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What’s keeping me writing this week, #2

Yes! I have indeed been writing! And Taylor Swift is involved. Sort of. Go ahead; read about it.
New habit?! What’s keeping me writing this week.
I am the worst habit-former in the world.
My longest streak on the latest habits-and-routines app I am using (Fabulous is really fabulous) is a whopping TWO DAYS.
(And that’s not two days of anything ambitious; that’s two days of waking, drinking water, taking pills, and clicking in the app that I did so. Which, for the record, simply means touching with one finger the watch that’s on my wrist, which pings every morning asking me if I’d like to log that “routine” as completed.)
So, when I titled this list over at my Substack “What’s keeping me writing this week #1” I did not promise anything about when you might see #2.
Depends if I keep writing.

Fear of the Unknown (Stories I thought I Knew)
Happy to share this piece from over at my Substack. It’s part of what I think will be a new book, memoir-ish and full of my shitshow trauma learning over the last few years.
And, yes, this means I am writing again! Embarrassing stories from middle school are a great way to rip off the bandaid…
What it felt like to face the man who sexually abused me in court
It felt strong. It felt brave. It felt powerful.
It also felt sad. Unexpectedly, desolately sad.
I’ve always said “When I have an emotion, I’m usually last to know.” That’s not really true of me anymore, but for years I was always reacting to Big Feelings but almost never knowing which feelings, or why.
I’m sure the reasons are as mixed as any other complex human thing… autism, toughness, pride, and shame are a few… but “Coach Mike” Spiller was the biggest reason to be sure. When you’re a kid, adults are supposed to be trustworthy and take care of you, and when they don’t, it’s a sick spiral from there to complete self-alienation. From then on, I learned to ignore my feelings, no matter how big, and especially the bad ones. Those hurt!
Feelings, I learned, were confusing. Feelings would take you places you didn’t want to go. Feelings upset other people. They made people not like you, or they made you vulnerable to other people too, or both. What’s more, I learned from Coach Mike, feelings are not to be trusted. In fact, if feelings are unreliable, why not just cut them off altogether?
Here I stood, forty years later, in a courtroom, directly in front of this person who changed the course of my life. To his sad-eyed yet steely face and to the faces of strangers in the courtroom, I explained right out loud– in public and in detail!– exactly how his actions affected my life.
Having spent most of the years since his crime telling myself that it hadn’t really affected me much at all, this was all-new material. I stood there and listed problem after problem.
My personal record of fuckups and long-ways-around.
A CV of failures.
My litany of lament.
I stood and read this aloud, less than twenty feet away from this old man in prison stripes and a brand-new cheap haircut. This man who told little me I was special (the words I still most long to hear) when he really meant I was an object he would soon be using.
I’m a professor, and in my years teaching writing, I’ve learned the power of reading your writing aloud. I have students do this all the time. There’s nothing like it. This magic thing can happen when you read, audibly and straight from the page, something that you have written. When you hear your words aloud in your own embodied voice, they sound different than they did in your mind’s voice. They’re your words, written by you, and yet hearing yourself read them makes them “other” somehow. Reading your own writing aloud makes you be an audience-you along with the author-you. What’s extra weird about this is that author-you knows things that audience-you does not. Eerily, you then can hear yourself saying things to yourself that feel like new information; you realize things about your topic that you didn’t understand until you wrote them. To yourself.
Last week in the Kendall County courthouse, I heard myself saying words that I had tried so hard for so long to pretend were untrue. I heard myself counting all at once the total price, costs I have long known about and talked about but never had quite laid out in one itemized bill.
I heard myself say “I have been profoundly harmed.” That “life has been harder than it should have been.” And that I would have liked to know who I would have grown up to become otherwise.
I love me, but damn, I would have liked to know that person. And I never will. I am sad about that.
[Here’s a short recap of the day from KHOU Houston. And here’s other media from court and from before that.]
Convicted. At last. For now.
Yesterday I and a few other people abused by my childhood coach saw him sentenced to prison in Texas.
Ricardo Delgado’s story in the San Antonio Express-News here.
Zachary Taylor Wright’s story in MySA here.
I gave an impact statement, right to his face, and will need some time to know exactly how I feel about it… except proud. The proud part is easy.
Also, KENS-5 put a tired, frowny and wrinkled me on its 10pm broadcast:
Writing hangover
I have a writing hangover. It’s that feeling I get when there’s been something I wanted to write, or needed to write, and haven’t been able to, and then I finally do. It felt SO good to complete and send it off, but MAN I feel hung over. Do you get writing hangovers?
I do, especially with big and important pieces of writing. Some pieces of writing really fight to stay unwritten. At least mine do.
Maybe this happens because I’m swamped with life maintenance activities, which I am terrible at and get overwhelmed by, so even sitting to write at all is hard. Maybe it’s because I am distracted, distractible. Really distractible. I distract myself from most of my ideas by having more ideas! And while I haven’t finished the important thing, I also want to dive into the new thing, and sometimes I do. This means that for every big-ish piece of writing I complete, I have usually started at least three other pieces along the way. (How do people sometimes find themselves without ideas? This has never happened to me.) Or, even more frustratingly, even when I am strong and responsible and stop myself—dodge another rabbit hole!—I still am basically fried now by the interruption anyway. What kind of victory is it if fighting for it renders me unable to enjoy the spoils?
So that was happening, has been happening, much more than usual for the last couple of months. During the past two months, I have been needing to write the “victim impact statement” I will give in court next Thursday at the sentencing hearing of the person who sexually abused me in childhood. (More on that soon!) It was hard to write, so very hard. Of course it would be—what one statement could ever summarize the effect of any one event, a traumatic event in this case, especially forty years after it happened? It has had lots of time to stew. Or for a less yummy metaphor, it has been festering and oozing for four decades, its putrescence seeping and spreading along all my inner cracks and crannies. While regular cleaning and occasional blasts of strong disinfectant can do a lot, there’s still a real buildup after forty years.
So the statement was hard to write, and I kept writing parts of it in my head and on paper and in computers, rehearsing it and reframing it. While I was doing this, of course time outside of the writing continued to elapse, and life went right on life-ing. So, while I was not-writing the statement I was also returning to work, caring for children, handling medical needs for multiple people, fighting insurance companies, cooking, cleaning, dealing with money, making appointments, going to meetings, filling out forms, doing all my side gigs, home repairing… I know that only some of these things are unusually taxing for most people. For me, even getting the mail, opening it, and dealing with anything needed within it can sometimes take me a week—and all the while, more mail comes every day. My whole life feels like that now.
But now I have written it!! It exists! I have written it and it exists, and I have sent it to the DA’s office, and I shall read it in court. After sending it I shut my laptop, greeted my son who was just getting off the school bus, and immediately set out to buy a disco ball and mount it on a pole (long story), purchase food from a drive-through against my better judgment (received all the wrong food), contend with boss-level traffic and parking issues (these are of the devil!) and delivered my son to a parade float. And had a full-on meltdown which I spilled right onto a loved one. And watched a three-hour parade and was literally pelted by three pounds of candy. And ate candy.
And this is why today I have a hangover, without drinking or drugs or anything. It is in fact a writing hangover.
(but hey! I am writing!)
Suppose it’s a Saturday
It’s April Fools Day, and I can’t take a joke. Like, at all. Every time I’ve been fooled or pranked or tricked, the way I feel is not amused, but ashamed. It feels like everyone set against me, like I‘ve brought shame upon myself by falling for it. I know, party pooper, right? I blame long-undiagnosed autism and the aftershocks of trauma…. But other than that, I’m super fun!
No joke, I can have fun, but often when I’m doing it, I feel bad for not doing some other thing I should be doing. And I also spend a lot of time doing neither what I think I should be doing NOR what I want to do, but anxiously hovering between them, or rediscovering emails I forgot about with things that I was told to do or promised to do but have not done. So, not as fun as I could be.
Today was different. Better! It is possible that I am actually learning how better to do being human than I have done before. It was a very good Saturday, even though all my problems are still problems and all my things I’m behind on are still things.
And it’s day one of Verselove. A poem a day, or some days, all April. Here is my poem today. May you have a day like this sometime. Or even every day.

