Nowhere does Jen imply or state that recovery through writing will be easy. But the essential initial act of courage, she makes very clear, is to break silence. And the first effective step toward recovery may in fact be breaking one’s own inner silence, privately by writing, or openly by writing and reading aloud in a supportive group.
No writer before Jen Cross, I believe, has made that fact so irrefutably clear. And no writer before her has translated their own deep experience of trauma and recovery more passionately, more beautifully, more richly with quotations from other writers, medical professionals, philosophers, and poets.
Writing Ourselves Whole is cause for celebration. Its time has come. It will be an invaluable training and tool for both professionals dealing with trauma survivors, and for survivors looking for a private and/or beginning revelation of their own stories.
Amherst, MA
May 2017
To write is to enter the mess, is to spill out all your syllables, is to devil the precious eggs everyone else treads so carefully upon. Writing opens the wound, lets in oxygen and releases pus, helps me breathe again, I mean, breathe with gills & webbed toes, breathe against the tide that’s coming in, breathe through the mountains of fear I live within. To write is to enter the fuse, electricity on my lips, close the circuits, let sparks fly—to write is to see what I forgot I was thinking, is to be unstable, grammatically incorrect, metaphorically questionable. To write is to pass the words forward, to dance around old truth, to hunger with pen and ink, to kill him over and over, that he who is only saved by the unmentionings, the unsaying, the not speaking. To write is to tell about his mustached grin, the taste of his tongue, his grey belly—when I set these truths to paper, I make his monstrosity visible, familiar: one more regular old child molester. I lift up the rock he turned himself into when he lay upon me and reveal the white grasses, tiny bugs, balled-up roly-polies, ants, beetles with shiny stained wings—all the life still making a way down here.
Down here. To write is to go down, go in, to emerge with handfuls of something I smear on the page. I don’t stop to read, reflect, reinterpret. I just stain what was empty, secrete the silenced, and move on with more handfuls. To write is to mix up the wheat paste and poster the neighborhoods of my frightened inside corridors with noise & mess, to blur all the boundaries, remove and muddy the sharp crease between my good girl surface and the difficult things inside. To write is to lose track of identities, to loose tense muscles around neck, shoulder wings, belly, coccyx, thighs, to set vowels and variables into those muscles, transcribe a new calculus and slope new languagings for ease to ride itself upon into this swollen, unbreakable being.
This is what writing does. It marks up what we work so hard to make smooth, it pulls tight all the lines cast forth from within us, knots together past present future, opens space and time to release the brilliant catastrophe we were meant to be. Our skin, this singular organ, contains every possibility we ever laced with might have been and the writing sets all that possibility free, helps it step ginger or fierce into the world, to discover ourselves again. (2002)
•§•
Why do so many of us who have suffered something unspeakable turn to blank pages, pen in hand or fingers on keyboard, reaching for the words to describe, clarify, or explain what we’ve been through, even if only for ourselves, even when we never expect to share those words with anyone else?
If you have written about or out of a place of shame or loss or trauma, you have your own answers to this question. Since I began offering writing groups for trauma survivors in 2002, I’ve found that when survivors write the true and complicated stories of our lives, our perception of our lives expands, shifts, opens and transforms—and when we share these stories with our communities, we are no longer alone with the many secrets we’ve carried for so long. Other survivors listen to our writing and treat us like creative beings whose words have power and make a difference, rather than responding to us like the terrible people our perpetrators convinced us we were. That reception changes everything.
The writing fingers open the tight fist of power and control and drops us out the writing opens up a chasm the writing throws over a bridge the writing topples buildings, walls and boulders fall steam risesthe room opens. The body opens. The future opens.
•§•
As a writer, workshop facilitator, and survivor of sexual abuse, I’ve witnessed first-hand what happens when survivors create the space (on the page, in our lives) for the whole of our stories, especially the stories that stick in our throats, the stories that hide under our lungs, behind our eyes, between our legs; the stories we aren’t supposed to tell because our families don’t want to hear them and/or our communities can’t hold them with us—or at least we don’t believe they can. All of us who are trauma survivors know: there are the stories we tell and the stories we don’t tell. There’s the trauma story that we have rattled off so many times that it rolls from our lips in one continuous breath, so polished and packaged we can barely feel it anymore, the story that is neat and clean and careful not to make anyone too uncomfortable—and then, underneath that, are the messier stories of our violation and survival, the many stories we never tell anyone, the parts that are still raw and throbbing and sore, wounded and tender and fragmentary. These are the stories that don’t fit into a “good survivor” identity. These are the parts of ourselves that we’re sure will get us turned out of our communities: stories of the things we did to keep ourselves alive, stories we fear make us as bad as our perpetrators. There are stories of what we long for, the desires and hungers we hold under our tongues, afraid of what it says about us that we want anything at all. The carefully-rehearsed trauma stories are only the tip of the iceberg that is our complicated, tangled, gorgeous human self. When I talk about writing ourselves whole, I mean writing out of the undulant enormity under our smooth surfaces, in order to bring forth shards of our as-yet-unarticulated real stories and selves.
First Nations writer Thomas King, in his beautiful book The Truth About Stories, says, “The truth about stories is that’s all we are.” In my twenty-some years recovering from sexual violence, using writing practice as my primary medicine and splint, I’ve found that writing—first freewriting alone, and then writing with other survivors—is a way to give myself the language for the stories I believed couldn’t be told: the trauma stories I hid (or hid from), the desires I was afraid to articulate, the parts of myself and my experiences I trained myself never to speak.
•§•
I started journaling in 1993, when I was twenty-one years old and breaking away from my stepfather after nearly ten years of ongoing sexual, psychological, and physical abuse. As often as I could, I took refuge in local café, where I bought a large, dark roast coffee, and popped a tape into my portable cassette player—Ani DiFranco, Erasure, Zap Mama, The Crystal Method—slid my headset over my ears, folded the notebook open to a new page, uncapped my pen, wrote things I thought I’d never be able to say out loud. I spent years doing this, my butt planted in a wooden chair in some coffee house or other in Northern New England or around San Francisco. This is the way I found my tongue again. I wrote through the numbness that kept me protected—through writing I could feel the sadness, despair, depression, rage. The emotions had a weight and a shape once they found their way into words, whereas, inside me, they had all tangled together into a single inarticulate mass. There were few days I didn’t break through into tears while I bent over my notebook at that corner table in the back of the cafe.