(Un)tidying the Account: The Emotional Cost of Hearing Untold Stories

In qualitative research, the researcher can be considered the research instrument, in which our positionality influences our interactions with participants and our interpretations of the data. Yet, the effect of this process on the researcher is less emphasized. In this essay, I describe the experience of writing my master's thesis about sexual assault survivors' privacy management in romantic relationships, asking how we manage these embodied experiences (and our disclosures of such) as scholars.