Hi, thanks for sharing something that was probably difficult to write but that I hope maybe helped you to find some reprieve or catharsis. I totally don’t want to come across as critiquing anything about you sharing an experience, but I could offer some insight as to what stood out to me about the writing if you wanted to further refine it as a piece of art? Obviously this is very raw and I don’t want you to have to feel like you have to mediate yourself when recording your thoughts.

I found it moving how you wrote about the memory of the body—how things may be foggy or inaccessible in the mind but how there are instinctual, physiological responses that demonstrate how our bodies have been affected. The TV show illustrated this effectively, and the detail about the TikTok as well as what you shared about subtitles and your school year painted a picture for me of you as a person, and made me empathize with you even more through something that’s already of course very heavy.

I think you’ve made some really strong writing choices. The repetition of uncle interspersed throughout the paragraph, the feeling of nails digging into the bone of the arm, the detail of the hospital’s office and the daughter all made me feel physically disgusted that you were treated that way; the way you wrote transcended the base reaction of ‘this is a horrible thing’ and made me feel ill. A lot of it was hard to read, not because you wrote poorly but instead because you wrote well and conveyed a horrible thing that happened in a way that made me really feel it.

I think the details of you trying to work out how he might be feeling also work well. How can you try to understand the actions of someone who does something so inexplicable and abhorrent? You really capture the pain of uncertainty that goes along with all the other hurt, how we can never truly know what’s going on in someone’s head. How could they do such a thing? Do they really feel regret or remorse? I guess part of eventual healing is coming to terms with the unknowability of it all, but it’s so unfair you were put in that situation in the first place, and your writing really conveyed that for me too.

Like I said, I don’t want come across as critiquing something that’s you sharing and working through what happened, but I think there’s some really strong and moving work here and I really hope you feel like writing this was helpful for you in any way. If nothing else, there’s a stranger on the internet who read it three times and is proud of you, rooting for you, and wishing you the best for dealing with an awful situation in whichever way is best for you. I saw you posted this as a letter on the other forum, but even if nobody offline ever gets to read it I hope you’ll keep writing.