LITMIR.BIZ

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to think too hard about what I was saying, I clotted up in doubt and fear and couldn’t write at all. I needed the right kind of pen (Pilot Precise v7) and the right kind of notebook (8 ½ x 5 Artists Sketchbook, please); I needed the right noisy cafe, a corner table near the window, headphones and a cassette tape of music I knew well. I needed many cups of strong coffee adulterated with a lot of sugar. I was like that little girl, afraid of the dark, who needs a glass of water, and her blankie, and the same two stuffed animals, and the door left open just the right amount before she felt safe enough to fall asleep. Everything had to be just right for me, too; I was absolutely afraid of the darkness I was trying to write.

      My stepfather had tried to occupy every fragment, every nook and cranny, every inch of my psyche—he believed, and trained me to believe, that he had a right to every thought in my head, every emotion, every instinct. He taught me to believe he (or someone in his employ) was always watching me, and through this training, taught me to surveil myself. A legacy of that surveillance took the form of brutal and byzantine inner critics who contradicted or challenged most of what I thought or wrote. So I learned to write very fast, in order to outrun these challengers—by the time the voice rose up to take apart an accusation I made on the page, I was already onto the next line.

      The chatter of the other cafe patrons, the music pulsing loud and fast through the headphones: these occupied my hyper-vigilant consciousness, so that I could write from the place underneath—from the self that was terrified of exposure, from the well of knowing that had been forced into silence during the years my mother had been married to my stepfather.

      At first, I used the pages to try and make sense of myself—quite literally. After finally escaping my stepfather, I first tried to write down—using the direct, clear, logical language my stepfather had demanded—all that I had been through and was feeling. But the words kept getting muddled. I stopped writing in the middle of a sentence, stuck between what I knew was true and the quarrelsome voice of an inner censor, which sounded an awful lot like my stepfather and challenged almost every assertion I tried to make about what he’d done. I stared out the window at my hale and happy-appearing classmates; why didn’t they have this trouble? I’d lived so long inside the silence, and tangled in the Doublethink and Doublespeak, required of those surviving long-term abuse that I no longer knew how to speak straight-forwardly. My stepfather had forced me to dismantle my own language and desire from the inside out, and reconstruct these in the image he preferred. I didn’t know what anything meant anymore. That’s not exactly true; I didn’t know how to convey the layers of meanings inside my words to anyone else.

      After I told my stepfather that I could no longer “continue our sexual relationship” (that was the language he required us to use) and broke contact with him and the rest of my family, he promised to harm or kill me and those I cared about if I told what he’d been doing. So I did not go to the police and I did not go to therapy. The trajectory of my life upended. He and my mother terminated their financial support for my education, so I had to withdraw from school after the fall of my senior year. I took a job with the on-campus library, went more than a little crazy, drank almost anything I could get my hands on, watched too much Rikki Lake, and wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote. It took almost a year after that terrifying conversation with my stepfather before I could let myself believe that I would not be physically harmed if I told my story to a therapist, and by the time I was able to so, I’d already developed the writing practice that I would use to suture myself back together.

      In working to heal the damage my stepfather did, I haven’t only written, of course. I also, as I mentioned above, went to talk therapy, as well as group therapy, feminist support groups, model mugging and self-defense classes, every modality offering tools I could use to further my healing, my sense of sanity. But my mother and stepfather were both psychotherapists: I understood how the language of talk therapy could be used to undo or contort or ensnare someone’s psyche and sense of self—and though I have worked with kind, smart, wise and generous therapists, I don’t know if I have ever fully trusted that process or relationship, though I do believe in its transformative potential. Writing, however, has been a steady and unwavering companion, able to listen and welcome without transference or countertransference.

      The page has been the place where my whole self could emerge—my complicated, confused, petty, sorrowful, funny, jubilant, desiring, hopeful, despairing, pleased, depressed, hurt, enraged, spiritual, philosophical, playful, curious, certain, and uncertain self. The page introduced me to my human self—utterly imperfect and nonetheless acceptable. The page has been a place for beauty, for grief, for attempt, for starting over. And over. And over. And over. Freewriting is my yoga, my daily jog, my meditation, my spiritual practice—when I go without this writing for too many days in a row, I begin to lose touch with myself, become jagged and short-tempered; I can feel, inside, the shards of me banging against each other. I am too many pieces again, all of them demanding attention, demanding to be true. My sense of wholeness begins to disassemble when I fall out of this practice. I’m cranky, less pleasant to be around, less functional in my so-called adulthood.

      People dismiss writing practice as “just journaling.” I just did so when telling a neighborhood woman about what I was doing here, sitting in the sun across the block from my city’s beautiful lake. She’s been watching me here. She’s small, slender, brownskinned, her hair cropped close to her scalp, wearing Bermuda shorts, a blue T-shirt, and green glitter flats. Her male companion is across the street, sorting recyclable cans and bottles, preparing the many bags to take to the recycling center. She comes over to me and says, “You must be doing schoolwork or something.” I say, “I’m just journaling.” She says, “You must have a lot on your mind then.” I want to invite her to sit with me and write. I know she also must have a lot on her mind. The man across the street makes a noise in his throat when I comment appreciatively on the woman’s shoes, and I am worried that any more kindness I show her will result in some kind of challenge from him when they’re alone. (I never wanted anyone to say anything nice about me in front of my stepfather for the same reason.)

      Just journaling. I don’t say, I’m continuing to teach myself how to breathe into this lifetime. But, for me, that’s what this practice really is.

      •§•

      Over time, my requirements for my writing time loosened—maybe I could go ahead and write if I only had a cheap ballpoint pen. I shifted from expensive unlined artist’s sketchbooks to the cheap single-subject notebooks that I buy in bulk every August when school supplies go on sale. I began to be able to write at home, and, eventually, my startle response softened enough so that I could write in silence—no longer afraid of being heart-poundingly surprised by any sort of noise when I was deep in a write.

      Writing groups helped me learn to write under conditions that weren’t entirely under my control. More importantly, though, is that, throughout, I’ve worked to give my writing what the writing needed. For so many years, I was trained to believe that others’ needs were more important than my own, that my creative or intellectual needs (to say nothing of the need for safety and comfort) weren’t worth respecting. In my stepfather’s house, if he was in the middle of working, he was not ever to be disturbed; woe to any of us who broke his concentration. Yet, of course, no matter what my sister or mother or I were doing, when my stepfather decided he wanted our attention or bodies, we were expected to be available to him.

      After leaving his house, I came to be selfish in my work, to take my time back for myself and this practice.

      Now, I’m in my apartment, writing this in a twenty-minute window just before a workshop is slated to begin. I put on a little Irish fiddle music, and I drop in to the writing. That’s a miracle, when I stop and think about where I began, and is in part the result of these years of practice and patience, the result of giving myself years of care and structure—all the pieces in place just right as I taught myself it was safe for me to go into the dark, to find those stories still hidden, still isolated, still lost.

      •§•

      Think about how powerful it is to share a story, a necessary story. There are stories that live in me as a broken kind of breath because they haven’t yet received the reception I need for them, a sense that they have been truly heard, understood, grokked. Former Poet Laureate

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