Kathryn Reiss
Jul 23, 2017 · 2 min read

Hello dear Sarah! I have a few thoughts I’ll share: I don’t think ‘Sewer’ is a separate personality — and I don’t think you suffer from Schizophrenia! I think Sewer is the part of you that felt unclean after having been molested. I think Sewer named herself that because she didn’t understand (being a little child at the time) that she was NEVER dirty. She had NEVER done anything to warrant the molestation; it was completely a crime done by another person… just as much as a home invasion is not the fault of the homeowners, no matter how pretty their home, no matter how much cool stuff is inside. The thief, the intruder, the molester… THEY are the ones committing the crimes, doing the bad deeds, behaving horribly. Your little girl self felt dirty as a sewer, and named herself that… but it’s all just you, all the time, and you are not in the least bit dirty or soiled.

And think of what a sewer actually does. It contains the ‘dirty stuff’ and floats it all out to the big wide sea (okay, now we get into ecology and pollution control and maybe even global warming — NOT the topics I’m tackling here!). But you get the picture. A sewer is sometimes seen as a cesspit, a dump. But it’s not. It’s a waterway, leading somewhere, keeping our cities clean. Sewers often end up at the water treatment plants — where the water is purified, and returned to the lovely, clean resevoir. . So I hope that now your little girl self is growing up, she can let that name slip away. ‘Sarah’ is so much lovelier.

    Kathryn Reiss

    Written by