Self-Care to Conquer the Struggle

Today, we conclude our series with Jen Cross. In this final post, she dives into writing as self-care and the struggles that come with that.

---


It’s late where I am, on a Sunday. Outside, the evening is quiet — no birds chirping an odd night song, no owls, no turkeys announcing their victory over our November feasts. No sirens, no voices of neighbors, no train whistles, nothing. The only sounds are the clicking of these keys under my fingers, the quiet music streaming from my laptop, and the slow, persistent tick-tick-tick of the analog clock I have sitting up on the bookshelf behind me. Oh, and there goes an airplane overhead.

What are the sounds where you are right now? If you close your eyes, take a deep breath and then pause, what can you hear?
Sometimes I have to go back to the beginning. In the aftermath of this election, this might be one of those times to go back to the beginning. To go back to where I started with writing, to go back to the page, the pencil, the play. There’s supposed to be play in there somewhere, isn’t there? To return to writing as a place of radical self care.

In the beginning, I wrote my body. I wrote from the five senses: what I saw, what I heard, what I felt, what I smelled, what I tasted. I wrote what was immediately around me. I wrote what was on my table in the cafe, what the people at the next table were saying to one another, what the room smelled like when the back door opened and a blast of winter blew in; I wrote the concrete physical details of my immediate present. 

This helped to ground me, to get me into the now, to remind me that I was not lodged in my past, no matter how often I felt that way. And then, through focusing in on these specific details, I was able to write enough to be able to drop into something deeper — I could imagine a story, or to float back to a “time before this time” (as Pat Schneider likes to say it in her writing prompts) to write from a memory, knowing always I could return to these concrete physicality's: the taste of cooling coffee on my tongue, the way my neighbors purple puffy jacket had slid off the back of her chair and was about to slide onto the floor, but she wasn’t paying any attention to it because some guy had bumped into her and it turned out to be the guy she’d been flirting with — anyone could see she liked him by the way she looked away from him and studiously ignored his presence.

That is to say, I could come back up from the details of the past into the reality of the now, could move through time on the page.

What are the smells around you right now? What’s the last thing you tasted?

Going back to the beginning means returning to writing as a place to be free, a place to explore and play, particularly when the notebook has become a site of hazard and panic, when every time I sit down to write, I think, I've got to say something Important! I have to write out the hardest story now. I have to tell a real truth. I have to get into the pain, the anger, the hurt, the confusion, the ache, the loss, the panic, the fear… and after too many days, weeks, months, years of expecting that sort of writing from myself, I get less and less inclined to sit down at the page. You might not be surprised to hear that. Instead, I want to watch something ridiculous on tv, or take my dog for a long walk through the live oak grove up the hill a ways, or make another loaf of bread. Anything but write more hurt.

The trouble is, there’s a lot of hurt to write these days: my own, my communities’, my friends’, my country’s. And so I can get to a kind of impasse.

Do you ever find yourself in a situation like this, where the thing you’ve done to take care of yourself, the practice you’ve turned to for solace and clarity starts to feel somewhat radioactive, less like a space of invitation and creativity and more like a have-to, a should, an ought? 

I dunno about you, but there’s a 12-year-old girl inside me who’s not so fond of should's and have-to's, and rolls up our words and goes home, decides to quit playing if writing can’t be play at all any more.

Radical self care is a phrase I first heard in activist communities, for those of us who have been convinced or who convinced ourselves that self care is for the weak, or is indulgent, or maybe is ok for those folks over there but we, well, we have to finish this grant proposal and then write those last three poems we said we’d send to that community chapbook and then put the finishing touches on the podcast we promised to do for our friend’s organization and then do our shift at the crisis hotline and then and then and then … when the revolution is won, then we can take a break for some self care. 

But the revolution isn’t ever won; our job isn’t even about win. Our job is to stay in the struggle, and in order to stay in the struggle, we have to take care of ourselves. We have to sustain ourselves — that sustenance, those things we do to nurture our revolutionary bodies, that’s radical self care. Sometimes we have to step away from the work and give ourselves time to play, to rest, to ease, to laugh, to sing, to dance, to create, to remember what sort of life we’re working for in the first place.

