Artist Amy Kerr chose me to be a part of her project, I AM MORE (amykerrdraws.org). In it she creates portraits of people who have overcome all sorts of adversity and life challenges and exhibits her work in public places for all to see. She asked for an essay to go along with the portrait – here’s mine:
I am more than a woman who survived the childhood sexual abuse of incest. I am a writer and a leader of writing circles for survivors. In my lucky hours, time is suspended, and I get lost in my words, swimming between my thoughts and feelings discovering just the right word, watching a delicious sentence form herself through my pen. Being able to express myself in these ways is a joy that is mighty hard to describe.
Express is the opposite of repress. And I spent an enormous amount of time and energy repressing all kinds of memories and feelings about the incest – all caused by my father’s harm and my mother’s inability to protect me. My creative spirit was imprisoned deep inside that repression. Understand, the holding back of pain and awareness was nothing short of a way to survive, a way to live as ordinary a life as possible. But in my third decade I came to know that I had to pry open the manhole-cover holding back all that pain so I could get it out of me – drain the swamp to get down to the mud where the lotus of my creativity could finally bloom to her fullest.
Amy asked, “What did you love when you were a kid?” The first memory that surfaces isn’t even mine; it’s my mother’s. She loved telling the story of how I would run into the ocean and tumble in the waves soon after I learned to walk. “You were like a little seal playing at the beach,” was always her closing line of the story.
The beach was on a naval base in Guam. My dad was stationed there at the close of WWII. Mom and I joined him there when I was 8 months old. The start of my life (gestation through the eighth month of babyhood) Mom and I lived with Gram and Gramps on their farm. That’s what I knew, all that I knew – a peaceful harmonious family cocoon in eastern North Dakota. Mom and I entered Guam wrapped in a cloud of innocence to find a violent drunk in our Quonset hut. He would stay that way for sixteen years until Alcoholics Anonymous wrung the booze out of him. But he retained his meanness and abusive nature till the day he died when I was forty-six.
I’m struck by my mother’s recall of the joy I showed. How confused I must have been, little me, certainly bereft of my first home as well as stunned by the chaos that was my father. It brings me to imagine (because I can never know for sure) that it was the beach and the tumbling in the ocean waves that served as a respite for my tiny self. Clearly this experience was imprinted in my very cells because whenever escape is warranted from work or life, it’s the beach, the ocean I long for and do all I can to get there.
Amy also asked, “What unpleasant experiences are you able to handle?” Ah, well, you really should get my book for the full Monty on that. After decades on a healing path I’d say what I’ve come to be able to handle is the negative reactions people sometimes have upon learning about my experience of surviving incest. It took years to even say it out loud because, first of all, for a long time, I could barely handle hearing my own voice saying it, telling it.
I’ve been asked, “Have you forgiven your father? You need to forgive him to be at peace.” I explain that healing is more about forgiving myself – transforming the inner voice of self-hatred into one of self-love.
Then there’s what I call the veiled response. Sometimes, when I disclose to someone, a thin opaque veil seems to close over their eyes – like they’re checking out from the conversation. Clearly, we’re done.
The flip side of these encounters is when I’m approached by someone who’s read my book or blog or seen my play and says, “This is my story.” Or “I never told anyone, but I’m a survivor.” Or “Thank you for what you’re doing, this happened to my sister (or daughter, or brother, or wife, or, or, or…).
And here’s what I say first when someone discloses to me, “I’m sorry that happened to you.” Second is usually, “Thank you for telling me.” Because when a survivor feels believed, their world can begin to feel safer and that can free up all kinds of creativity.
Thanks for reading,
Donna
Caption: Amy Kerr, Artist and Donna Jenson, Subject