Some Major Self Care Action!

I’m heading to Costa Rica – it’s medicinal – an elixir for a major piece of work. Listen, the last 18 months have been a mix of something like tornado winds and walking on cobblestones in spike heels. All brand new to me, all pregnant and bustling with surprise, all requiring another kind of energy and posture.

For five years prior I was consumed with writing my book. Revisiting all the hilltops, valleys and swamps of my healing journey – writing about all of that wasn’t easy but it was familiar.

Then – it was done and a whole other experience laid waiting. A completely unknown experience – if I could have just written my way thorough it, told the story instead of having to live it, I would have. But that’s not how you get your writing, your story into the hands you want it to land – face up and smiling.

My best recollection is that it was in the fall of 2015 that Patricia, my editor extraordinaire, introduced me to Steve, saying, “This is Donna and you’re going to publish her book.” I kid you not. That’s what she said and that’s what he did – through his independent press – Leveller’s.

Marketing! How I hated that word, Marketing. It has all the ring of capitalism, consumerism, with lots of snake oil salesman ramma zamma. Since it sounded impossible I knew I needed help. So I sat down and talked to a few professionals. One was a whole group of four people who said they’d be my team for a mere $8K. That would be a “no”.

Despairing, I turned to a friend. I always turn to friends when I’m despairing, clueless and in need of a better direction. This time it was Suzanne, who said, when I turned to her, “Let’s ask the E.D. at a local museum - she’s great and may know someone.” And know someone she did.

Right now my inner critic, Pacasandra, is getting terribly impatient with this dragged out over detailed rendition of history, asking, “Who the hell wants to hear/read a detailed account of all the things you’ve been doing for the past 18 months? Get on with it kid, this story is a snore.”

Too bad, this is how I need to trace it.

So the museum E.D. sends me to Clare in San Francisco with a newly formed practice, helping authors market their books. I may have been one of her first clients, which would explain her $2K estimate for a new web site, a book cover, a marketing plan and a couple other things I can’t remember right now. What actually cinched the deal was when, after interviewing me for half an hour, she said, “Donna, you’ve been marketing for decades, only you call it organizing.”

So off we went, bi-coastally attached at the hip, to make it all happen. Meanwhile I pulled together two groups – over a dozen friends with opinions (FWO’s) and a marketing posse. I turned to the FWO’s for things like the 11 book covers Clare got from her designer, Katie, asking them for their favorite. It wasn’t mine; it was my second choice they almost unanimously chose. So, that’s the one I picked – and ultimately grew to love.

And I started meeting with my marketing posse, Will, Suzanne, Joan, Steve, Chug and Erin. A couple of pivotal moments: in the first meeting I explained I wanted the book to go to as many survivors as possible AND to reach activists and potential activists. Their answer stopped me in my tracks. “OK, you can do that but it will take two marketing plans.” I sneered internally and thanked them for their input, growling all the way back to Mt. Holyoke College, to drop off my intern (oh yeah, I forgot, I did a whole request process with Mt. Holyoke to get Erin in the first place). Anywho, talking with Erin in the car it dawned on me that 1) I didn’t want to do two marketing plans and 2) I should focus on all survivors - the activists would probably eventually find me.

Another moment with the marketing posse was when I tentatively brought up the idea of raising money to send free copies to organizations that worked with survivors. Steve and Will bantered back and forth until they came up with the simple but perfect title for the campaign – the Books To Survivors Project (BTS). The BTS fundraising campaign took one hell of a push – including producing a three min. video.

I had no idea what the hell I was doing but Rythea and Tom did. Hundreds of BTS’s were, and are still, getting sent out – the last batch was sent to a District Attorney’s office in Michigan for a group of gymnast survivors from the L. Nasser sex abuse case. (By the way – I still have some copies waiting to be sent out so let me know if you have a place for me to send one.)

In an oversized nutshell: I did 14 readings – in Western Massachusetts, Boston, Washington D.C., Ft Lauderdale, Miami, Long Island, Chicago, Sheboygan (a town in Wisconsin which included reuniting with my first cousin Linda after 26 years!). Readings were done in bookstores (the worst), libraries, and community organizations (the best). My intern, Erin, had the nerve to graduate and move 100 miles away to go to graduate school. Luckily I found a stellar assistant in Cat who’s teaching me all kinds of stuff about social media and beyond. Four writing/mindfulness workshops were given for survivors; a second video promoting the readings and workshops was produced with the ever creative, Sev, in Florida. I gave a performance of my one-woman show to a conference in Albany, N.Y. filled with advocates and survivors. Amy Kerr did my portrait and brought me into her public art and writing project I Am More. An excerpt of my book is being included in the That’s What She Said spring presentation, a program of the University of Colorado Denver's Women and Gender Center.