When the revolution comes, what sort of life do you want to be living? What happens if you take the time, at least once a day, even for just a few minutes a day, to live that life now? How will you work? How will you play? What if you set a timer for ten minutes and wrote—try not to think too much about what to say, try not to censor yourself or edit or make yourself write it “right,” 'cause there's no such thing here—about what that life will look like, feel like, smell like, taste like, sound like? 

Follow your words wherever they seem to want you to go. And when the timer goes off, pick up the pen, take a deep breath, and maybe do something really nice for yourself—spend a few minutes snuggling with your pup, read a favorite poem, play a favorite song, or call a good friend who you haven't talked to in ages.

Be easy with you, ok? And thank you, today and on all the days, for your good, good words.

---

A widely-anthologized writer and performer, Jen Cross has written with sexual trauma survivors and other writers for nearly fifteen years. In 2003, Jen founded Writing Ourselves Whole, an organization that offers transformative writing workshops, creating spaces in which the true and complicated stories of the body can emerge. Jen’s fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in over 30 anthologies and other publications, including Nobody Passes, The Healing Art of Writing 2010, make/shift, Visible: A Femmethology (Vol. 1), and Best Sex Writing 2008. She's the co-editor of Sex Still Spoken Here (CSC Press, 2014). Jen is currently an MFA candidate in Creative Nonfiction at San Francisco State University. Find out more about Jen at writingourselveswhole.org.

Giving Thanks & Finding Gratitude as a Survivor of Abuse

Today, we continue our series with Jen Cross, who shares with us a special tradition for this time of year for finding grace and gratitude even as we cope with abuse or perhaps sit down to meals with those who have harmed us.

---


This past Saturday I gathered with seven other writers in a small conference room in downtown San Francisco and there we wrote and read aloud to each other as the rain fell outside, as the day opened its mouth into the afternoon, even as protestors marched up Mission Street, hollering, chanting, blocking traffic, taking up space. We wrote by way of our own protest, claiming and reclaiming our many possible voices, making room for the wise and the weird, the honest and the playful, the sensuous and the necessary.

At the breaks there was conversation about this post-election world we now inhabit, about various forms of self-care (reading, too much bad tv, travel, communion with like-minded others in resistance and rebellion, and, of course, also writing) – then we refilled our coffee or tea cups, brushed scone crumbs from our notebooks, and wrote some more.

As I sat in this roomful of writers, I found myself grateful: for their willingness to give over a Saturday afternoon to writing in community; for their creativity and words and risk; for their generosity with one another as they listened and offered feedback; for their humor and silliness and camaraderie at this time of great national turmoil; and did I say for their words?

I close every workshop session with a poem, a practice that I borrowed from a dear friend and colleague Chris DeLorenzo of Laguna Writers in San Francisco. On Saturday, I closed the writing group with the W.S. Merwin poem “Thanks,” as I do every November. It is my one annual workshop tradition. Some writers have read the poem around in my groups several times over the course of these years since I first read it. 

Can I find the words to tell you exactly what I most love about this poem, why I return to it over and over? I love it for its form—the breathlessness, the run-on sentences, the fragments of thought. Yes, there's irony here, but I read this poem through the lens of trauma, and so for me, the piece reads as one of the best articulations I've ever seen of trauma gratitude: the recognition of the horror around us all of the time and the way we — many of us, at least — find ourselves grateful anyway, grateful in spite of grief and war, in spite of how very bad things can get. 

Those of us reading this blog know some of the ways this world, and the people in it, can get very bad indeed.

I bring the poem every year because, for me, the poem exemplifies my relationship to the US holiday of Thanksgiving. We are supposed to give thanks for our blessings, to hearken back to the early days of our country’s history, a time when (the story goes) the pilgrims and Indians sat down together and broke bread, supporting each other. We are supposed to deny our real history—forget genocide and 500 years of occupation—and so this has always been a national day of cognitive dissonance. Those of us who have experienced violence and abuse and denial and secrecy at the hands of our families have an added layer of complication to navigate on this day. We know very well how to pretend like everything is all right, and we also know the deep damage that such pretending can do.

