My mom and I email a lot, since she is far away and at work all day. I wrote to her that I went to a workshop on PTSD yesterday, that I was miserable and my head was spinning the whole time and I could not listen. She didn't respond to this part of my email at all. And it is just like being six and twelve and twenty and not being listened to all over again. My mom's own way of dealing with trauma has created such a gap in understanding that I don't know whether I can ever be not invisible with her, if I am so many of the things that she will not look at in herself, if our heads are spinning and spinning memory out of us and we can't listen.

I know this but her silences loom larger and larger and I fill them with all the things I imagine she wants to say, that I should just get over it, that nothing happened, that I'm just being lazy, that I'm acting crazy, that I should be spending my time and money on getting out of debt instead, that I don't deserve, that I can't afford, good health and good things.

I asked, in group yesterday, if self-blame helps us reclaim some belief that we are in control of things then how can we give up self-blame without losing whatever sense of safety and security we've built up. This is what we're all trying to figure out, she said. But speaking that did not help, did not feel safe, shaking and crying in front of others, even the most understanding of others. It did not feel safe to use my voice for hours. I could not speak, could not listen, could not feel the snow crunching under my feet because I learned a long time ago that this is how to survive, in a daze, waiting to come back to myself.

The news has become too close to me. There are stories that stay with me for days. I cried and cried on Monday over the video of Oscar Grant. I have been waiting for some way to make sense of this, for someone on the side of those at fault to come out from hiding and say that this was a horrible mistake, for someone in a mainstream position of power to stand up and demand accountability, for some authoritative declaration simply that this was wrong, to read or hear about this story somewhere besides in blogs, but then I am not watching the news much and don't know what the coverage has been like. It occurs to me that I am more vulnerable, more open to people I have never met and will never know than I am to the people who are close to me, sometimes. I haven't known what to write about this, just finally can only say that this story has weighed on me this week, though I've done nothing, continue to do nothing, though I know there are things I can do now, but all I can seem to think about is the long run and however I will find some way, outside of academics, to lessen all the unnecessary violences we daily undergo, some small way to matter.