Joanne, a veteran journalist, pushed me hard to write an article and get it published in a national magazine before the year was out. Never done that either. I worked for six months, on and off, crafting an article about #MeToo being a good start for opening up exposure of childhood sexual abuse. I sent out a 1864 word article to twelve national magazines – getting back mostly crickets and only two written rejections (though nicely put). Then, when I was just about to give up, let go and submit it to a bunch of blogs in the national Sexual Assault community – MS Magazine came through and published it.

In partnership with my buddy Emily, I’ve sent proposals to three conferences happening in 2019 to do workshops/readings with survivors who work in the sexual abuse advocacy field. And I’ve started conversations about filming my book reading with a live audience to promote to local PBS stations – a great opportunity to offer it more and travel less. Lastly I’ve overcome my resistance to technology-centered communications and organized a pilot online writing workshop that will be another way to reach survivors outside of my home area. We had our first session on Jan. 26th and it was a delight.

Deep breath!

There’s a bunch more I could list but you get the gist – it’s been one hell of a ride. So I’m taking myself to Costa Rica for three weeks – to a little house on a beach. Week one will include two of my dearest friends, Reena and Judy, peer counselors and overall good time gals. Then my darling daughter, Jen, will arrive. It’s a rare delicious treat to have time alone with the one I lived with as a single mom for years. Then my husband Chug, grandson Cole and Jen’s partner, Sev, will arrive for some island frolicking. The last stretch will be just me, Chug and the beach!

I am bringing four books: The Collected Essays of James Baldwin, the Definitive Edition of The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, Upstream by Mary Oliver and Becoming by Michelle Obama. The only “organizing” I will be doing is deciding which book to read and if and when to walk the beach, swim and/or sit and look at the ocean.

Thanks for reading,

Donna

A Photo in Time

I have had the extreme pleasure to be a part of a weekly writers group for over twenty years. Through these years I’ve come to write about my experience of surviving incest both through non-fiction and fiction pieces. Sometimes the fiction can be just as empowering for my voice as the memories. Recently our wonderful leader, Nancy Smith of Shelburne Falls, MA, gave us our starting prompt: “Think of a photograph and enter it.” Here’s what I came up with:

A photograph slipped out of my memory and onto the movie screen that resides on the inside of my forehead. It’s where so much played the two years I did EMDR trying so hard to reconcile the shunning of my family when I came out about the incest.

The photo is black and white, 3”x3” with the date printed in the bottom margin, 1959. I’m seated on our front stoop comprised of two cement steps and a 4’x4’ platform in front of the door leading into the duplex – we were living on the bottom floor.

The sexual abuse had ended though I didn’t know that at the time. I was still keeping vigil through the night – sleeping lightly so as to steal myself if the door to my bedroom should open.

In the photo, a step behind me stands my three-year-old brother, David. I called him Davey. His right forearm leans on one of the posts holding up the roof over our stoop. His left hand rests on my right shoulder; he’s wearing a pullover shirt with wide black and white horizontal stripes, and a white collar with three buttons going down the front, they’re all open.

In his freshly combed hair you can see the neat part on the left that will disappear once he’s off the stoop making a run for it down the front walk. But he never beat me – I always caught up with him before he got to the curb.

We both have short hair. I had just gotten a new and special haircut called a ducktail – though try as I might with the sticky gel the beauty shop lady gave me – my tail would fade and fall within an hour.

I let my imagination take me into this fifty nine year old photograph. First, I stand silently on the walkway – letting the two of us get a good look at the adult me, get a little used to me being there. I don’t want to scare us anymore than we already are cause dad’s still drinking and that’s enough scaring for a couple of kids.

Geeze, writing that phrase – ‘a couple of kids’ –stops me in my tracks. Usually, whenever I let myself glance back at any of those days I think of Davey as the kid. I’m the big sister. But I started being a big sister at the age of nine. That’s two years after the incest started in action. By “in action” I mean my dad probably had predatory thoughts earlier on, before the rapes started.

Anyway, back to the photo. I take a long time approaching us. Davey immediately gives the adult me one of those sparkly smiles of his. But the twelve year old me is not so quick to respond to strangers.  In fact my first instinct is to slide across the stoop and scoop Davey into my lap and wrap my arms around him, which causes him to put his favorite thumb in his mouth and stare up at my chin.

I wait some more. Then in a very soft voice I ask little girl me, “Mind if I sit down here on your stoop?” Little me shrugs her shoulders in an ‘I don’t care’ sort of way. I take care not to touch them, to move slow and smooth, to keep my face at rest – no large grins of friendliness or measured scowls of concern.

Eventually I say, “Hi my name is Donna.” Little me looks up, “Me too.” Her response makes me want to place my palm on her cheek – she doesn’t know what prophecy she’s just uttered – but I don’t. I keep my hands to myself.

I take a deep, quiet breath. Looking down at the walk I tell her, “The worst of what he’s done or going to do to you is over.” I let that sink in. Little me presses her lips together and lets her eyes glance to the side away from me in disbelief. Why would she believe me? How could she believe me?