Merwin's “Thanks” is a poem that speaks to this complication, this cognitive dissonance that so many

human beings experience: even though we know everything is not fixed, or even fixable, we find ourselves grateful for something, many things, every single day: grateful for poetry, for laughter, for the flow of one word after another, for rhyme, for the way an unfamiliar metaphor can shock us awake in delighted surprise, for a rainbow over a supermarket parking lot, for resistance, for the smell of bread baking, for the noises of joy a dog makes when you scratch her head just above the eyes, grateful for anger and for the ability to cry as hard and long as we need to, grateful for cuddling on the couch after a long day at work, grateful for the taste of an apple, a fresh cup of coffee, for the wet purple Japanese maple leaves shellacked by rain to the sidewalk, for the smell of eucalyptus or snow, for that one song that brings tears to our eyes every time we hear it, for one good memory from childhood, for the ability to tell the truth(s) about our lives, for the minor scale in a favorite song, for the one bird who keeps on singing long after the sun has set, singing its clarion song into the night, even when every one of his brothers and sisters has fallen silent — for this song, for so much small and not so small at all, we are, paradoxically and continually, grateful — even though it’s true, as the poem says, everything is breaking.

This is not easy or simple gratitude: this gratitude is hard-won, is survival at its core.
May you find space for the paradoxical human gratitude that lives in you this week, even as you also make space to tell the difficult truths we are living in these days, personal truths and civic truths alike. May you find space for some words to flow on the page. May you feel, from my screen to yours, the gratitude I feel for your words as well,




Thanks 
W. S. Merwin

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
smiling by the windows looking out
in our directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is


From The Rain in the Trees (Knopf, 1998)

Read Part 4...

---

A widely-anthologized writer and performer, Jen Cross has written with sexual trauma survivors and other writers for nearly fifteen years. In 2003, Jen founded Writing Ourselves Whole, an organization that offers transformative writing workshops, creating spaces in which the true and complicated stories of the body can emerge. Jen’s fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in over 30 anthologies and other publications, including Nobody Passes, The Healing Art of Writing 2010, make/shift, Visible: A Femmethology (Vol. 1), and Best Sex Writing 2008. She's the co-editor of Sex Still Spoken Here (CSC Press, 2014). Jen is currently an MFA candidate in Creative Nonfiction at San Francisco State University. Find out more about Jen at writingourselveswhole.org.

Writing to Feel Whole in Times of Trouble

Today, we continue our series with Jen Cross, who shares how writing has helped her navigate these turbulent times.

---

It's been hard to write this week. I sit down to the notebook and my words dry up. Are you triggered in the aftermath of this election? I know I am. I feel as though I’m watching my abusive stepfather given the keys to the castle, like he’s the one who just won the presidency, like he's the one that my fellow Americans actively chose to support.

I sit down to write, and what floats behind my eyes is: What words are there to say? What difference does it make if I write or don’t write, if I speak or don’t speak? I spoke before the election, didn’t I? And what good did it do to tell?

I put down the pen, turn back to Facebook, begin to scroll through the most recent atrocities, overwhelm myself to numbness.

The day after the election, I did write. I wrote how angry I was. Anger feels more powerful than fear or grief— old grief, I mean. The grief that still lives in my body, in my lungs and liver, the grief that lives under my tongue and behind my heartbeat. The young girl asking, the teenage girl asking, “Why do you choose him? Why do you believe him? Why don’t you believe me when I tell you he is hurting me? Why are you questioning me, telling me guys are just like that, telling me I need to change my attitude, telling me he was only trying to help, telling me it didn’t go the way I said, it couldn’t have gone the way I said, telling me I need to calm down — it couldn’t have been as bad as I’m making it out to be.”

I didn't write how scared I felt, how exposed, how vulnerable. I didn't write into that big question—why the abuser is chosen so often, it seems, over the one(s) they abuse?

I didn’t write about those things. I wrote rage, and then I stopped writing.

It’s an old silencing, an old quieting of the fingers, of the tongue, of the mouth — and old muteness that takes over at times like these, when what gets triggered is that old feeling of hopelessness and utter impotence.

