In early 2014, I sat in my still completely unfurnished apartment, working from the spare bedroom that I’d designated as my office. It overlooked the complex’s parking lot, where I’d often see my next door neighbors, a middle-aged couple, coming and going. The wife, who stayed home most of the day, liked to play music and it traveled through our shared wall.

Any time the music played, as quiet as it was, I’d lose my ability to focus on anything, outraged by what felt like a flagrant violation of my boundaries. Even when the music wasn’t playing, I was scanning the room for the threat of it, wondering if every random noise was the beginning of hours of music. To complain about it, I knew, would make me look crazy no matter how I presented it, so I would just quietly suffer, not fully able to relax in my own apartment, not having a clue why, that nothing about reacting this way was normal.

I was angry. Friends would say, “That’s apartment living, though,” as if apartment living wasn’t my only option: I had a sustainable income to buy a house. I couldn’t. My dad had destroyed my credit committing financial fraud against me, something that took me me several years to resolve, and in 2014 I was still paying the emotional interest on that crime, barely qualifying to even rent a place. I knew my safety needs were disproportionately larger than other people’s… but I had no way to help myself there. The anger felt warranted. It was just pointed at the wrong person.

Many years later, I’d watch a documentary, The Perfect Neighbor, about a woman who behaved very much like I did in 2014. Susan Lorincz shot her neighbor Ajike Owen from inside of her own home after a series of escalations around Owen’s children noisily playing in the space next to her yard. Lorincz repeatedly called the police, who tried to de-escalate the situation, telling the children that they were not doing anything wrong, but maybe to stay away from the crazy lady anyway.

A final escalation brought Owen right to Lorincz’s front door, where she shot her through the door. Lorincz was charged with manslaughter and her attorney counseled the defense on a “stand your ground” angle that was not well-received by the jury.

The documentary, centered around police body cam footage captured before and after Owen’s death, includes commentary from police and neighbors who described Lorincz as a crazy, racist, cold-hearted liar. In one shot, Lorincz tried to communicate her awareness of her intensity and ascribed it to a history of severe trauma. The officer walked away, muttering, “Fucking psycho.” It’s heavily implied that the audience is supposed to agree with that assessment. Most viewers don’t have PTSD, will never know what it is like to be triggered to the point where even a child’s laughter feels disturbing, to not understand that being reminded of the past is not the same as living in it, to intellectually know that it is weird to have such a reaction, to feel the deep embarrassing shame of not understanding any of it, to feel like a villain without the intentions of a villain.

I had to turn the documentary off halfway through, when the father of Owen’s children delivered the news that their mom would not come home. I was appalled that the police stayed in the room, recording it, witnessing it even, not giving this man the privacy needed for his kids’ wellbeing.

But underneath that was something harsher: If I am like this woman and my trauma harms others around me, albeit way less violently, what aftermath am I failing to see? How many people have I made cry and not stuck around to even see? Have I not been safe enough for those people to cry in front of me? That felt nauseating to piece together suddenly, at 41, sobering to revisit all of my memories, recontextualizing them with that new understanding.

The memories that hurt the most were recent ones involving Joel. After my mom died, I felt a tremendous urgency to process my PTSD, knowing there was no other option if I ever wanted to feel safety, love, or happiness ever again. Her autopsy indicated multiple causes of death, “multiple organ failure” being the primary, but I knew the truth: she died at age 63, no longer able to survive a lifetime of heartbreak. I could feel the ache of a similar death for myself written somewhere already in pencil. I freaked out, aggressively needing to change course.

But decades of trauma don’t heal neatly. The memories spilled all over the floors of our house. I started having extremely fragmented flashbacks of childhood sexual abuse and entire summers I had been left alone by myself with only a freezer of microwave burritos and tear-stained notebooks that I poured my heart into in the absence of love and support.

One day, nearly a year after my mom’s death, I messaged Joel, letting him know that I was on my way home from a massage appointment where I’d had a panic attack. Matt, my favorite LMT of ten years, was working on my forearm when I felt spasms that reminded me of pushing someone away violently. I laid in place silently, hesitant of when it was time to finally speak up and ask Matt to stop for a moment. I was afraid to admit that I was having a panic attack during a massage, worried it would reveal just how weird I was. Matt was one of the kindest, most gentle people I knew, though, and it made no sense.

I laid there longer, dreading knowing that whatever that was, I was about to be flooded with more of it. I suddenly remembered a time when I was eleven years old, home alone, laying in the back yard in the grass staring at bruises on the flanks of my abdomen, asking myself, “When will these go away and how much longer do I have to hide them?” I had remembered, during the massage, the feeling of being violently attacked but had no narrative memory of who did it or why. I waited until I was home to tell Joel this, just warned him that I was coming and was still shaky.

