I’ve been through a lot in my life.
That’s a tough sentence to start an essay with, but it’s also true.
When I was 19, my mother died very suddenly in a car accident. As a child, I experienced sexual violence. Following a decade of harmful work, I was diagnosed with a serious mental illness. For a few years, my symptoms were so severe that a normal life wasn’t possible for me. I rarely state these facts so plainly. Usually, I want to soften the experience for the reader. I lead by saying how much I’ve recovered, how happy I am. That’s also true, but my hesitancy to foreground the trauma says something about how we talk about the worst things that have happened to us.
Soon after my mother died, a friend told me that I was living her nightmare. That phrase has haunted me since. It felt profoundly othering. She couldn’t be alongside me in my grief and had to push it away. She didn’t know I’d been sexually abused or that I was teetering on the edge of suicidal ideation. She didn’t know how much I was struggling just to stay alive and upright and walking forward. If she couldn’t handle my grief, I knew she wouldn’t be able to handle the rest. That interaction, and hundreds of others, prompted me to tunnel deeper inside myself. I retreated from the world and lived through many years of intense loneliness and isolation.
Recovery was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It’s probably the hardest thing I’ll ever do.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about moments in life when there’s a clear before and after. When the person you were before the traumatic event is gone, and you have to remake yourself in the aftermath. For me, that’s been about rebuilding in the aftermath of sexual violence, of a brutal, sudden bereavement and a decade of work in an industry that’s supposed to care about making the world a better place, but often does more harm than good.
In an essay I haven’t published yet, I described that feeling as being like the aftermath of a forest fire.
“The earth was scorched, all life extinguished, only a barren, blackness remaining. Scorched land is remarkably fertile. Wood ash contains calcium, potassium, and magnesium which makes it a formidable fertiliser. Other nutrients contained in ash neutralise acidic soils and support new growth. Naturally occurring forrest fires are nature’s way of reinventing itself. From that fertile ground, I grew a new life. It was slow and laborious but I made myself a new home, a new life.”
My version of recovery looks like a changed relationship with food, a different career and a strong creative practice. During the worst years, I wrote everyday. I don’t think I would have survived without it. I returned to exercise. I developed a new relationship with my body. I started volunteering. I came out as queer. I read voraciously. I stopped drinking, not because it was a problem for me, but because it made me feel shitty. I started to teach. I learned to rest, which is much more difficult than it sounds, and tried to be self-compassionate.
I still manage a chronic mental health condition. My symptoms are a fraction of what they once were, but they are still present in my life. I do, from time to time, get profoundly triggered and have to be proactive about keeping myself well. Sometimes, the weight of if it all makes me deeply sad. More often, I’m thrilled to be alive and capable of living a full, messy, complicated life. Recovery was not a passive process of letting time pass and hoping to heal. It is something I built with years of deliberate work. Something which requires maintenance, care and attention.
I’ve been wondering about what is the unifying lens for what I want to say here. Our Substack community is growing and I want to be intentional about what we are co-creating.
I want to write about how we rebuild our lives in the aftermath of serious trauma.
For me, it was grief, sexual violence and workplace trauma. For you, it might be recovery from addiction, from serious mental or physical illness, from deep betrayal or the collapse of a central relationship. It might be about how climate change upended the life you knew, or how you were forced from your home due to violence. It might be the hate you experience as a member of the LGBTQIA+ community, or because you are because you are discriminated against for another reason.
I want to create a space that centers survivors and our experiences. A space that is built and shaped with us in mind. A space that’s free of objectifying pity, however well intended it may be. I want to write about the things that support my recovery: about food, travel, creativity, reading and rest. I want to write about survival as a creative act. I want to share resources. I want to continue writing about how sexual violence is portrayed in TV and film. I want to start conversations about what recovery looks like, a space that celebrates the messy middle when you're striving toward something but don't quite know what. I’m interested in the rich lives that are constructed in the aftermath of serious trauma.
In my past life working in communications for non-profit organisations, I often worked with what we called ‘experts by experience’. They are the people directly impacted by whatever policy we were working on, who could speak about the impact it had in their lives. Working on the campaign to legalise Ireland’s regressive abortion laws, I spoke with women who had been denied the healthcare they needed. I worked with people displaced by war, and those who’d survived unspeakable violence in their own homes. I worked with survivors of sexual trauma, migrants experiencing life-arresting, racist discrimination and people who’d been wrongly imprisoned. These people have a kind of knowledge through lived experience. No matter what challenge we’re facing, the people most closely impacted by it are often best placed to offer solutions. Those voices are often sidelined, but they shouldn’t be. If you ignore the perspectives of ‘experts by experience’, you’re missing an important part of the context.
I’m not a therapist. I don’t have any professional training in trauma or recovery. But I am an expert by experience. I am also - thanks to my whiteness, middle-classness, ablebodied-ness and countless other factors - a very privileged survivor. I want to invite other survivors & supporters into this space, and learn from them. Trauma, especially sexual trauma, is profoundly isolating, but we are not alone.
Early in the pandemic, I had a session with my therapist on Zoom. We were both surprised at how well I was coping. This was not a typical session for us. Most of our time together was spent talking through everyday things that I struggled to manage, but when life as we knew it collapsed around us, I knew how to cope. I wasn’t the only one. Many people who’d survived serious trauma knew how to survive when normalcy evaporated. I remember watching people grieve the years lost in pandemic limbo. I remember their rage when they realised that their lives were suddenly out of their control. “Welcome to the knowledge that your entire life can be wiped out in an instant”, I thought, rather ungenerously.
As political systems swing to the right and wars rage, we need to find new ways to live amidst deep uncertainty. We need to learn to process our grief, pain and trauma. We will need to do it more as the climate crisis intensifies and we’re forced to endure extreme human suffering on this planet. Survivors, as a cohort, have developed a skill set that is very useful in a world of chaos.
When something awful happens, many most people look away. In this space, we go toward the scary thing to see what’s on the other side. I don't have many answers, but I’m eager to dwell amidst the questions.
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I loved reading this post, Clare. So much of what you wrote resonated with me. Thank you for sharing!
total yes to this, we need to hear more from "Experts of experience". Thank you for writing and taking this stand. Beautiful writing too. I especially love this paragraph and the concluding sentence: "As political systems swing to the right and wars rage, we need to find new ways to live amidst deep uncertainty. We need to learn to process our grief, pain and trauma. We will need to do it more as the climate crisis intensifies and we’re forced to endure extreme human suffering on this planet. Survivors, as a cohort, have developed a skill set that is very useful in a world of chaos." You are reminding me of something that is currently simmering away on my back burner..I don't know what it will be yet, a collaborative course, a forum, interactive groups, maybe a series of interviews, where I and whoever feels aligned can offer inspiration and tools for navigating our brave new world.