After I posted an essay recently about an abusive experience I had growing up, I was seized with guilt and panic. I still have a relationship with my mother and not only do not I think she would remember the incident as I do (she never does), but I know she would never understand the impetus to write about it publicly. I don’t write about my experiences with trauma or abuse to shame the people involved. In fact, that’s part of why I don’t write under my legal name.
Rather, I write about these things in an attempt to process and move past those traumas, and to help other people who’ve gone through similar experiences. Writing about trauma helps me separate it from myself, it shrinks it down from an overwhelming terror to words on a page and it chips away at the stigma of speaking survivorship.
For a long time, my trauma was deeply enmeshed with my identity. I was a victim, then a survivor. I couldn’t separate who I was from what had happened to me. This made it really difficult to think or talk about my experiences without feeling like they somehow reflected on me as a person. I felt guilty and ashamed and embarrassed. Who was I that I allowed those things to happen?
Even though many of my experiences of abuse happened when I was a kid, powerless to stop them and often even kept ignorant of the fact that what was happening was abuse, I…