He sat across from me at our dining room table just staring at me wordlessly. He didn’t understand anything about it. The memories were split-second fragments. Sensory details, a feeling of dread. They’re details I’ve always known… and yet they were things I had also somehow forgot for a very long time. I never talked to anyone about these things… and because of that, the memories have no words. The memories are linked together not by time, but by clusters of patterns of precise emotions I felt when each thing happened.

It was a lot to understand and I didn’t want to look at the unfairness of it all: That most people will not be able to handle the weight of the things I’ve lived through. That there’s going to be a significant part of healing from trauma that is going to be endured alone and I have to be prepared for that.

Joel hadn’t consented to emotionally witnessing any of this, but I couldn’t seem to control the way it was spilling out of me and I was upset with him for not holding me through it in the exact way that I needed, nor could I even directly communicate to him what I needed, because I didn’t know. It wasn’t that he didn’t care—he very much did—but the volume of my trauma was louder than his ears could handle.

The trauma was so loud, it seeped into my work as well. My then-boss and I had a precarious professional relationship that lacked clear containment. I kept trying to manage the situation with extra empathy and reasoning, believing that if I could communicate my side clearly enough to her, she’d understand. Instead, the dynamic escalated publicly in a way that was humiliating for me.

I became hypervigilant, tracking tone, subtext, and reactions with the same nervous precision I’d learned long ago as a child. What should have been a straightforward workplace issue turned into something sprawling and destabilizing, drawing in people who had nothing to do with the original problem. That was when it finally became clear to me that trauma doesn’t just distort threat perception: it leaks. And when it does, even well-intentioned efforts to explain or soften can increase the blast radius.

Back in 2014, I was disregulated by the apartment noise, refused to confront my neighbor, and then marched myself to the leasing office expecting them to immediately remediate the issue. The security officer they sent out stood in my completely empty living room and told me that the music wasn’t that loud. “Maybe you should get some furniture to dampen the noise,” he suggested.

It was a reasonable, unbiased suggestion, but I couldn’t hear it as he said it. All I heard was, “You are a fucking crazy bitch who doesn’t even have furniture.” Because that’s how I felt about myself. Crazy. Intense. Too much.

A few years later, my mom called me to deliver the news that she’d been diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder. I could hear both a sense of relief in her tone that she finally had some explanation for why she was the way she was, while also expressing shame for a mental health diagnosis that effectively rendered her as irreparably defective. I wanted to tell her she should get a second opinion, but I knew it wouldn’t matter. She seemed too wounded to be able to fight the real battle, and I wanted her to be as healthy as she could get, knowing it’d never be what I needed out of a mom or as a grandma to my son. Maybe just medicating it really was her best option, I concluded. I just wanted her to be happy for herself.

The conversation about her bipolar diagnosis had reminded me of a time when I was twelve when my dad took me to a therapist because I was emotionally withdrawn and refused to talk. I didn’t trust the therapist, feared that he would just repeat anything I said to my dad, who I also did not trust. A couple of years earlier, he had purchased a device that allowed him to listen in on my private phone conversations and it made me feel unsafe.

Even if the therapist had disclosed confidentiality at the first appointment, it wouldn’t have mattered: I wouldn’t have trusted him either. But one day, I decided to tell the therapist about an incident that happened when I was younger, where I’d had a dissociative episode in the middle of the night as a six-year-old. In what was a really bizarre sequence of events involving me lining up glow-in-the-dark toys on the laundry room floor late at night, I thought I had seen “a man” towering over me in the doorway of the room, and ran away in terror, not even understanding the meaning behind the strangely coded story I was telling the therapist.

My dad stopped taking me to see him again after that, telling me that it was a waste of his money. I always wondered if the therapist interpreted that incident exactly the way he should have: that a child was in grave danger. But nothing happened. I lived in that house for six more years, feeling chronically unsafe, thinking it was because I was crazy. I searched the internet for answers and told myself I had Bipolar Disorder, that a good dose of lithium would sort me out, that I was crazy for how I had adapted to surviving all of the surveillance and repeated boundary violations.

I would have done anything to save myself from the terror. Susan Lorincz was diagnosed with PTSD during the trial, but it didn’t prevent the jury from giving a guilty verdict. Ajike Owens didn’t deserve to die and Lorincz deserved to be held accountable for her actions, absolutely. But is she really a “fucking psycho”?

Or is she just wounded?