• 21 Jan, 2026 *

"How did we get started on this topic?" my best friend asked her spouse. We were all eating pizza at the counter while talking about various injuries we’d sustained.

"Marinara sauce," I joked.

Now my best friend’s spouse was telling me a story that involved a nail passing through a part of his body. I would go on to eventually ask my friend and her spouse "why do y’all have so many stories about nails?" This is one of many things they apparently have in common: tetanus shots.

So he was recounting the story of a nail passing through a part of his body. He included a specific, chilling detail. "Oh," I said. A shudder had just passed through me—limbic, polyvagal, maybe some bowel involvement. The feeling was too unpleasant to be called a frisson. My friend looked at me. "I just had, like, a spasm," I told her, while holding my upper abdomen as if it were going to run away without me.

She burst out laughing. "A little sympathy spasm?"

"Uh-huh," I said, slightly shaken.

A devilish glint appeared in her spouse’s eye, and he told me two more stories of a similar nature. My best friend followed it with another explicit, visceral story of personal injury.

"I’ve had, like, three full-body spasms now," I said, my lips tight. I wanted to follow it up with "you freaks." She grinned evilly.

At one point my friend told her son to stop messing with his sister’s craft project. "I see you," she told her child, and the same evil little grin crossed his face.

She left the room, and her spouse and son—this family of little gremlins!—began talking about airplane spin recovery training, partly just to curl my hair. I was duly ruffled, sitting frozen with my hand over my mouth for about 20 minutes. I wasn’t upset, far from it, but I did spend some of that time thinking about the human inclination to deliberately upset someone as a form of making connection.

Recently I have been thinking about this innate gremlin tendency to try to make someone else’s hair stand on end, literally: a pilomotor reflex. I remember explaining, to a female friend, my own tendency to enter a type of conversational gamesmanship, typically with gay men—trying to outdo one another by telling the most outlandish, horrible, or toe-curling anecdote—because she had been baffled by my sudden foul mouth at a hotel bar. There, a stranger had approached, had sat next to me, and had cryptically said, "You’re like me." Later my friend would wonder aloud what he had detected in me that he had not detected in her. Los Angeles is very strange.

At the end of December I’d watched the Mike Flanagan movie Doctor Sleep, in which emotional dysregulation is depicted as ionic clouds, glittering huffs and puffs. The energy vampires get high off it.

Sometimes agitating a response is a type of game—like telling horror stories around the campfire in Are You Afraid of the Dark—but sometimes it is predatory and even violent. I think a lot about mobs, bullies, and "lolcows": people a mob has identified as reactive enough to warrant targeted harassment. It’s their own fault for reacting where others can see it, the reasoning seems to be.

---

The older brother was poking his baby sister and was being rewarded with a variety of screams. During these marathon screaming sessions, the sister cries out for an authority figure to intervene. Their mother sighed and looked at me. "Just ignore them," she advised me.

Very early in my life I’d stopped asking for authority figures to intervene during conflict. They weren’t dependable or reliable. They didn’t want to be bothered.

"No tattling," I remember a Texas teacher telling me.

‘Tattling’ was another whimsical word that sounded entirely made-up to me. None of the new words I learned during my first year in Texas sounded real. I remember asking that teacher for a definition of the word. She’d flown into a fury, even as I reiterated "but what is ‘tattling’?" What were its exact terms and conditions? I didn’t understand when, and what, I was supposed to be bottling up and burying.

I think a lot about this ’90s Texan obsession with training children to remain silent in the face of abuse.

But I was beginning to understand what ‘tattling’ looked like. Now I was deeply worried that the older brother was becoming inured to the screams and shrieks of others. "Surely there is a way for her to communicate so that her brother would know if he is actually hurting her," I said aloud.

I don’t remember what their mother said to me. I only remember my answer to her: "But... he would never hurt his sister on purpose??"

The children’s mother stared at me so long and so hard that it actually began to dawn on me that this is exactly what is wrong with me.

"I can’t wrap my head around the idea that someone might hurt someone else deliberately," I said to a different friend later, "and this endangers me."

Couldn’t I remember ever wanting to hurt someone? the friend asked me.

I frowned. I had to work hard at finding a memory. "Yes," I said, surprised. So this disbelief isn’t inbuilt; it’s a rejection of a part of myself.

"Something happened when I was a kid," I told my friend. "I don’t want to talk about it, but there were consequences." It’d made me fearful of anger, of reacting, of basic self-preservation.

One morning I was in the bathroom brushing my teeth when I heard the most bloodcurdling scream I have ever heard in my life. It had come out of the youngest child down the hall. It made me angry. I was angry because any sane person would hear this and call 911. It was the very definition of "somebody better be dying."

Instead, I locked in on my morning hygiene rituals. I appeared in the doorway of the playroom only after hearing a milder, less being-murdered scream. I stood there, my face drawn and pale and exhausted.

"Do you know what ‘bloodcurdling’ means," I asked the youngest child. Then I asked her if anyone ever told her the story of the Boy Who Cried Wolf.

"No," she said.

"Yes she has," her older brother said. "She’s heard it."

"A boy keeps yelling that a wolf is coming, when there is no wolf," I said. "So when there is actually a wolf, he yells and screams and sounds the alarm, but no one comes to help because he already cried ‘wolf’ too many times. So there’s nothing he can do to save the town or the sheep or whatever."

Both children were completely silent, staring at the floor. Yep: this was not my lane. It’s my job to be fun. That’s it.

"I also worry," I said quietly, "that your brother might not have a way to know if he were actually hurting you."

They remained silent. I sighed. "Anyway, I don’t feel great. I think I have a cold." For whatever reason this admission caused the youngest child to look up at me and smile warmly, and I sheepishly smiled back at her.

Later I would hear, from another room, a series of rapid-action Nerf darts fired off in succession, and a little scream.

"How many of those hit your sister," I called down the hallway.

"None of them!" her brother shouted.

"Okay," I shouted back.