 2 year old died. My sister who I never met but whose little life and horrible death cast a long shadow over my own. All of the dozens of poems I have written about what it feels like to replace a dead girl. How it feels like every day I go back into that water, in the lake where as a girl I swam and where she had died. The hundreds of times my parents allowed the revolting old priest to kiss their daughters on the lips. Every time I would brace myself and attempt to contort my head to avoid his spittle-ridden lips, but somehow fail. Predators know their prey. And then there was the night I was assaulted in my sleep in Malibu in 1987. I was at a party where they were blasting the lyrics “How can we sleep while our beds are burning?” And I think of how LA is burning right now. And of course the night the creeper who I somehow sensed had been stalking and hunting me finally tried to get inside our home in May of 2018. My husband was out of the country on business, and I was at home alone with our son. I had just started planting the garden. The daffodils were blooming. And then it was as if everything suddenly went black all at once. And all of those nights when my husband was not with me. And that man was studying me. Taking his time. Getting to know my dog. Men cannot be trusted. Sleeping is dangerous. Being beautiful is dangerous. Bad things happen at night.

But we start this session with a daytime event. A new event from when I went shopping at Best Buy. Which on the face of it seems innocuous enough. The young woman at the cash register was alone and the line was growing and meanwhile there were a bunch of employees working in the adjacent line for returns. I was next in line and asked the girl if she wanted to call for additional help. There was a man in line right behind me. And I could almost feel the moist heat of his enraged breath on the back of my neck as he said “You need to shut the fuck up, bitch. That’s right. Shut the fuck up and wait your turn. No one cares about you. Shut the fuck up and don’t you dare move.” And I turned and saw that he was smiling. Looking right at me and smiling and continuing to hurl profanities at me. I ran over to the manager who refused to help me and said he could not call the police - that I needed to do that if I felt threatened. As if this was merely something I was “feeling.” I watched as the young women working there seemed to be both frozen in place with fear and poised to run. Eyes darting around. I called my husband, the one man I can trust. I was terrified and crying, crouched down on the dirty salt stained carpet at the entryway. The guy thought I was calling the police and left the line to go to the back of the store. But I didn’t call the police. I do not trust the police. Not after they threatened to arrest me when they claimed I was lying about the attempted break in. Even though I had it on camera. And the cameras kept rolling on them when they told my husband they thought I was lying. These big men with guns. Accusing me, the victim of an attempted home invasion, with making this up. I am trembling and terrified. They decide to call for an emergency psychiatric evaluation, as if I am hysterical. Exaggerating, rather than responding appropriately to what has happened. Hence: The police cannot be trusted. Back to Best Buy, though. Because this particular event wasn’t just about this man with his rage and the way in which he unleashed it on me in public, unprovoked. What I wrote about for the assignment was how when I told my friend about it, her response was, I wonder why so many bad things happen to you? As if I had somehow brought it on myself or was to blame. My therapist gently interrupted me and said, I’m afraid I may have said that same thing to you last week, and then she apologized. And so now we are getting somewhere. But I am still trying to figure out how to answer the new set of questions of whether my stuck points are only just a part of the story.

And the thing is that I know I’m going to get it all wrong because the very first thing I thought about when I started thinking about whether my stuck points are based on habits or facts is that they seem to be factually accurate and evidence based to me and that they are also based on habits: the habits of men, not my own habits. My own habits are primarily based on responding to men’s habits. And I am not alone in this. I am always careful about when and where I run, never using both headphones for music. Always making sure I have my dog. I think about the research paper I read last week that found sexual violence against women often happens in locations like trails or parks, which are considered high-risk areas for women, and that ~72% of women alter their routines to avoid outdoor violence. That’s right: outdoor spaces are considered high risk for women. But that’s not all. So is the home. ~55% of sexual assaults happen in or near the victim’s home, with 48% of victims having been asleep or engaged in another activity when the assault occurred. Sleep is dangerous. Men cannot be trusted. I will never be truly safe. And then I feel I am in a spiral that is not part of the assignment. Plus, what if I don’t even want to give up my beliefs? What if my big words aren’t exaggerations? Look at the data. And then I get to the next question - in what ways are my stuck points based on feelings rather than facts? And here we go with “feelings” again. Didn’t I spend years of my life writing a dissertation about how feelings are essential to informing rational decision making and shouldn’t be dismissed as irrational or less than? I am losing faith that this will work for me at all. And yet the assessments I’m given every week show my PTSD scores steadily going down. This week I dipped below the clinical threshold for the first time. Still, my fear of men remains unchanged. So maybe I will not have to give up my beliefs altogether, but they will somehow loosen their grip on me through this process. Last night I dragged a few of the heavy boxes of my newly published books of survivors’ stories to block the inside of the front door before heading to bed, my German Shepherd at my side. In the event that someone tries to break it, it might buy me some time.

