Writing Ourselves Whole - Jen Cross

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what I knew, what I thought, who I’d been and who I was becoming. I read Writing Down the Bones, and followed Natalie Goldberg’s instructions: freewrite every day, follow any surprising or ridiculous thought, get it all down onto the paper, don’t stop to analyze or decipher, just write, just write, just write. The practice became exercise and meditation, and a process of recreation and resurrection.

      •§•

      They say—those voices of writerly authority—that we should write what we know. But sometimes what we know is denial and silence. What we know is discord. What we know is our words squelched or torn from our throats.

      So we write what we know, and we write our “unknown”—that which is uncertain, hazy, confusing, diffusely remembered, unrooted in us. Write what you don’t know, or what you don’t know yet. Write what you think or imagine or wonder. Write your certainties and your fears. Write what unknowing feels like. We need a language for what it’s like not to know what one’s own body has done or been put through. Write the fuzziness and numbness. Write the cycling of emotions. Write exactly what happened—what you know happened and what you don’t know happened. Write the uncertain as if you were absolutely clear, and then write it full of questions and confusion. Write it grammatically incorrect, as it exists within your body and memory: confusions, fragmented, broken, metaphorical.

      •§•

      As young children, if we are lucky, we are taught by those who love us to listen to our instinct, intuition, curiosities—to listen to our “gut.” We need guidance and encouragement to heed that deep inside wisdom, though, and most often, even for those of us not abused, the process of growing up means learning to ignore our intuition. We are taught to do what others expect from us, what makes others comfortable or happy. If we are female, we’re taught to act small, get quiet, and stuff our voices down while baring our bodies for the viewing and approval of others; if we are male, we’re taught to get loud and big, force our voice into a room, take what we want and stuff our emotions down. If we are genderqueer, well, we’re mostly just taught to disappear. We are—all of us—taught that what other people think of us is more important than what we think of ourselves. And we are taught that being ourselves, if that self is at odds with the expectations of our community or those in power, can get us hurt. Our survival instinct kicks in and teaches us how to follow, even if following chafes.

      In the workshops I talk about what it means to come back into a relationship of trust with our intuition, that small quiet voice inside that has always wanted to lead us in the right direction but that we were trained or forced to ignore, especially if we were children of violent homes. It didn’t matter that there was something inside us screaming, No, stop, let’s get out of this situation, let’s get away from this person! If we live with our abusers, we can’t leave, at least not physically, most of the time. We are forced to turn our attentions outward—to focus on the smallest nuances of a parent’s or abuser’s mood, voice, actions, so that we can get a sense of their emotional state and thereby hope to keep ourselves a little more safe. We learn how to read their tone of voice when they call us to dinner, learn how the evening is going to unfold by the way they shut the door when they come into the house. We give so much attention to the violent or unstable people around us, and we turn our attention away from the voice inside that knows what goodness and brilliance we’re capable of. We have to ignore that voice if we want to be safe.

      I’ve used writing as one way back into a relationship with my intuition. And part of that practice, for me, has been writing messily, taking risks, following whatever thread is pulling at me. I write the words that call themselves forward, even if they make no logical sense, even if I’m confused by where they’re going, even if I’m scared or feel stupid about what I’m writing. Maybe I just hear syllables or nonsense words—write them. Maybe there’s a phrase that wants out that I don’t understand—I have to write it; otherwise those words or sounds just keep repeating themselves until I do.

      This is a languaging of trauma, the real world’s song, with its own grammars and choruses. Repeat what bears repeating, and then rewrite the rest. Follow your instinct, and let your pen guide you.

      Using metaphor to get under everyday “sense”

      On a sheet of paper, number the lines 1-10. (I always liked the numbering part of any assignment when I was in elementary school.) Draw two vertical lines down the page, separating the page into three columns. In the first column, next to each number, write the names of people or places that are important to you. Try not to think about this; write the first thing that comes to mind. Now cover that first list (with your hand or a piece of paper). In the third column, write 10 common nouns (everyday things like, cow, mountains, governor). Fill the in-between column with “is” or “is like,” then add articles (a, an, the) and do whatever else you need to make the sentences read smoothly. You’ll end up with lines something like this:

      1 1. Mother is a foot (a metaphor)

      2 2. San Francisco is like orchids (a simile)

      These will usually be metaphors and similes that don’t really make “sense.” Read through your list, and let one of these prompts choose you. Copy it onto a new page in your notebook and begin to write: what could this line mean? Give yourself ten minutes. Don’t be surprised if your writing veers off into strange places. Let yourself go there!

       we are not trauma but we know the words for it

      We get all the words. We get to write everything. We get to not be ok and be absolutely ok at the same time. We get to take this work slowly—write a memory for ten minutes, then breathe and cry and beat pillows for twenty. This isn’t work we need to rush through. We’re building a relationship with our deep inner self, our surviving self, our material, our memory, our creative genius. We are meeting our own idioms, a linguistics of loss and determination, a semantics of our own particular triumph. We write phrases that don’t make sense anywhere outside the context of our own subconscious—even we may not consciously understand our writing sometimes. We keep writing until we understand what the sense that lives in us could be. We write something that completely contradicts what we wrote yesterday, and then we keep writing until we understand that we have not contradicted, we simply exist in multitudes—we are Whitman’s heirs.

      Some days you might write all around the edges of the violence you suffered. Some days you might avoid euphemisms: instead of entering the written picture with the relative soft-focus of “that was the day he molested me,” you might choose to describe precisely what of him went where on you. You might describe the full gloss of your body’s reaction. You might describe it as though it’s happening to someone else, or it’s happening to someone you’re talking to. You might choose a third person point of view (that is, using she, he, it, or they) that puts some distance between the reader and the experience, or use the passive voice (e.g., “The body was abandoned”) to center the action and draw attention away from the actors. One scene of your story could use all of these framings. Use all the tools at your disposal.

      Then write it differently. Write yourself fighting back, then write yourself fighting back differently or not fighting back at all. Write someone walking in. Write from the point of view of the bed, the couch, the closet, the garage floor, the basement walls, the kitchen table, the office chair—the inanimate witnesses to your experience. If someone had walked by, walked in, what would they have heard or seen? Write it inside out. Every different telling brings forth new details, new remembering, and new art.

      Then write about the birdsong in the summer birch tree, the smell of sea salt roses, the deep blue of the thin autumn sky. Or take yourself for ice cream or go for a run or have a long cry or a swim.

      When you write trauma, your body will fill up with memory and emotion. Consider how you want to take care of yourself after, how to thank your body for this effort of recollection and creation, for tangling itself back up in the old (sometimes not so old) memories, how to communicate to your psyche: I will take care of us through this process of reclaiming and restorying. I take long walks, cry into the notebook, get into the garden or watch silly sitcoms. I go for

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