"Bedroom" by Emma (twitter). "A requiem for lost hours, unmade beds, and all the broken things I can never repair.". Anything starting out with the imagery of both one's bedroom and being unmade, you know you're likely to experience something intimate and understandably disorganized. The first poem blows away any thoughts of that personal aspect being something Emma will build up to. For me, it felt like really reading about the way I feel so disconnected from my own mind. I don't know exactly why focusing is the hardest thing in the world for me. It could be ADHD, autism, or the fact that both apply to me working together at the same time. All I know is that I never fully feel awake, and very little around me feels real. Emma's writing is similar. The perfect capture of the way living with neurodivergency constantly makes everything around you feel like it's 10x MORE of something no one else ever seems to get or talk about.

There's so much here that really digs deep and clearly into the reality now that comes with coming of age alongside the internet. In that it's always been a part of our lives and has informed our relationships with our bodies, our sexuality, with sex, with sexual assault . . . and the frequency we develop symptoms of trauma. Social media may be an amazing way to stay connected with other marginalized people, but nearly everyone I know has had a digital experience with being in an unhealthy dynamic with an adult as a minor or very young adult. People don't seem to realize how widespread that reality is, regardless of gender, and they don't seem to get that we're all growing up with some sort of sexual trauma one way or another. People always have been, but the way digital spaces enable this to happen and then also enable the development of poor coping mechanisms in response is such a common story among anyone my age or younger it's to be expected even if it's never spoken of.

Emma crafts poems that maybe aren't exploring that message specifically, but the theme and point is there all the way through. What a fucked up world we live in, and there's very little outlet for exactly what we're dealing with. WE still have a responsibility as survivors not to enact harm into the world around us. That's the story we don't get to tell. That we aren't always good, and we aren't always okay, and that we can do harm too and we shouldn't do that harm. People want to use trauma as an excuse for a lot of things, but at the same time traumatized people are given two options. To stick to the narrative of "all" victim's goodness and purity and sweetness, or to become a terrible horrible person. We aren't given middle grounds or constructive options to help with recovery. Only the survivors who play into the "soft and cute" roles get rewarded and always believed. What I appreciate more than anything about this chapbook is the fact that it talks frankly about the ways in which trauma can make you a fucked up person and that you won't be perfect but you can and should try to not harm others. The world has so much work to do before it stops these cycles for perpetuating for eternity. Emma is telling the stories people don't let people tell. That there is more than a black and white world of bad and good, but that there is always responsibility even in nuance. It's heartbreaking to think about the way trauma changes people, but there is always time for us. Time for us to grow up into surviving responsible imperfect adults.

"i. let’s start here: age, sex, location. I don’t remember how we got from there there as curiosity there as in snuck moments there as in before I am trying to make this something

v. to be autistic is to be a puppeteer of your own body only able to control it from an imprecise heavens."

[CW // sex, rape, trauma, sexual assault, therapy, addiction, recovery]