Status Updates From Writing into the Wound: Und...

If I could impart to my students—to anyone who wants to write about trauma, really—one thing, it would be to make the incomprehensible comprehensible, to create a space within a narrative for both the writer and the reader to see themselves, to understand something necessary about themselves.

there is no singular way to write about trauma, and that sometimes to write about trauma did not require excavating intimate details…The nature of the abuse, the severity of it—these things are clear, but she offers not one explicit detail. When I first read the memoir, I admired that restraint, that dignified discretion, that ability to protect herself while still telling the whole of her story, on her terms

events don’t have cause and effect relationships the way you wish they did. It’s all a series of fragments and repetitions and pattern formations. Language and water have this in common.

Excerpt from: "Writing into the Wound: Understanding trauma, truth, and language" by Roxane Gay. Scribd.
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Read this book on Scribd: https://www.scribd.com/book/490048177

"I began to realize that whether I wanted it or not, I had a responsibility not only to myself, but to my readers who, in response to my trusting them with so much intimacy, asked me to trust them with their own intimacies. I realized that when writing about trauma, you have to be prepared to handle not only your own trauma but being exposed to the trauma of others."

"After resisting, she did eventually apologize, though it was clear she had no idea what she was apologizing for. The apology was hollow. The damage was done. I had to live with it all, while trying to hold my head high, at least in public."

this book is so short and I'm highlighting like half of it lol

"I knew I needed to thicken my skin to withstand it. I did not know if I could."

"I didn’t tell anyone for years, even though it was painfully clear that something was wrong. In an instant, I became a stranger to everyone who knew me. I became a stranger to myself. I had no idea how to explain who I was becoming. I had no idea how to keep myself from shattering, so I did. I shattered, but my skin hid all the broken shards of who I had been. It was easy to hide in plain sight."