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If you’re a writer, you’ve probably heard the phrase “write from the scar, not the wound.” This directive has always troubled me. As if writing from the wound makes one an unreliable narrator. You cannot be trusted. You’re too emotional. When wound becomes scar — however long that process is supposed to take — your story will be more credible.
I google “write from the scar, not the wound,” to see what other writers have said about this injunction. Heather Demetrios argues that “When you teach (or write) from the scar, you've come into some wisdom about something. There's clarity, equanimity. When you write or teach from the ‘wound,’ you're writing from a place of unresolved pain.” As though unresolved pain and wisdom cannot exist side-by-side. Demetrios will go on to explain how writing about pain enables the wound to becomes a scar, and so she revises the phrase: “Write from the wound, edit from the scar.” I’m still not sure that we need to reach the scar to write or edit.
The implication in both pieces of writerly advice is that you can’t be objective or coherent if you’re writing from the wound; that the wound will make your writing too emotional, too biased. You must wait until the wound has scared over; in other words, until you’re Fully Healed™️. But what if there is no Fully Healed™️?
Disability justice activist and author Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarsinha offers a brilliant critique of this ableist version of survivorhood in her essay “Not Over It, Not Fixed, and Living a Life Worth Living.” Piepzna-Samarasinha describes how
“The idea that survivorhood is something to ‘fix’ or ‘cure,’ to get over, and that the cure
is not only possible and easy but the only desirable option, is as common as breath. It’s a concept that has deep roots in ableist ideas that when there’s something wrong, there’s either cured or broken and nothing in between… This belief creates the myth of the “good survivor” who is cured, fixed, over it; and the “bad survivor,” who’s “still ‘broken.’ Still freaking out, still triggered, still grieving, still remembering. Still making you remember. They’re annoying, aren’t they? No one wants to date them. They cry, they have panic attacks, they can’t get out of bed, they’re not ‘over it.’”
Piepzna-Samarasinha wonders about a different world, one in which “crazy was really okay”: “What if some things aren’t fixable?” she asks. “What if some trauma wounds really never will go away–and we might still have great lives?” Alongside her questions, I feel called to pose some others: What if our wounds never become scars? What if we understood that writing from the wound isn’t any less valid than writing from the scar? Trauma, after all, means wound.
A few years ago, after a particularly brutal breakup (which I’ve written about in my book and will be sharing in Friday’s newsletter), a friend of my ex sent an anonymous message to me (though it’s also very likely that it was from my ex). They told me that I should know about writing from the scar, not the wound. That I had made my trauma my whole personality and I profit off of my pain. And then they went on to diagnose me with borderline personality disorder or narcissistic personality disorder. All because I was writing about the breakup, still fresh in the wound. My perspective, my insights, couldn’t be trusted.
Here’s the thing: it’s been twenty-four years since I was raped. I still feel that as a wound. It’s been two years since my brief, six-week long relationship ended via email (the aforementioned brutal breakup). I still feel that as a wound. It’s been nine years since my first non-abusive, deeply supportive partnership ended. Some part of me still feels that as a wound. It’s been twenty years since I was the young girl that my father called “irrational” when I had feelings. That is, very much, still a wound, one I have been working to heal for over two decades.
I feel the injunction present in the question asked by the mother of the speaker in Anne Carson’s The Glass Essay: “That psychotherapy’s not doing you much good is it? / You aren’t getting over him.” Perhaps I am, to borrow Leslie Jamison’s words, a wound-dweller. In her essay “A Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain,” Jamison describes how
“I was once called a wound-dweller. It was a boyfriend who called me that. I didn’t like how it sounded, and I’m still not over it. (It was a wound; I dwell.) I wrote to a friend: “I’ve got this double-edged shame and indignation about my bodily ills and ailments—jaw, punched nose, fast heart, broken foot etc etc etc. On the one hand, I’m like, Why does this shit happen to me? And on the other hand, I’m like, Why am I talking about this so much?”
Jamison responds to her question: “I guess I’m talking about it because it happened. Women still have wounds: broken hearts and broken bones and broken lungs.”
Maybe one day these wounds will become scars. But the fact that they’re still wounds today doesn’t mean that one has a personality disorder, or that you’ve made your trauma your whole personality, or that the words that you’ve written about your experience are inaccurate. And to make that claim of me, or any other writer or artist who processes their heartache and their grief and their trauma through their creative practice is to be no better than those who promote and collude with the medical industrial complex. And it is, quite frankly, harmful.
A loved one of mine recently sent me a poem they wrote, in response to my question: do you really know me? “I know you like / to … Write about wounds / you keep open / why close the thing / that makes you a window / or a door / that swings with the wind / why plug the holes / in your heart.” Their words made me feel so seen.
I am a writer. I write about my life. And my life has been filled with trauma. It would be impossible to not write about these wounds. It would be a lie. Like Jamison, I believe that “Wounds promise authenticity and profoundity; beauty and singularity, desirability. They summon sympathy. They bleed enough light to write by.” And so I write from the holes in my heart, and they transform into windows and doors, welcoming you in, dear reader.
Culture Diary
I truly thought that Nobody Wants This was a movie, and while I’m not upset that it’s a series, I’m halfway through and really feel like it could’ve just been a movie. Not because the series isn’t great — but because I just don’t know where it’ll go in upcoming seasons.
Reading Johanna Hedva’s essay “Sick Woman Theory,” was transformational for me and I come back to it again and again. Hedva now has a book of essays, How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom and I can’t wait to dig in.
I’m new to Suki Waterhouse and have been listening to “Supersad” on repeat and am stoked to listen to the full album, with a title that I’m kinda obsessed with: Memoir of a Sparklemuffin. I’m not great at describing music, but her songs fall perfectly into my fav music category: makes me feel like dancing and makes me feel like crying.
I know that not everyone loves Sally Rooney, but I do. I love her prose, her characters, and their messy lives. Anything she comes out with a new book, like her most recent, Intermezzo, I buy it in the hardcover (do not love hardcover). Haven’t cracked this one yet, so the jury is still out.
I didn’t know who Aubrey Plaza was until White Lotus, and she was my favorite thing about the disappointing Happiest Season. In My Old Ass, she visits her 18-year-old self to offer advice. I don’t wanna give away any spoilers, but at one point in the movie, the 39-year-old Elliott tells her younger self: you were so wise. This movie made me cry, which I wasn’t expecting, but I was 100% here for it.
We all need some levity right now, and Bowen Yang as Moo Deng x Chappell Roan did everything for me. Moo Deng is your favorite hippo’s favorite hippo. Watch it here.
Good survivor vs bad survivor- very helpful!!
As a Pisces with a lot of trauma, 42, and still not "over" my childhood and teenage wounds, I feel seen. Thank you! Also, I am also a Rooney fan for so many reasons that I can't quite contain here, but I have a tattoo of a mason jar as an ode to Normal People and writers which feels right to share here:
“It feels powerful to him to put an experience down in words, like he's trapping it in a jar and it can never fully leave him.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People
Also, sadly Plaza has come out as zealot Zionist, and added another celebrity to the list of folks who I currently can't enjoy. I'm dealing with this in a lot media and not sure how I'll navigate it broadly, but I know right now I can't watch anything with her in it (it's just too hard for me to separate, probably bc I was a low-key fan of hers for so long).