All Comments on 'Minimal Damage'

To Drugs!!!!!

Because it made no sense whatsoever.

I like your short, punchy sentences. However, there's not much substance here--it's too abstract for most readers to grasp.

It is a story about domestic abuse. Just in case that wasn't clear.

It is mostly about victims being unable to express their pain and anger in abusive situations. Instead of the 1+1=2 kind of narrative, I thought highlighting the effects of abuse when mentioning the actual thing quite less might be a cool experiment. I'll be the first to admit I constantly experiment with the written and its form so if the story wasn't clear, perhaps now, for the reader, it might make more sense. If not, back to the notepad... Tell me what might make it work well. Give some tips. Thanks to both readers and writers!

I thought it was crystal-clear, personal, and very affecting. This writing treads the line between poetry and prose - powerful and (I believe like a previous commenter said) punchy. It got me in the gut, and I'll come back to it and your work.

I knew exactly what you what were writing about from the second paragraph - "I broke his things when he was gone." Classic indirect aggression. When you can't just say and do whatever you want to, you find ways to get back at them however you can just to keep some sense of dignity intact. I think people had a hard time understanding you more because they don't understand the dynamics and narrative of abuse rather than because you didn't write it clearly enough. The only thing that threw me was at the very beginning about the bunk bed and your brother. However, that kind of left-field stream-of-consciousness beginning works perfectly when you are focusing on everything around the subject rather than the subject itself. This is a very interesting and difficult approach, but forcing oneself to remember traumatic events as circumspectly as possible is very therapeutic, the psychological equivalent of someone forcing themselves to stretch a damaged limb past the pain during physical therapy. Sometimes it can be all the little things around the trauma that catch you up later on and trigger anxiety and panic.