Writing Your Future

On learning to stretch beyond your limits

Working through trauma is one of the hardest things I've ever done. Learning to trust again, to open, to feel safe after being seriously wounded is not easy. It becomes harder the more you're wounded in the same place.

One of the hardest aspects of surviving what I believe was a rape was that I had to live with persistent fear that I'd be tracked down and killed for speaking up about it. And later, I feared I'd be killed for speaking up at all. I don't know how to put this fear to rest. As a person who has always been in people-facing roles in my work life, I had to learn to cope with what was happening under the surface while keeping on a happy face, even while I was terrified that I'd be seriously punished for speaking. In the aftermath, it was too hard to look at the consequences my voice might bring to the people I left behind and while I wondered if what I said hurt people I loved, I couldn't create room in my busy life to have those conversations with those people.

It's true there's an agony in holding things in because to speak them is to risk destroying things that are precious to you, but there is also a special kind of agony in knowing that the story you hold has real effects on the people you love, not all of them pleasant. The distance I had from the situation because I moved away from it helped me feel safe enough to talk about it, but when I realized that people were listening, I no longer felt safe talking. What if he was angry about what I said and intent on causing me harm? What if my words put other people at risk? It was no longer just about me; my work had grown beyond me.

When I first started blogging, then freelancing, I didn't think about the consequences of my words. I just had a lot inside that I couldn't keep in. It didn't occur to me to question what effect I might have on those around me and if those people approved of what I said.

I initially felt defiant post-survival but shamanic work blurred the lines. When I asked, “Why me?” in a shamanic journey and the answer was that I had written, I didn't know how to feel about the fact that my voice was the reason everything in my life was broken beyond repair. It held historically true. My whole life, I made people angry with me without meaning to. I said things that prompted slaps, punches, screams, and punishment, and I didn't know how to stop. The problem, as I perceived it, was my voice. It was that I couldn't force myself to be someone I wasn't or to stop talking. No matter how much I tried to please people, I couldn't keep them happy all the time. So getting around to feeling like my writing could create positive results in my life and in the world has been a huge struggle. I underestimated the power words can hold and the way they can influence the world outside us.

Healing this reluctance to speak has taken a lot of twists and turns. It has been a battle with myself, a search to identify the voice I can have that's safest. Experimenting with fiction created a space for me to use my voice and safely bring my authenticity to the table, but there's a huge part of me that's still afraid. To be visible is to be vulnerable. In that vulnerability, you never know if you'll be safe.

Sometimes it's hard for us to understand how to move forward after trauma and sometimes we find it difficult to pursue what we would like to do. It can be hard to know how to define ourselves and understand how we can write our own stories. As a writer, I create fictions in my mind every day. I am always thinking up scenarios that never make it to paper.

I take comfort in my imagination. What we can imagine, what we dream as creators, is truly limitless. We can imagine a happily ever after, an exciting romance, a world in which magic is real. We can envision a fictional universe where we can make true whatever we want.

The question is, “What story do we want to tell?”

Are we brave enough to speak it into existence and to imagine ourselves anew?