We fought so hard. So many of us fought so hard. And still — this. Still, the abuser won.

The muteness says: nothing you say is going to make any difference. Your words aren’t important. Your voice doesn’t matter. No one can hear you — and if they do hear you, they’re not going to understand, or they’re going to downplay or deny, or they’re going to tell you right to your face to shut up.

The muteness is an old self-protection strategy. It says: Keep quiet if you want to get through this relatively safe. Swallow your screams and shouts. Swallow your rage. Swallow your indignation and disbelief. The psyche taught us something important in those years we were surviving abuse, many of us. It taught us not to speak. It taught us so many different ways to keep silent.

We come to believe the story that our muteness tells: that our voices were stolen, that our voices were taken from us.

More often, though, the truth is that we are ignored. Our voices work fine. We say no, and are ignored. We act out, and are punished, and ignored. We sometimes tell directly, and many of those tellings are ignored — and then we get in more trouble (as this new ostensible-president has threatened to sue those who have come forward with stories of his abuse, harassment, and violence).

After years of being ignored when we who have survived child sexual abuse tell (in all of the brilliant and creative ways we do tell) what was being done to us, we so often internalize the story that we are without a voice. Isn’t that easier to believe, easier even to live with, than the reality that our words and our behavior was actively ignored by those non-perpetrating caregivers and other adults who were supposed to be paying attention, supposed to be protecting us? Supposed to be listening to us?

This week, that old deep loss has gripped me every time I think about writing. And so I force myself to do it. I make bargains, promising myself I can go back to the bad-tv reruns, the bag of popcorn, after my three or five pages. Just write. Just let the words come. I am “making” myself do it because I know I will feel better, more whole, and more sane on the other side. I will feel less impotent, even.

The writing doesn't fix everything. It doesn't change what happened. But writing gives me back more of my whole self in this aftermath.

In the process of freewriting, I feel my power return—even just slightly. Just a wave of possibility. I

remember how loud my voice is, and was. I remember how eminently capable I am of telling my own truths, and in how many different ways. I remember that I can poetry my truth, I can testimony my truth, I can metaphor my truth, I can song my truth, I can nonsense my truth, I can fragment and I can puzzle it back together. I remember that no one can tell me how to tell my own story, how to language my own emotions, how to word what I was told (both directly and indirectly) never to speak.

And in the writing, I feel a little more whole – a little more broken, too, sure, but also more complete, more honest, more present.

One of the prompts I return to often, when I want to get a freewrite going, is “What I really wanted to tell you was...” or “What I really want to say is....” and then just following the writing however it flows. If I get stuck, I repeat the prompt. Write it again: What I really wanted to tell you was... Some days it works better to write it in the third person “What she really wanted to tell you was, or what he really wanted to tell you was, or what they really wanted to tell you was...”) I try to keep writing, not to stop to edit or correct: this notebook writing that I'm describing, it's not for anybody's eyes but yours. This isn't for a Facebook post or a blog. That writing can come later. These words right now, these tellings, these are all for you, allowing to flow free and powerful that voice that has been within you all along.

Thank you for all of your words in these difficult days – the words you write, the words you don't write, the words still tucked beneath your breastbone, waiting for the time when you feel it's safe enough for them to come out.

Read Part 3...

---

A widely-anthologized writer and performer, Jen Cross has written with sexual trauma survivors and other writers for nearly fifteen years. In 2003, Jen founded Writing Ourselves Whole, an organization that offers transformative writing workshops, creating spaces in which the true and complicated stories of the body can emerge. Jen’s fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in over 30 anthologies and other publications, including Nobody Passes, The Healing Art of Writing 2010, make/shift, Visible: A Femmethology (Vol. 1), and Best Sex Writing 2008. She's the co-editor of Sex Still Spoken Here (CSC Press, 2014). Jen is currently an MFA candidate in Creative Nonfiction at San Francisco State University. Find out more about Jen at writingourselveswhole.org.