Prof. Whitney Goes to Austin
What a day of wonder. I’m in Austin, TX, Texas being my homeland and site of a whole lot of memories of all colors and temperatures.
Today I tagged along with a coalition of survivors of child sexual abuse representing several different advocacy organizations as well as themselves. We were there to educate legislators and their staff about SOL reform bills making their way through votes that would either help or further hinder folks like me to get any kind of justice AND to expose the abusers and the organizations in which they hide.
And lots of press! These today and more tomorrow. Whew!
(And Austin and music and tacos and bats and true love. A long, deep, great day.)
Here you go! Will edit/ update later on, so please forgive these messy and unhidden links-
Here’s what should be a free link to Houston Chronicle article: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/politics/texas/article/texas-capitol-survivors-child-sexual-abuse-17854764.php?utm_source=marketing&utm_medium=copy-url-link&utm_campaign=article-share&hash=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuaG91c3RvbmNocm9uaWNsZS5jb20vcG9saXRpY3MvdGV4YXMvYXJ0aWNsZS90ZXhhcy1jYXBpdG9sLXN1cnZpdm9ycy1jaGlsZC1zZXh1YWwtYWJ1c2UtMTc4NTQ3NjQucGhw&time=MTY3OTU0MzU1MzY1OQ==&rid=YzkxZGQzM2ItYjY4OC00NzIwLTg4ZDItNjFjN2VkZjFkOWZh&sharecount=Mg==
And also CBS Austin https://cbsaustin.com/news/local/sexual-abuse-survivors-advocate-outside-texas-capitol-for-statute-of-limitations-reform
And also Fox 4 in DFW https://www.fox7austin.com/news/survivors-protest-texas-bill-child-sex-abuse-statute-limitations-austin-capitol
And Fox 7 Austin https://www.fox7austin.com/news/survivors-protest-texas-bill-child-sex-abuse-statute-limitations-austin-capitol