I keep on telling her what I know, what she can’t yet know, “You are going to get through this. You are going to decide that no matter how hard it feels you are going to do everything you can to heal from all the awful things your dad has done and said to you. And you’re going to heal from the travesty of your mother not ever protecting you. Then you’re going to find the medicine your heart will need when this sweet boy brother of yours  - in a few decades – abandons you for making what he’ll say are false accusations about the man that is father to you both.

You’re going to forget that I came here today to tell you all this – but not completely. A tiny spot in your heart is going to know that you can and will believe in yourself.

The Path

I want to not be writing about all this – the whole Supreme Court nomination debacle that has taken up way too much energy. I want to pay attention to better things: Kind people. Good weather. Leaves reddening like so many surprises. I want to tuck myself into the thought of my grandson – doing anything. Maybe just shooting me a wide smile or, like the last time he visited, stopping in his tracks as he walked in our door, making my heart swell when he said, “It smells the same. I love how this house smells.” 

My immediate world seems to be a strange seesaw of comforting a flock of survivors who are daily triggered out of their minds and wrapping my arms around things that will feed my heart; turning my attention to anything that feels good and nurturing.

 Sometimes everything falls right into place. You reach the airport arrival lane just as they exit the baggage claim door. The baby grabs hold of her own bottle just when the two year old needs pulling back from falling head first onto the coffee table. The check arrives forty-eight hours before the payment is due. You get your period a week before prom.

And sometimes everything falls apart. The biopsy is positive. The apology is rejected. The brakes fail. The pen dries up. They choose him anyway. The therapist gets sick the day your spouse asks for a divorce. The gown rips on your way in.

For sixteen years I’ve been reading Pema Chödrön’s book Comfortable With Uncertainty:108 Teachings. Most mornings I sit on the edge of my bed and read a teaching – they’re only a page long. Each teaching has at least one stark, strong line I’ve highlighted in blue, yellow or pink, depending on which pen is in the basket on my nightstand that year. Why do these lines feel fresh and new each time my eye glides over them? Haven’t I taken them in more than a dozen times – these bubbles popping with wisdom? Why don’t I know them by heart already? I might make a list of the whole batch just to see what they look like together. Would they garner power being in a list together? The power to help me get it? By “it” I mean wisdom. Wisdom enough to not be surprised when people act out of ignorance or meanness. Pema would say that’s all about their suffering.

And if that wisdom of hers really permeated my skin and soul, might I be more at peace in all this chaos? Would I be able to figure out how to drop both ends of this tug of war I can take on between control and surrender? Do I even know what I’m talking about here? I’m trying to sort something out. Sort out how to be happy and mad all at the same time.

Lots of survivor web sites, Instagram and Facebook pages have posted lists of what to do to get grounded when you’re triggered. Or how about, instead, a Galactical Space Force ship descends from Saturn and scoops up all the characters I’m furious with, simultaneously, tonight. No, right now! While so many of us are feeling like deer caught in the headlights of the final Supreme Court outcome heading for us. Oops, I’m drifting far, far away from that smooth Buddhist cushion of peace and deep breathing.

Everyone knows someone who’s got abuse in their history - EVERYONE – whether they know it or not. I am actively grieving the pain survivors are experiencing as loud declarations both condemn and affirm our lived experience. We try so hard to stay balanced in our lives – to not let past crimes and tortures reside in the front of our minds. But the world is exploding with so, so many reminders.

But, listen, while the president mocked our newest warrior, Christine Blasey Ford, the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad for their efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict. And the day before Judge K attacked the Senate Judiciary Committee Bill Cosby was sentenced to prison. 

There was a time when we survivors mostly struggled in small rooms – therapy, support and chat rooms. Now we’re struggling in the New York Times, on CNN, in big ass places. We need to stay alive, stay present; stay centered, in a new world – a world shouting our experience to itself through a gigantic megaphone. Fasten your seatbelts, buckle your life jacket, and put on your goggles, ear and nose plugs and grab hold of your favorite tree trunk. Hunker down when these winds of change and disruption blow 100mph through your world. 

If you’ve been consciously or even sub-consciously on a healing path to get out from under your trauma then you’ve no doubt discovered one or more things that bring you joy. If you’ve yet to choose a healing path well now’s as good a time as any to ease on down that road. I wish I could prescribe the perfect place to go or thing to do to feel comforted in this shit-storm our culture is experiencing. Like – at the next fork in the road you might see, on the left, two long rows of red maple trees reaching their branches across the path to each other, forming a majestic, protective arch for you to walk under. The right side of the fork is a wide open sun filled path with a fawn skipping 20 paces ahead of you. She keeps glancing behind her, looking at you as if to say, “You coming?”

Here’s the thing – I am clueless about which turn in which fork is best for you – only you can choose. All I’ll say is – choose – go, breathe it in, find some peace and, yes, some joy.

Thanks for reading,

Donna