I return again to my desk, which is not a desk at all but the dining room table, now covered in my own books with pages of notes. This morning the snow is falling and my tea bag fortune urges me to maintain optimism: “We can always start again.” I wonder why it is that I keep reading these tiny chits on the other end of my green tea. A few months ago I ran out of the brand that has the fortunes, and I realized that I missed them being part of my morning routine. Not that I believe them. Not necessarily. But still. They are not nothing. I return again to my assignment. Today I will reflect on whether my thoughts - not my feelings, but my thoughts about the world - are realistic or helpful. I wonder who designed this program. I decide to research that instead. For now, anyway. The first thing I hit on is that the lead author is identified by Google search results as a “public figure.” I dig deeper. She has a Ph.D. and is a highly accomplished and innovative clinician and researcher who is professor at one of the little 11 universities. (I pause to wonder what algorithm categorizes someone as a “public figure” rather than a “professor.” Like the podcaster who is always reminding everyone that he is a “professor” at an Ivy League medical school. Why is she identified as a public figure? And does that - by extension - render him a mere podcaster?) The therapeutic methodology she developed was specifically designed for veterans and sexual assault survivors. She has been interviewed on This American Life, one of my favorite radio programs turned podcast. I decide to listen to it later. The cognitive processing therapy is supposed to be done in 10-12 weeks. I feel like I could spend a month on this week’s work alone. I wonder if I can ask my therapist for an extension. I go back to assessing whether my thoughts are realistic or helpful. I decide to argue with myself about what it would mean for them to be helpful. Does it count as helpful if they allow me to be aware of just how dangerous the world is for women and girls? I mean, it’s helpful to know the truth, right? I consider adding a new stuck point to my list, but then I remember that “facts” don’t count as stuck points. Neither do behaviors, feelings, moral statements, or questions. They must be thoughts about these things. My thoughts. I am distracted by a black squirrel running across the top of the fence. I want to send my therapist the book of poems I am writing about grief and loss and ask her whether any of the poems might count towards my homework. One of them is about a black squirrel with its tiny paws folded together as if in prayer. I think about the 10-speed bike that I won for an essay contest in grade school. It was so big that I couldn’t even ride it. This feels like that to me. And I need to make it all happen in the next 8 weeks. I consider whether planning a celebration at the end of the 12 weeks might be helpful, and realize that the timing will coincide with my birthday.

I return again to my list. I realize that there is nothing about my dead sisters on it. Nothing. I think about my poem “Wrong Girl.” About how watching my sister slowly die of cancer felt like yet another lost girl. And me, strung in between the dead sister I never knew and the one who I loved and was perfect. Unlike me. I feel like a lone sparrow on a clothesline in winter. And the final lines in “Wrong Girl,” about how the cancer got the wrong girl. That is how my poems ends. With me wanting to scream out wrong girl, the cancer got the wrong girl. I remember borrowing her cashmere sweaters when I was old enough to wear her size and then returning them reeking of cigarette smoke, as if she wouldn’t notice. Of course she did. How is it that she is the one who died and I am still alive? And that stupid cotton shirt I bought because it was so cold when I stayed with her in the ICU. How is that shirt still hanging in my closet, but my sister no longer exists? I return again to my list and add: Sometimes, I think I do not deserve to be alive. I am grateful that I think I got this one right, because it is a thought, not a fact. And I was careful to make sure it did not have exaggerated language, hence the “sometimes.” But there it is on the list. I have placed it on the top of the list. At the beginning. As if it might be the start of a poem.

And so it is of course with words that I begin to craft a path back to me. While it feels jagged and filled with switchbacks, I will keep trying. Because I do not believe that I would be better off dead, even if it is true that I sometimes wonder why and how it is that I am alive. That I am still alive. Plus, the days are getting longer now, and there will be more light. And I know that I want to be in the light. To bask in it even. I set aside my newly revised list with all of its questions. Looking out the window, I see that it is coming on sunset. I prepare to go into the forest to run out among the trees. It is the place where my sorrows fade, and grief loosens its grip. Knowing as I do that in those moments of moving almost effortlessly to the rhythm of my breath, I will return again back into my own body.