Writing into the Wound: Understanding trauma, truth, and language

IN THE SUMMER OF 1994, I was a rising junior at Yale University. I had already changed my major twice. I began as a premed student, because I had an elaborate fantasy about becoming an emergency room doctor, fast on my feet, saving lives, engaging in torrid affairs with my fellow doctors, sex in on-call rooms, living a grand life. And then I took introductory biology with a professor who told the hundreds of eager students sitting before him that his class was designed to separate the biology dilettantes from the students who had the potential to become doctors. As the semester progressed, I was slow to make sense of the course material and quick to understand that I was one of the dilettantes he was so eager to dissuade from the medical profession.

At the beginning of my sophomore year, I decided I would be an architect. My father is a civil engineer, so I hoped that an understanding of structures was part of my genetic inheritance. I loved my architecture classes. I loved building models and imagining what structures could be. In an urban planning class, I learned about how a city is designed and the importance of green space. In the studio, late at night, I would cut cork sheets with my X-Acto knife, and sometimes my hands. I had good ideas, but I struggled with physics, the laws of gravity, and designing structures that could realistically exist.

I worked part-time in a computer lab in the cross-campus underground library. I loved technical theater and spent an inordinate amount of time on drama productions, designing and building sets, running soundboards, doing whatever needed to be done to make a show come alive from behind the scenes. Finally, at the end of my sophomore year, I settled on English. I loved reading and I loved writing, so surely studying reading and writing would be a natural fit. I moved with a roommate into an apartment off-campus above a small grocery store. I monopolized the phone line and used a modem to navigate the early internet, which is to say I spent a lot of time talking to strange men about sex. I pretended to be anyone but myself, hoping I could lose myself in the virtual world. I wanted to lose myself because I was losing my mind. I was breaking beneath the pressure of trying to be the good daughter and the perfect student when I was so desperately far from perfect. I was carrying a secret and using food to fill an ever-expanding void inside myself. And then, a few weeks before the semester began, I disappeared.

In the ensuing years, my life has changed radically, and so has the world. As I write this, we are in the midst of an intense and seemingly unceasing collective trauma. Donald Trump’s reign as president and the grandest disgrace in American history is just behind us. The world has been ravaged by a pandemic that is particularly out of control in the United States. We have a new president, but a record number of people are going hungry as unemployment rises, along with the number of families falling into