Wait—Did That Really Happen?

By Amy Roost

“Nothing has really happened until it has been described.” ~Virginia Woolf

Surely everyone knows the feeling of having experienced something so disconcerting or shocking they ask themselves, Did that really happen? But that’s not what Woolf was referring to. She was emphasizing the describing not the happening.

She was referring to trauma, her own. Specifically, the sexual assault she endured.

I too suffered sexual abuse by my older brother, and for decades I’d described it to no one. The events, isolated in my memory for so long, faded like the dates on a tombstone. I began to imagine I’d imagined it all.

Finally, driving the I-5 south of Seattle, wipers swatting raindrops, my boys both asleep in the backseat, I found the words to tell my abuse story to one person, my other brother. Much to my surprise, he was able to confirm everything that had begun to fade…because he’d been forced to watch.

At last, a hand and a handle to hold.

Words are to memory as breath is to life. In fact, psychologists specializing in trauma have confirmed what Woolf knew experientially: the act of speaking and/or writing about trauma can help the victim heal. Recording the trauma gives it life. Only what’s living can die. Once trauma is alive on the page, we can kill it, like a rat in the kitchen. Once we kill it, we transform from victim to survivor.

Validated, I began to write. Little by little, I described to a broader audience what happened to me as a child, and, later, as a woman. What my brother did. What the nanny did. What the salon owner did. What the co-ed who gave me a ride home from the bar did. What my mother and father didn’t do. What the police didn’t do. What I didn’t do because I knew the police would do nothing.

The more I revealed, the more readers praised me for my honesty, for being “authentic” and “brave.” I began to think of myself this way too. I went from being what had happened to me to being what I did about it.

Not to suggest the journey has been without hiccups. One editor who read a pseudonymous essay I’d submitted responded, simply, Yikes! I interpreted her response not as a rejection—though it was— but as constructive feedback. Her reaction implied that what I’d written was too much for her and, by extension, the reader. I proceeded to restructure the essay from a breathless narrative of brutality to a collage essay that gave the reader more space to take in my story.

Now that I’ve described my abuse and my abusers from every conceivable angle, I’m brushing my hands, packing my tools and moving on; there’s nothing left for me to discover at this excavation site. RIP to the slice of my story upon which so many personal essays dwelled. Like Whitman, I contain multitudes.

Time to write about another me.

___

Amy Roost lives in Bellingham, WA, with her son and grand-boxer. She dabbles in stand-up comedy, runs an estate sale business, and resists being defined by the worst things that have happened to her and the worst mistakes she’s made.