write even with no headphones on, no longer terrified of my startle response, no longer afraid of something bad happening to me when I get lost in the words.
•§•
Creativity is in us. Creativity is us. We who are survivors of intimate violence are always creating, given our ability to adapt to horrifying, unendurable situations. Without a profound creative capacity—our instincts and intuitions, the generative resource of our resilient psyches—we wouldn’t have survived our homes or relationships or any of the other war zones we’ve endured. We couldn’t have navigated the impossible landscapes laid before us. We wouldn’t have been able to read the emotional street signs in our families, develop strategies for disappearing and reappearing inside our own bodies, or negotiate the simple, daily horrors of living with an abuser. Trauma and creativity are inextricably linked, and, I believe, creativity can pull us through the after-effects of what was done to us, and what we did to survive.
Changing our language, shifting our story even slightly, alters how we know ourselves. We are elastic beings ever becoming new. When we name what we have experienced—especially when we were told that no one would listen to or believe us, or when we were not taught the words we’d need in order to tell—we take power back from those who meant to silence us, and we reclaim control over the narrative of our lives. When we question, reword, or invert the stories we learned to tell about our ourselves, we are changed—we begin to be restoryed.
•§•
We are made up of the stories and memories we lift out of our pockets to share with friends over dinner, the remembrances we recite for ourselves in the thick of depression or in the bright morning of recovered joy, the stories we draw from film and TV commercials and pop songs and novels and Saturday morning cartoons, the anecdotes and gossip we heard our mother and aunts telling across the table at holiday suppers, that our fathers and uncles slipped through the sides of their mouths while watching the game, the stories that we saw whispered and pantomimed. We are shaped, too, by the stories we keep hidden. We were shaped by the stories our perpetrators told themselves and us, in order to justify their violence, and by the stories we told ourselves, in order to make sense of the violence we were suffering through. We were shaped by the response when we told what had been done to us: whether we were heard and cared for, or denied and shamed. The stories we grew up within determined what we experienced as possible—and impossible—for our lives.
There are stories that serve us for a lifetime. And there are stories that serve us for a period of time and then begin to harm us. Often, though, we don’t notice that shift until we are in some kind of pain. Questioning our stories is risky and frightening. Who am I if I’m not this person I’ve been telling for years? What do I mean if my foundational stories are malleable?
When I began to lead writing groups with sexual trauma survivors, I finally thought to ask: What happens if we question the mainstream stories that get told about us? What happens when we tell the untellable stories? What if we challenge the stories our families or perpetrators or communities told about us, the normative, normalizing stories that tell us who and how we’re supposed to be? I wanted to find out what happened when we wrote directly into the stories we were most afraid or ashamed of, when we turned our most-told stories upside down and inside out. What happens when we write the backside of the stories we have internalized about ourselves, about our communities, the stories of our healing or our desire?
In writing with groups of survivors (and other folks, as well), I found the strength and curiosity to write into and question some of my most deeply-held stories (that is, beliefs) about myself: that I was broken; that I would never feel safe in my body; that sex would always be difficult for me; that I was a failure; that I didn’t deserve to call myself a woman; that I was culpable for my stepfather’s sexual abuse because I hadn’t been able to stop him for so long; that I didn’t deserve family; that family didn’t want me; that I wasn’t worth caring about or saving. It takes heart and guts to tell the truth on the page, whether we ever share that writing with another soul. We grow, we transform, when we are willing to take that risk.
If we as a culture are immersed in story, then it follows that we come to know, to understand, ourselves through story. Therefore it’s possible to be transformed by others’ stories, by others’ ways of knowing and experiencing the world and their own possibility, though this requires a profound vulnerability and willingness to be open to change. When we are present with other people’s stories, we can learn different ways of looking at the world, looking at ourselves, understanding pain and struggle and desire and longing, than we ourselves have yet considered. I notice this happening quite often in the writing workshops, a note of, “I never heard it described quite that way before—that’s just how I feel, too!” And there’s a shift, a splitting open, a new openness of our perceptions, and thus ourselves.
There is a quality of magic that manifests when we gather with others in community and share our creative selves. The word magic comes from old Greek and Persian words that have to do with art and agency or power. I want that magic—that powerful art—for all sexual trauma survivors, because I believe this work can heal us, break open our isolation, reincorporate us into the human family, while transforming humanity into something more kind, expansive, and real.
•§•
One magic quality of story that I most value is the way stories show up for me when I am most alone and nearly lost. Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen, the author of Kitchen Table Wisdom, was one of the facilitators I worked with when I attended the Writing as a Healing Art conference in 2010. While she was with us she discussed the power of story, describing the ways in which stories are able to accompany people into their darkest places. The story that any of us tells about how we survive our own struggles will accompany those who’ve heard us when they, later, have to walk into their own difficult places. The listener receives these stories as a kind of opening, a faint and terraced map: Look how they resisted, made it through, forgave themselves, told the truth—maybe I could do that, too. I carry workshop writers’ stories with me: they live along the skin of my forearms, they live in the cilia just inside my ears.
When I hear others’ stories of resilience and resistance, I get the chance to revisit my own narrative, reconsider the parts I’ve labeled cowardice, betrayal, isolation, lack of integrity, lack of strength, and cover those old labels with sticky notes on which I’ve scribbled: strategy, resilience, patience, courage, generosity. I try on new naming. I remember, in the early 90s, sitting at an isolated desk in the dusty stacks of my college library. The timer that controlled the light above the study area ticked away while I flipped through an old collection of women’s stories of abuse—maybe it was I Never Told Anyone—horrified that this was happening to so many of us, and, underneath that, so thankful to have discovered I wasn’t alone. I don’t think I ever checked that book out; I was too afraid of the librarian cocking an eyebrow my way, which would lead inevitably, I was sure, to my stepfather raging at me on the phone because I “told.” But there in those stacks, when the timer ran out and the light clicked off, I held the book in my hands for a moment, breathing in the knowledge that there were women who made it out—that there were women who got free, that there were women who told.
We need one another’s’ stories as we learn to navigate the world post-trauma. For anyone struggling with the isolation of trauma aftermath, writing authentically—alone and with peers—can be transformative. Author and essayist Barry Lopez says, “The stories people tell have a way of taking care of them. If the stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive.” While we can never change what was done to us, we can transform how that history lives in us, take control over how it shapes and constrains us. We can come to understand that creativity, or creative genius, or possibility can be our name: broken and raped don’t have to be our names. Victim doesn’t have to be our name (nor does stupid or shithead or selfish or crybaby or coward or whatever other words they used against us to keep us tethered,
