I hear this a lot: Don’t be precious about your writing. Hold it loosely. So loosely, perhaps, that it slips from your grasp and into the fires of Mordor.

I think when people say “Don’t be precious about your writing” they mean “Don’t be precious about what you have written.” But what about the capacity of most writers to be precious about the act of writing itself?

As a writer, I can be so fucking dramatic sometimes about writing. So much of writing is literally just psyching myself up to write.

I was listening to a podcast episode the other day, and Dan Harmon was talking about how the only time he loved writing was when he was blogging every single day on Myspace (a drunken (?) rant worth listening to in full, starts at 46:55).

I too had a Myspace blog (RIP). And he’s right. It’s addictive. There’s something about writing everyday or writing just to write that gets under your skin, or more accurately, into your bloodstream, bypassing some of your preciousness about the act of writing.

It’s like writing can be this deep, profound thing and it can also just be complete trash. It’s like writing doesn’t have to be something that you suffer and bleed for—it can just be words on a page or screen.

I have a martyr’s complex when it comes to writing, and yes, sometimes you do sacrifice part of yourself, but—

Sometimes you just have to write for the sake of writing. Process be damned. Outcome be damned.

I think when you start to get away from the basic point of writing—which is to communicate an idea or a feeling—you start to go off the rails a bit (is writing like a train? If writing were a form of transportation, what form of transportation would it be? If you were a train, what kind of train would you be?).

I tend towards vulnerability in my writing and I also write about personal things, but I don’t think any other writer’s writing is somehow less risky or vulnerable. To create is to take a risk, to make yourself insanely, desperately exposed to the rest of the world.

I don’t think I like the word “precious” in this context. I prefer “fragile.”

I’m so, so fragile.

But sometime it’s just words.

This is the lie I need to tell myself: None of this matters. No one will read this. No one cares. Nothing will come from this.

You have to hold on and let go at the same time in order to write. It’s a balancing act.

Was I precious about writing about being precious? Maybe.

But sometimes you have to lie to yourself to get to the truth.

I got something on my mind. Or is it on my butt? I’m not sure. Maybe it’s on my left thigh or on my waist or my hair or my head or is it my ribcage, just below my breasts?

Your hands gripping both sides of my head. Your hand around the small of my waist. Your fingers in my hair. Your crotch pressed against my butt.

Yesterday I went to a free workout in the park with a TV personality you might recognize from a long-running franchise on ABC that uses roses as a metaphor for love— as you do in LA, or should I say, as I do in LA.

We took a picture together at the end, all hot and sweaty. And as we pressed in for the picture, I could feel the guy behind me press his frontside into my backside.

Is this really happening? Is this what I think it is?

I grew very, very still for a few seconds. Finally, I moved imperceptibly away from the pressure of his body.

I was wearing tight spandex leggings (because working out). But still (get it?). I know it’s irrelevant, but the thought still flitted through my mind.

Earlier this week, I messaged a guy on a dating app to tell him I didn’t like the way he kept touching me during our date—it wasn’t sexual, just overly familiar, seemingly more a result of his own impulses than my comfort level.

It was only after he left that I shuddered and thought, “I didn’t like that.”

I wrote earlier this year about being physically grabbed during a different photo opp, although I didn’t go into detail in that post because the details felt somehow traumatic: A man I didn’t know very well grabbed both sides of my head from behind in order to move it out of his way.

Why do I say all this? Why am I playing show and tell with my body, especially those parts that I never talk about, that are simultaneously invisible and hypervisible, this body of mine that at times doesn’t even feel like mine, doesn’t even feel like a body, and yet nevertheless continues to exist in the world, to take up space?

Something about even bringing all this up feels gross, like I want to claw off all of my skin just thinking about this guy pressing himself into me or all the other times men have grabbed me, groped me, treated my body like the person inside wasn’t even there.

I’m not sure.

All I can say is that I tend to freeze when someone touches me in an unwanted or objectifying way—I don’t say anything in the moment. I barely think anything in the moment. But I can feel a scream building up within me.

Don’t touch me.

Trauma is a weird thing—it often feels cyclical and repetitive. When I see someone keep repeating the same story and going back to the same moment in their lives, I think, “Oh yeah, trauma.”

Time feels different with trauma, as if it both never ended and never began.

And the same thing goes for questions, questions that circle around and around, trying to make sense of something that ultimately doesn’t make any sense, that refuses the sense that I try to make out of it. All the questions seem to be some version of “How did this happen?”

Last month I went to a panel at the Hammer Museum on Black Women and the #MeToo Movement.

Supermodel Beverly Johnson spoke first, about being drugged by Bill Cosby in an attempted assault. She talked about how Cosby groomed her prior to the assault by inviting her to the set of “The Cosby Show” and introducing her to his family, his wife and kids.

When you introduce someone to your family, you’re saying: You are safe here. We’re all family. You belong with us.

The word “grooming” is commonly used to refer to child grooming, which Wikipedia defines as “befriending and establishing an emotional connection with a child, and sometimes the family, to lower the child’s inhibitions with the objective of sexual abuse.”

But in the context of abuse or assault between adults, what does it mean to be groomed?

Dee Barnes spoke next of being brutally assaulted by Dr. Dre in 1991. But some of the first words out of her mouth were, “Was I groomed?”, as if the question had never crossed her mind before this moment.

She described Dre as an intimate friend, someone who treated her like a little sister, someone who brutalized other women but would never hurt her. She was family. You don’t hurt family.

Barnes ended up repeating the question “Was I groomed?” over and over again during the panel discussion, as if to ask 28 years after the fact:

Was I set up to be abused? Was I deliberately made to feel safe and protected by someone who intended to hurt me or at least had no intention of actually keeping me safe?

Maybe it was an arm around the shoulder or a whispered inside joke. Maybe he teased her constantly or called her “lil’ sis.” Whatever he did, he made her feel safe enough to go into that fateful night without any kind of protection, physical or otherwise.

She wasn’t attacked by a stranger. She was set up.

I don’t know how you deal with that kind of hurt, that kind of betrayal.

I think one of the hardest things to articulate in the aftermath of any kind of abusive relationship is all the nice things the other person did for you, the thousand small moments of care, empathy, compassion and love, the tucked in blanket and the Hallmark movie moments. These things feel so impossible to explain—at least not in any kind of way that makes sense—given what I know now.

Trying to explain why something was traumatic feels like trying to explain why every time you sneeze, someone in another state mispronounces the word “ingenuous.”

Me: You don’t understand. He found out I liked chocolate croissants and then he bought me sooooo many chocolate croissants.
Other person: [blank look] Uh huh…

It’s been years for me too, but a question came up for me like a slap in the face, writing this:

Why would you agree to go into a room alone with him?

Because I didn’t know. Because I felt safe.

Was I groomed too?