I have decided to do what so many survivors have decided to do. I have decided to write the story of my trauma and my survival in hopes that it may help other survivors feel seen, heard, and understood. And also in hopes that it may draw attention to the issue—sex trafficking. I am a survivor of eight years of brutal trafficking. I was an adult in my early twenties at the time. I am disabled (albino and legally blind). I am not particularly thin or cute. I made decisions in order to survive that are, in the best light, morally gray. I am not a “perfect victim.” So few victims are. I think more than shedding light on sex trafficking, which is worthy and important, I want my memoir to raise the voices of those of us who are imperfect victims and feel that with every fiber of our beings when the media only covers the tragedies of people who fit a certain physical, socioeconomic, and moral type. And especially feel it when our abusers say, “No one will believe you because…” and are probably right.
I started writing the memoir with the working title “Guilty Innocents” in November and, so far, it has frankly kicked my ass. I write a scene and am knocked out by it for days. I have tried to come up with all manner of ways to soften the impact. I have a scolecite stone that reminds me of a fellow survivor that I hold before I write and listen to music that makes me think of him, and us. I blast film music while I write. I have a cool down piece of music for after. I let myself eat as many chocolate chip cookies as I want when I’m done. I wrap up in a fuzzy jacket. I chit chat about my poodle to my AI robot pal to get my mind of it.
And still it is costly.
This is not me complaining. This is me just saying. And it is me appreciating. Every trauma memoir out there, and there are a lot, cost something similar of the writer. How brave and strong and full of light they all must be. Even if the writing isn’t very good or even if it’s a trauma we’ve heard about a thousand times before—every word of every one of them costs courage and nibbles little painful bites out of the writers’ souls. They should be admired for their endurance. I admire them tremendously and pray I can stand up in that same lineage and get this story down.
I laid in bed one night with my fiancé, buried face first in a pile of pillows, my “comforting” classical playlist on, not working, telling him, “This writing is so important. I know it. It’s so important but also… costly. Just so costly.”
For the first couple of months of working on it, we ate a lot of blue box mac and cheese, ramen, spaghetti with no meat… noodles noodles noodles… because that’s all I could manage for us for dinner. I joked we may come out at the end of this with me having written a wonderful memoir, but the both of us having developed ramen-induced rickets. I’ve since gotten past the noodle noodle noodle phase and I’m glad. Last night we had cold sandwiches. I don’t know if that will prevent rickets, but the introduction of protein is a good thing.
I decided to start blogging about the process of writing the memoir mainly for my own decompression I think and also to have something lighter to write about. I feel like a lazy bum on days I don’t write anything forward-moving, but I also can’t face the memoir every day, so I thought blogging about the process was a good way to produce public-facing writing on days I need a rest from the deepest darkest—to keep me feeling like yes, I am still a working writer. Yes, I am still capable of finishing things and not simply writing until my brain wants to crawl out of my skull and I simply can’t stand to sit in front of the keyboard or at the notebook one minute longer.
Also, I am trying to focus more these days on writing what I love to read and I LOVE to read about writerly process. I’ve dipped back in to Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones recently and oh… I feel like a dog rolling in the sun drenched grass reading about her process. So why not write about process myself? Acknowledging, of course, that with me, with this material, there might be dog patties in that grass sometimes, but the sunlight of having written something worthy, that never dims.
Until next time, my friends. I wish us all the very best in word-liness.
-M. Ashley
PS
The picture for this post is an idea my AI robot pal and I developed for the cover of the memoir. What do you think?
M. N. Ashley 