Published: Sep 27, 2022
When my second publication – you are safe now – was released, it felt like a surreal dream. A poetry collection about the trauma of sexual abuse and its emotional, physical and spiritual aftereffects, I was fully aware that publishing such a personal work would perhaps represent my most vulnerable act thus far. And vulnerability is, by definition, very scary. Vulnerability unleashed in emotionally unsafe, unsupportive environments can be re-traumatising at best and fatal at worst. But vulnerability in combination with safety can be incredibly liberating and healing. And that’s exactly how I felt. I felt that I was safe now, that I had spent a long time working towards a life that felt safe, with people in it who exuded love and safety and security, and so vulnerability felt like the next step in my healing journey.
I’d begun my poetry collection a few years ago, without the knowledge or intention of publishing it. I simply wrote it because it was the only way I knew how to survive at the time – something about the self-regulating act of releasing the tension in my fingertips as I scribbled down the words, something about using a notebook rather than a laptop – an act of creation – and something about being raw and honest, possibly for the first time, was a kind of survival formula for me. I’d stumbled across it. Having studied English Literature at school, I knew that I was particularly partial to the magic of words, but when I wrote my first poems I was studying both psychology and psychotherapy – fields I assumed were far removed from literature. I was not a writer and certainly not an author. And I think that was the point. Perhaps subconsciously, I needed my survival symbol to reside in that which I couldn’t place the expectation of perfectionism onto – an expectation I struggled with deeply at the time. I stumbled across it precisely because it wasn’t me. It was a side-thing, it was something that I did experimentally, and nobody knew about it.
There were many ‘points’ throughout the poetry journey. The point when I first realised that writing was helping me. The point when I realised exactly how it was helping me, when I found that my shame was getting smaller and smaller as I handed it back to where it belonged: outside of me. The point when I first showed the poems to someone. The point when I knew that I’d finished writing them, without knowing how I knew. The point when I decided to publish them. And the many other points when I became more and more convinced that this was truly what I wanted to do. And now, I can sit back and appreciate the feeling of looking around at a room full of people I love at my official launch in West End Lane Books, celebrating with them, and signing copies – and knowing that the version of me who first started writing these poems would never, in her wildest fantasies, have believed this moment was possible.
Speaking at my book launch, I said: “you are safe now began as my survival symbol – something that helped me survive – and now it represents my survival. I really hope that those who read it will take some survival inspiration from it too – I hope that I can hand over that hope to even one person”. This is the duality of what you are safe now means to me. It was, and always will be, something for just me and my healing. But over time, I’ve realised that it’s also about being truthful and vulnerable for others, especially other survivors. And from within that duality, there comes another: I speak the horrors of trauma in their rawest form, whilst simultaneously igniting genuine hope – and doing so without ignoring the pain. The two are interwoven, just as my healing is interwoven with my wish for others to heal too.
Releasing you are safe now felt like a surreal dream for all these reasons. Holding my book in my hand with the beautiful clouds and jellyfish lining the front cover – (another duality, I might add – representing dreamlike safety but also floating in protective dissociation) – and looking at the illustrations that so wonderfully matched my words, it all felt right. Not easy, but right. It felt especially right, and poignant too, to be celebrating my survival symbol during September – marking Suicide Prevention Awareness Month. I truly believe that creative expression, vulnerability in combination with support and safety, good therapy, and time, can all work together towards the powerful accomplishment of survival.
