This piece was originally published in the 2026 issue of the Cow Creek Review
My voice says “fuck” a lot. Seriously, a lot. I said it twice during my interview to be an Assistant Federal Public Defender. I still got the job. Saying “fuck” a lot is kind of an unspoken requirement for being a public defender at any level. It’s a very fuck-worthy job.
My voice is vulgar and crude. I come from the trashiest of white trash; I grew up in condemned houses, not having enough food to eat, and rarely having clothes that fit. When I learned about the implied warranty of habitability in common law property class, I cried for days. The landlords of my childhood saw themselves as doing my family a favor by letting us live in their cast-off properties for cheap and felt no need to make the home even passably habitable. I was born with rough edges, roughened more by circumstances, and they never wore smooth. My voice pisses off a lot of people. Mostly men. “You’re too combative,” they say. “You’re too aggressive, too assertive, to hostile, too LOUD.” I am loud, and I never shut up. One day I had to meet a probation officer at East Baton Rouge Parish Prison to interview a client of mine. The probation officer got there before I did and was admitted. When I arrived, I was denied entry. I stood at the prison gate, shouting about the Sixth Amendment right to counsel. The guard threatened to arrest me, but I just shouted louder, daring her to do so. When the probation officer came out to see what was taking me so long, the guard looked at her and asked, wearily, “Can you make her go away?” I say a lot of things we aren’t supposed to say out loud. I don’t always believe this is a bad thing. I talk openly about my past tendencies to self-harm when life is particularly bad, about cutting my own arms and legs, deliberately causing bruises, and on one occasion even giving myself a black eye. I speak publicly about these things, because I know I’m not the only person to suffer this way, and I hope that my words will make someone else feel less alone.
A man once asked me why I have moods. Not in a philosophical “how do our brains work” way. He genuinely wanted to know why I did not feel and act the exact same way every single day. “Some days you’re cheerful and chatty,” he said, “but other days you’re quiet. Why is that?” I thought, “Because I’m not a fucking robot, you sociopath,” but I did not say it out loud, because he was my boss and I like being able to afford food. From my limited experience with the man, he has no emotions to speak of and may himself be an android. He clearly expected an answer, so I tried to explain about PTSD and flashbacks and nightmares and intrusive thoughts and how recovery—in as much as recovery is possible—is a long, time-consuming process. He told me I need to learn to think happy thoughts.
I hate it when people tell me to “choose happiness.” When I was homeless and living in a shed after leaving my husband, a former friend told me I should ask my therapist for tips on “finding joy in things.” How the fuck am I supposed to find joy while living in a shed? I’m not talking about some decked out “she shed” with insulation and electricity and cute curtains. It was a plain old garden shed, and every time the sun shone the temperature inside skyrocketed, even with the cheap-ass air conditioner blocking the one tiny window, powered by whatever electricity I could get from a single extension cord that snaked across the yard to the garage. I would keep the air conditioner on the lowest temperature setting all night, bringing the temperature down into the 50s, but every day as the sun climbed in the sky the temperature inside climbed into the triple digits. I wanted to lie around naked to try to find relief, but the door had no lock, and for some reason when you live in a shed people think they can just walk in without notice or knocking. It was the same in the women’s shelter I stayed in for a month. Twice a day, at unscheduled times, someone would walk into my room to make sure I wasn’t doing something I shouldn’t be doing. When I left my husband, I forfeited my privacy along with my comfort. The days in the shed were even worse when it snowed. My space heater could not compete with the below zero temperatures, so I kept a toaster oven on the highest bake setting with the oven door open to try to get the temperature inside the shed to survivable levels. My voice is ungrateful. I should be happy that I had access to that shed. I was certainly a step up from the days of living in my car. But I woke up every morning when the dew fell because everything would get clammy. I have an apartment now, but whenever it’s too hot or too cold inside, I’m back in that shed again, and I have a panic attack.
So many things give me panic attacks. After four fucking decades of feasting on a buffet of widely varied traumas, there isn’t much left in life that doesn’t trigger my fight-or-flight mechanism. I’m tired of this life and the thought of facing four more decades makes me want to crawl into bed and never get out again. This is called passive suicide ideation. I don’t actually want to kill myself (anymore; right now), I’m just completely over the whole “being alive” thing. My friend Lily says people who are over life don’t enroll in graduate school. I say if I’m stuck on this stupid planet I might as well keep myself occupied.
My voice is drowned out by the voices in my head. Memories of things repeated so often they became ingrained in my self-image. From the stepfather who assaulted me and made my childhood a living hell: “You’re worthless; you’re evil; you’re not as smart as you think you are.” Joke’s on him, because I’ve never thought I was smart, even though substantial objective evidence indicates I’m actually quite clever. From the mother who failed to protect me: “You were a mistake; you ruined my life; no man will ever want you; you owe me for giving birth to you.” Whenever I think I’m a bad mother, I compare myself to her and decide I’m definitely not doing the worst job at it. I even have a t-shirt that says “World’s Okayest Mom.”
