The Blog
The Body as Prewriting
A somatic writing practice for trauma-informed writers
A somatic writing practice for trauma-informed writers
This week is writing trauma, but also creating joy.
Have you ever sat down to write about something that happened to you and your body icicled? Or your mind F1'd, looped around the track, and spun out on 3 wheels? Or you suddenly needed to do laundry to make sure that Mickey Mouse t-shirt you got in 1996 is really clean instead. After all it's been in dusty moving boxes and closets since.
That is not writer's block. That's your emergency system fire alarming.
Writing directly can sometimes be retraumatizing. Your body may have been broken in the past, but you are not. There are other ways into the writing. You can braid the story inside a myth. You can compress it into six words. You can change the genre or the point of view.
Hannibal Lecter was the first true approximation of my mother that I witnessed on screen. Sociopathic or supernatural horror villains captured the predatory threat of my mother better than any dysfunctional family drama. A video on emotional abuse in my 8th-grade health class was the first time I was able to directly label my mother's behavior as something dangerous. I had always known that things were not normal. But I couldn't name it.
Writing in the horror genre allowed me to craft narratives that gave me control over my monsters and begin to slay them from my life.
The surreal and the haunted were easier ways into my trauma than hyper-realistic narration. It is easier to be bitten by a vampire than a mother.
Adapted from ideas I first explored in my Psychology Today interview about Gellar Studies and pop culture as a survival tool.
If the horror genre was how I learned to write what had happened to me, the hairdresser's chair was where I learned to see who I was becoming.
"Cut my hair like this," I said. I showed the hairdresser a photo of Sarah Michelle Gellar on my phone. "If you can make me look like this I'll pay you double," I joked.
I hadn't gotten my hair cut in 10 years. Some oak root shame from wishing I was a woman most of my life. Hair was deeply tied up in that for me.
I don't feel like a woman anymore. At least not all the time. But I am starting to feel real. Like a person. Like me.
The hairdresser explained that to look like Sarah will take some time. But she explained how to do it. She took her time. And she never mentioned that I was holding a photo of a woman. No comment on my desire. Just affirmation.
I looked in the mirror. There she is. There they are. Hello.
Adapted from "There She Is," my essay in ANMLY.
Kim and I have been together for fifteen years. I feel like the longer time goes on, the more we look like we are in a Wes Anderson film. This may be by design.
In the first picture, from 2011, we had just gotten engaged that spring. Kim had started her first library job and I had taught my first college class. We look so young in that photo, and we were. The second is from 2022, during a photo shoot at Pasadena City Hall, when I first started embracing the colors within me on my body. Kim has always been stylish. The orange scarf I'm wearing in that photo is actually hers. We trade it now. All the scarves are both of ours, and we Mr. Potato Head them between us. The third is from 2025, in front of a real edible gingerbread house in Solvang at Christmas. Fifteen years between the first picture and the last one, and in that time Kim became the librarian she was always going to be and I kept teaching. Now I am starting my own trauma writing community. 15 years in and I feel more myself, more confident, more in my element, and more in love.
None of this happens without joy. Joy is what survival is for. Writing as survival is also writing toward joy.
I've been stocking joy lately the way doomsday preppers stockpile canned goods. Because joy is stowed deep within us all and we must all firecracker it into a world that's been vampired, especially against queer people, for far too long.
For me, Lizzo's 2 Be Loved kicks the bunker door open and basslines me out of my basement.
Joy isn't something we should ration. It's something that should show up in sequins and glitter us back into who we are. Together, we can redead the joy hoarded in us. Use it as celebratory gush.
Songs contributed by Instagram followers. Follow me @erikjfuhrer to contribute to future weekly playlists.