"My life is triage"
About this Quote
A hard-edged phrase like "My life is triage" doesn’t ask for sympathy; it announces a operating system. Triage is what you do when there isn’t enough time, money, or oxygen to save everyone. By choosing that word, Vachss frames existence as a permanent emergency room: constant sorting, ruthless prioritizing, a willingness to make morally bruising decisions in order to keep the most vulnerable alive.
The intent is partly autobiographical branding, partly ethical manifesto. Vachss built his reputation on crime fiction and advocacy that orbit child abuse, predation, and institutional failure. In that ecosystem, outrage is cheap and resolution is often fantasy. Triage is the adult posture: you intervene where you can, accept that you can’t fix the whole catastrophe, and keep moving before the next case bleeds out. The subtext is a rebuke to comfortable moralism. It says: spare me your purity tests and your think pieces; there are bodies on the floor.
What makes the line work is its compression. "My life" is intimate, confessional. "Triage" is clinical, procedural, almost cold. The collision creates the sting: compassion expressed through discipline rather than sentiment. It also hints at the psychological toll. A life lived in triage is a life without closure, built around crisis management and grim arithmetic. There’s pride in competence, but also a warning: when the world is structured as perpetual emergency, burnout isn’t a risk, it’s the baseline.
In Vachss’s hands, the phrase doubles as a mission statement for writing itself: not entertainment-as-escape, but narrative as intervention, a way to point attention to the wounds that polite society keeps bandaging over.
The intent is partly autobiographical branding, partly ethical manifesto. Vachss built his reputation on crime fiction and advocacy that orbit child abuse, predation, and institutional failure. In that ecosystem, outrage is cheap and resolution is often fantasy. Triage is the adult posture: you intervene where you can, accept that you can’t fix the whole catastrophe, and keep moving before the next case bleeds out. The subtext is a rebuke to comfortable moralism. It says: spare me your purity tests and your think pieces; there are bodies on the floor.
What makes the line work is its compression. "My life" is intimate, confessional. "Triage" is clinical, procedural, almost cold. The collision creates the sting: compassion expressed through discipline rather than sentiment. It also hints at the psychological toll. A life lived in triage is a life without closure, built around crisis management and grim arithmetic. There’s pride in competence, but also a warning: when the world is structured as perpetual emergency, burnout isn’t a risk, it’s the baseline.
In Vachss’s hands, the phrase doubles as a mission statement for writing itself: not entertainment-as-escape, but narrative as intervention, a way to point attention to the wounds that polite society keeps bandaging over.
Quote Details
| Topic | Tough Times |
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