Over the last six months, I’ve experienced significant shifts in my recovery. I’m feeling it in my writing and illustrations, where I’m now able to convey things that previously defied articulation or required 42 million words.

Looking back, my older writing reads almost like an attempt to assemble evidence for litigation. Or a screenplay. Trying with all earnestness to force light onto things that had been kept in the shadows for too long.

And while looking at those things was essential to my healing, part of me desperately needed someone to recognize what I was trying to survive and make sense of.

I was frantic for one fucking witness. Someone. Anyone. To say, “I see it. I saw it. That happened. It was rough and wrong and shitty and painful.”

And if I were really lucky, maybe someone might even have said, “I get it.” Or, “You’re right.” Or, “Help me understand.”

And I would have absolutely settled for, “That shit fucking happened.” “What do you need?”

And it is astonishing to me that today, I don’t think I need that anymore.

I no longer feel terrorized by the need for outside acknowledgment of my experience in order for it to be true or traumatic.

I know what happened to me. I know how it affected me. And somehow, that seems to be enough.

Is this what it’s like to have a sense of self? Or self-worth?

Like maybe I can honor myself and what I know to be true without needing somebody else to affirm it.

So I’ve taken down older writing for examination, saving only what feels useful.

That writing gave me a chance to voice things I hadn’t been welcome to say. Things that had left me feeling silenced and erased and impotent.

I’m not sorry for writing those things. The writing did what I needed. Its work is done. It’s not for the trash, but it no longer interests me. It’s lost its hold.

And I love that.

Have you ever exhausted yourself trying to access the most perfectly accurate words, the ones that couldn’t be disputed or denied, so you could finally get someone to see what happened?

♡