My ex-husband’s voice is also loud: “You don’t know how to talk to people; I don’t want anyone to know we’re together; I put up with more crazy from you than any other man would tolerate; you’re too crazy to be around my children; you deserve to be homeless for abandoning your family.” I gave nearly half of my life and all of my identity to him, and in exchange I got twenty years of malicious commentary from this man who claimed to love me. He said he was going to fix me, and we both thought I needed fixing, so that was okay. Right up until the day it wasn’t. It took me far too long to realize I never needed fixing in the first place. I need compassion and understanding, and I’m still searching for both.
My ex-husband and I had been together(ish) for a year and a half when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. I was still incredibly poor, living in a falling-down, vermin-infested apartment with no means of transportation and not even enough money to eat every day. He called me the day before landfall and told me I needed to get out of the city. When I asked what I should do, he told me he had left the city two days before but that I had better figure something out because the storm was going to be deadly. He knew people were going to die. He knew if I didn’t find a way out, I might die. But still he left without me.
A couple of years after I left him we had an argument, and I threw it in his face that he left me to die during Hurricane Katrina. He laughed and said, “There were two million people in the city, and you think it was my responsibility to save them all?” After giving myself to him for a year and a half, I only had as much value to that man as a schizophrenic heroin addict living under an overpass. And I married him. Back then, I was so grateful he even bothered to call. I thought that ultimately worthless gesture was more than I deserved. He still thinks he was being generous to even make the call.
In the turmoil surrounding the breakdown of my mental health and the breakdown of my marriage, I fell into a disastrous relationship with a cocaine addict who openly admitted to having homicidal ideations. He would tell me: “You’re too negative, you’re too argumentative, everyone hates you, no one can stand to be around you.” One time he got mad because I was having a bad weekend and didn’t do the dishes, so he chopped up a table in the kitchen with a cleaver while screaming that he was going to murder my ex-husband. He did so much damage to my brain in a single year, it’s actually impressive in a really disturbing way. He promised me the world when he did not have a world to give, yet I still shame myself every day for not being able to meet his standards, most of which involved being able to drink copious amounts of liquor without becoming maudlin and being willing to spend all my time with felons and drug dealers. The most fucked up thing is how much I still miss him, because he said without him none of my scripts will ever be made into movies. I still believe this with my entire being, even though he has never actually made a movie himself and there’s no evidence that he ever would have succeeded in making one of mine.
So, my voice is insecure and self-deprecating. I spew forth a constant litany of “I did it wrong, I’m not good enough, I’m a fuck up, I’m a failure.” My friend Lily recently told me “It’s too late for you to be a failure. That ship has sailed and you need to move on.” I need to start hearing her voice in my head. It would dramatically improve my quality of life.
There’s a psychological phenomenon called imposter syndrome. It’s not a full-on mental illness, which is good because I’m crazy enough already without piling on more diagnoses. Basically, people with imposter syndrome consider themselves to be failures and frauds, in spite of objective evidence that they are successful. My thinking brain knows I was successful. I was an Assistant Federal Public Defender. At any given time, there are only a few hundred of them in the United States. Of those, most are primarily trial attorneys. Very few lawyers enjoy doing the reading and research and writing necessary to be a good post-conviction attorney. One day I did the math, and I estimated that approximately one out of every six hundred thousand people can do what I did at the level I did it. I shared this with my friend Dahlia, then asked how the hell I can know this and still have no self-worth or self-esteem. She said, “I’ve been trying to figure that out since the day I met you.”
My thinking brain knows all of this. My feeling brain is still a malnourished waif, always filthy because the septic tank kept backing up and filling the bathtub with sewage (not that it mattered because there was no hot water). Her feet are caked with dirt because the carpets have never been cleaned. She has bleeding welts on her legs because she’s never been able to keep her mouth shut, even for her own protection. She slept with the lights on to keep the roaches away, and filled her bed with books to keep the monster away. I recognize that child. I do not recognize the woman who stood in those richly appointed courtrooms, before judges who had been appointed by presidents and argued passionately for mercy and justice. That was not me. That was a character out of a storybook.
My voice is timid, having spent a lifetime letting men tell me who I am and what I like and what I want and what I deserve out of life. I don’t dare ask for the things I want. I don’t think I could handle the disappointment of not getting them. It’s better to convince myself I can live with what I’m given then to let myself wish for something more. I am not a dreamer. Dreaming is scary. I don’t make things happen; I let things happen.