Writing Was the Place Where I Could Be Free

Today, I have the pleasure of introducing you to Jen Cross, amazing woman, advocate, survivor, and writer. I'm so excited to bring you this month's series in which we will explore healing through creativity.

---

For nearly 15 years, I have worked with survivors of sexual abuse and others to find words for the stories they held in their bodies, in their hearts, in their hurts. I have led writing groups in which folks could put into words the unspoken, the unspeakable, and begin to experience themselves as creators as well as survivors.

As a survivor, writing has been the first, most consistent, and safest healing practice for me — before therapy or even talking with best friends or lovers. I write first, to figure out what it is I want to say to best friends or lovers or therapists. Writing was the way I thought, learned, grew.

Since 1993, I've gone to the notebook when nothing made sense, when everything felt wrong, when I was falling apart, messy, confused, scared, triggered, ashamed, excited, overjoyed, afraid — there were almost no circumstances under which I didn’t want to be writing. Writing helped me to make sense of myself. 

By the time I was in my mid-twenties, I was getting up every morning at 4:30 or 5am just to have quiet time by myself, alone with candle and cup of coffee and notebook, writing into the stories of my adolescence, writing into a future I was only just beginning to allow myself to imagine. I like the ritual of it, and by that I mean regular practice, and a sense that inherent in that regular practice was some devotion to self and space. For me, this regular practice of morning writing is a way to reaffirm my dedication to writing — a way to say to writing, “my first and best breaths are still yours.”

Writing saved my life. Isn’t that true for so many of us? If I hadn’t had writing as an outlet back when I was twenty-one and trying to figure out what had really happened to me, once I got away from my mother's second husband, the man who’d been sexually abusing me, I don't know what I would have done, or who I would be now.

I was someone who’d been trained to trust no one, and did not open my deepest thoughts to even my most significant others. The safest place for me, at least in the first years of my healing work, was the page. I wanted there to be a record of what I’d experienced, what I’d done and what had been done to me. The notebook was a place for me to rage, to ask the questions no one had answers to, to say, exactly, all the secrets that his abuse had force fed me.

To this day, writing helps me to figure out what I know, what I think. I follow the philosophical lineage of Natalie Goldberg, freewriting daily, following any surprising or ridiculous thought, getting it down onto the paper and moving on, not stopping to analyze or decipher: just writing, just writing, just writing. This transformative writing practice is my exercise and meditation, it’s possibility and dreaming, it’s sometimes just working my way to get through the mire of my survivor's mind.

Transformative writing is writing that changes you in the process of its creation. A dictionary gives one definition of transform as “to change completely for the better.” Another definition: “to convert one form of energy to another.”

Writing that’s transformative is writing that surprises the writer as it’s emerging. It’s writing through which the writer maybe learns something about themselves on the other end. In my experience, there’s much writing that’s transformative. Freewriting as a practice works well for me, when I can let the writing come, can get the editor out of the way and discover after I’m done what it was that I was trying to say.

In my experience, a transformative writing practice like this one opens us up. It teaches us that we do have words (even when we have been/felt silenced, been told not to speak, or not been given the words to express what we were going through). We have body and words, a body of words, we have words of our body, we have language to describe what has happens to us, what we have experienced, what we have been. We move from silence to storytelling, and storytellers are beautiful and necessary in this world. Writing is a way to put words to things that were never meant to be spoken – and, in so doing, to undermine, one word at a time, the isolation and shame that makes rape culture possible. So thank you, thank you, for your words.


Read Part 2...

---

A widely-anthologized writer and performer, Jen Cross has written with sexual trauma survivors and other writers for nearly fifteen years. In 2003, Jen founded Writing Ourselves Whole, an organization that offers transformative writing workshops, creating spaces in which the true and complicated stories of the body can emerge. Jen’s fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in over 30 anthologies and other publications, including Nobody Passes, The Healing Art of Writing 2010, make/shift, Visible: A Femmethology (Vol. 1), and Best Sex Writing 2008. She's the co-editor of Sex Still Spoken Here (CSC Press, 2014). Jen is currently an MFA candidate in Creative Nonfiction at San Francisco State University. Find out more about Jen at writingourselveswhole.org.