What I’m Thinking About
I’ve been reading about trauma lately (see below), and here’s what now seems irrefutable to me: trauma is not the exception to the human experience — it might be the foundation of it. Socialization itself is a kind of wounding. Culture is a kind of wounding. The family, the school, the state, the church — every system that shapes us also, to some degree, breaks us into a shape that the system can use. What we call “normal” might just be the scar tissue of adaptation. We learn to call the wound a personality. Gabor Maté puts it even more bluntly: the choice we face as children isn’t between authenticity and attachment — it’s that we sacrifice authenticity in order to maintain attachment. We give up pieces of ourselves to stay connected to the people and systems we need to survive. And then we spend the rest of our lives not quite knowing what we gave up, only that something is missing.
This is not a comfortable idea. It’s especially not comfortable if you’re a teacher — if you’ve spent decades inside institutions, believing (mostly) that you were doing more good than harm. It’s not comfortable if you’re a writer, either, because the whole enterprise of making art requires a vulnerability that wounding teaches you to avoid. You learn to protect the wound. You learn not to show it. And then someone says write from it, and your body says absolutely not.
Which brings me to a confession: I finally submitted a manuscript I’d been sitting on. For years, really. The book was ready. People I trust told me it was ready. I knew where I wanted to send it. And I just… didn’t. Day after day. I’d always find something else to do. Grade something. Answer an email. Reorganize my desk. Anything that felt productive enough to justify the avoidance.
I couldn’t name why, exactly. It wasn’t fear of rejection — I’ve been rejected plenty, and that’s not what this was. It was more like: submitting the work meant admitting the work (and the life it describes) is mine. That it comes from somewhere real, and that somewhere is very messy. I was handing someone the wound(s) and calling it art and asking them to hold it. And my body just kept saying not yet, not yet, not yet — until one morning it didn’t, and I hit send, and then I sat there staring at the screen feeling like I’d jumped off something.
Recovery — if that’s even the right word — isn’t a return to who you were before. There is no “before.” There’s only the negotiation between the self that was broken and the self that is being built, however haphazardly that may be.
What I’m Reading
- Trauma and Recovery by Judith Herman. I’m not finished with this one yet, and I’m not sure it’s going to finish with me anytime soon. What surprises me is the prose — how steady it is, how unflinching without being cold. Herman writes the way a good therapist talks: she doesn’t look away, but she doesn’t sensationalize either. And the structure itself enacts the argument. The book moves through the same three stages it describes — safety, remembrance, reconnection — which means by the time you’re deep in it, you realize you’re not just reading about recovery, you’re experiencing its rhythm.
- The Boston Way by Mark Kurlansky. Kurlansky is always good at making you see a familiar story from an unfamiliar angle. The Boston abolitionists weren’t naive; they were strategic, principled, and — Kurlansky argues — prophetic. Their commitment to nonviolence as a methodology rather than a temperament is what stays with me. It wasn’t that they were too gentle to fight. It was that they understood fighting would reproduce the very power structures they were trying to dismantle. There are (of course) echoes of this everywhere right now.
- “Mute Dancers: How to Watch a Hummingbird” by Diane Ackerman. A short essay that does what the best nature writing does: it makes the biological feel spiritual without ever forcing the connection. Ackerman’s attention is so precise — the W-shaped tongue, the eggs the size of coffee beans, the Aztec war god named for these birds — that the metaphors arrive as facts. She tells us hummingbirds are mute, that their voices don’t carry, so they communicate through elaborate aerial dances instead. They perform the essential dramas of their lives through movement, not sound. I keep thinking about that as a writer. What are the things I can’t say out loud that I might be able to perform on the page?
- “One Human Hand” by Li-Young Lee. Lee writes about watching his father paint birds on Chinese scrolls — the ink running past the brush and into the thing itself, the hand moving up and down as if it were the bird in flight. It’s an essay about a dead father, which means it’s an essay about reaching across an unbridgeable distance through the act of making. Lee’s prose has the same quality his father’s painting seems to have had: patient, obsessive, reverent, as if the work itself were a form of prayer. I read this alongside Ackerman and found them speaking to each other — both about creatures that communicate through movement rather than language, both about the sacred attention required to witness it.
Seven Invitations
The goal here is always GENERATIVE, never prescriptive. These are invitations, not assignments.
- Name a system you participate in that you suspect is wounding you. Don’t fix it. Don’t leave it (yet). Just name it. Write it down. Be specific. What does it cost you? What does it give you? Hold both truths at once.
- Submit something. A poem, an essay, a story, a letter, an application, a confession. Something you’ve been holding onto. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It has to be released. Notice what happens in your body when you hit send.
- Judith Herman describes three stages of recovery: safety, remembrance, reconnection. Where are you right now? Not as a patient — as a maker. Is your writing in the stage where it needs to feel safe? The stage where it’s remembering something it buried? The stage where it’s trying to re-enter the world? Write from whichever stage is true today.
- Write about something you can’t say out loud. Ackerman tells us hummingbirds are essentially mute — they perform the essential dramas of their lives through dance, not song. Write the thing your voice can’t carry.
- Practice non-participation for one hour. No news, no social media, no email, no obligation. Not as escape — as principle. Sit with what arises when you stop feeding the systems that feed on your attention. Write about it afterward (or don’t).
- Write a letter to a wound. Not a metaphorical wound — a real one. A specific hurt, a specific moment. Address it directly. Dear scar on my left knee. Dear year I don’t talk about. Dear thing I said that I can’t unsay. Let the wound write back if it wants to.
- Watch someone you love doing something they love. Don’t join. Don’t comment. Don’t photograph. Just watch. Notice the barrier between you. Write about that distance afterward. What lives in that liminal space?