My voice is ashamed. I used to be someone everyone admired. I was meticulously organized, goal oriented, and completely self-contained. In the student skit show the last year of law school, no one could think of a joke to make about me. Since they had to include every graduating student, they just stuck in a line where a character in a different skit said he wished he could adult as well as I do. There was clapping and cheering. Everyone except me took it as a given that I would have a remarkable career. And I did. Only three years after graduating I was licensed in two different states and was given an elite position in the federal judiciary.
I was the woman with it all. The two beautiful and brilliant children—both boys, such a blessing because, everyone says, “boys are so much better and easier than girls”—I had a lovely house where I threw elaborate and creative parties. My children had everything; more clothes than they could wear, more toys than they could play with, and more food than they could eat. No one knew that my husband barely worked, choosing instead to stay up all night playing video games then sleep until early afternoon. He told everyone he was a stay-at-home dad, when really he was just a dad who stayed at home. The children were in daycare; we had a cleaning service and a lawn service. I made all the money, paid all the bills, arranged all the appointments, made all the holidays special and still managed to bake hundreds of cookies every Christmas—molasses cookies, monster cookies, snickerdoodles, cream cheese spritzes, gingerbread (both cookies and the old-fashioned bread), sugar cookies, and, of course, dozens and dozens of chocolate chip cookies—that I passed out all over New Orleans and Baton Rouge. People called it “cookie day,” and I would start getting texts as early as August, asking, “what day is cookie day this year?” When I told people we were moving to Washington, many responded first by saying, “but what about the cookies?” I was the local Martha Stewart, except I was allowed to leave the federal prison and go home at the end of the day.
Now I am the woman who went crazy. I am the woman who abandoned my children, who walked away from an incredible career, who threw away a fantasy life. But it wasn’t my fantasy. It was what they’d told me I was supposed to want. I tried so hard to fit the mold. I really did. The people who knew me in my past life don’t speak to me now. New people find out my children live far away and ask how I could have left them. It’s okay for a woman to leave her husband, as long as she takes the children with her. “Children should be with their mother,” countless people have said, “Once you’re back on your feet you’ll get full custody.” It’s so humiliating to admit that I’m not cut out to be a mother, that I never wanted to be a mother, that I only had them because he asked me to, because society told me I should, because I was promised “it’ll be different when they’re your own kids.” But it wasn’t. If you’ve never liked babies, giving birth does not magically change that. I love my kids so much it hurts. I miss them every single day. I am so incredibly happy they exist. I wish they had a better mother. But I didn’t fight for custody in the beginning, and I don’t intend to fight for it now. I don’t want to deal with the daily drudgery of parenthood. I’m a video games and vacation mom. I don’t want to turn into one of those women who resents her children for existing. I left my kids with their dad and his mother, living in a three-story, five-bedroom, three-bathroom house in an overly gentrified gated community on a small island in the Pacific Northwest, where they attend a small alternative school that tailors their education to their personal needs. Yet from the looks I get when I say that I do not have or want full custody you would think I left them in a ditch on the side of the interstate to be raised by coyotes.
When people find out I used to be a lawyer, they ask me when I’m going back. “Just learn a new kind of law,” they say, like it’s so fucking easy. Law firms and civil judges won’t touch me because they would have to retrain me from scratch, and it’s cheaper to just hire someone straight out of law school. “There’s so much more money to be made,” they say, but I already know that a big bank balance isn’t enough to for me. I hated it. But for some reason that is not a good enough answer to “why did you stop practicing law?” I used to be amazing, one of those rags to riches stories they write books and movies about. I used to be inspiring. Now I am a cautionary tale.
My voice is hopeless. Our society has become completely dependent on pharmaceuticals to try to cope with the world around us. I see the commercials everywhere: “Antidepressants not working? Take this new pill along WITH your other ones. You still won’t feel good but at least when people say ‘you just need better/different/more meds’ you can say ‘I’m trying some out.’ Side effects may include diarrhea, cancer, or being more suicidal than you were before you started taking them.”
My depression isn’t chemical, it’s situational. No amount of drugs will change the fact that the world is a dumpster fire. We are living in a Brave New World, where Idiocracy is now a documentary. My guilt over having children is multi-faceted and intricately layered. I wish they had a better planet, a better government, a better society, and a better future. I hear young people say they don’t intend to have children because it would be cruel to force them to inherit the Earth in its current condition, and I feel like a terrible person for just bringing my own children into this world in the first place. They didn’t ask for this life, for the absolute bullshit that is human existence. The world is a dumpster fire; the fire extinguisher is long expired and dribbles and spits foul smelling liquid instead of shooting out a cooling foam. This is the legacy I have forced upon my children, and I am so very, very sorry.
My voice is sad. My voice is tired. My voice is defeated.
