Tag Archives: restorying

everybody is a story

image of women standing around ironing tables, working and talkingThis is one of the quotes I think of when I consider what the Writing Ourselves Whole tagline (restorying our lives) can mean:

“Everybody is a story. When I was a child, people sat around kitchen tables and told their stories. We don’t do that so much anymore. Sitting around the table telling stories is not just a way of passing time. It is the way wisdom gets passed along, the stuff that helps us to live a life worth remembering. Despite the awesome powers of technology, many of us still do not live very well. We may need to listen to each other’s stories once again.”

– Rachel Naomi Remen, MD, from Kitchen Table Wisdom

calling ourselves

graffiti of a woman, facing left, with a word bubble before her, "Who am I?"A dark morning with a bright moon outside, and I’m collected up on the couch with my little candle light and cup of mint-dandelion-green tea. Outside the moonlight is bright through the trees, lightening up the cloudful sky.

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Sometimes I feel like I want this blog to be even more of a resource for those who are survivors of sexual trauma. And then I wrangle with that identity, with even the language there: for us, survivors. When I say survivor, I mean people who have experienced sexual abuse. Other people mean someone who has experienced domestic violence, or someone who has experienced cancer, someone who has had a relative die, someone who lived through a car crash. Survivor means ‘one who lives through affliction’ or ‘one who remains alive or in existence,’ ‘to persist after,’ ‘to remain functional or usable’…

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Why sexuality and sexual trauma writing together, in the same ‘house’?

I still panic, sometimes, talking about the fact that I lead both erotic writing and sexual trauma survivors writing workshops; there’s still that ingrained sense, for me, that these two things just don’t go together. I don’t think I probably need to explain this as often as I think I need to – and yet, every now and again, I dive back into the why.

Why sexuality and sexual trauma writing together, in the same ‘house’? Restorying our sexuality lets us come back here, into our bodies, the site of trauma, the site of violence against us if we are survivors of sexual trauma. Restorying, writing our desire, our history and too our now longing, re-embodies us in a safe-ish way (writing’s not completely without risk, of course: if the writing is to carry and convey the depth and breadth and truth of a story, an experience or possibility and that means the writing needs to be embodied and that’s a big fucking deal for sexual trauma survivors – embodiment). Writing is a way to settle into ourselves, slow back inside our skin – not the only way. One way.

When we write desire – any desire: fantasy or fiction or what just happened this afternoon – we are back in our skin, we experience the want, we feel its flesh and tingle and joy, and, too, struggle and ache and loss and fear. We can write, and so we can feel, a body free of flashbacks – and, too, we are deeply familiar with the truth of an erotic desire riddled with holes and loss and so we can describe it fully, gorgeously, achingly real and hot.

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