The Blog · Week 2
You Are the Final Girl
You Have Survived.
You Have Survived.
This week is about writing trauma, but also creating joy.
Who is the free email course in my bio for? It is for survivors. It is for the writer who has a story they need to tell but every time they sit down to write it, their body straitjackets. It is for the person who deserves trauma-informed writing support and has been in a workshop that was not, and left feeling gaslit, mansplained to, or forced into a shape that is not theirs. Bonus points if you were encouraged to write the next great American Jonathan Franzen novel in the early 2000s.
It is for everyone who had a workshop with the dude with the bad haircut giving advice on how you too could write poems that look like they were written by a guy with a bad haircut if you were in a workshop. No one ever understood him because he was deep and French films but he thought he understood so well because your stories were the kind he was used to owning.
It is for people who love Toni Morrison, Schitt's Creek, Tina Turner, Medusa, or Blue Velvet and who have always suspected that the stories they love are connected to the stories they carry.
It is for people who have been told their writing is too fragmented, too raw, too strange. It is for people who have been warned not to trauma dump and not to write trauma porn. Trauma dumping and trauma porn are just terms to try to keep us silent.
If you read that list and thought, that is me, Build Your Own Writing Survival Kit: 5 Days to Slay Your Ghosts, the free course in my bio, is five days of finding out what you actually need to write. Not what the internet says writers need. What you need. Your conditions. Your process. Your safety.
The course is the beginning. What's on the horizon is a writing workshop for survivors, and others writing about and through trauma and other difficult material, a whole collective of us, opening July 1.
When I got out of the psych ward in 2020, I didn't write right away. I watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer deep into the night for comfort, hoping that Buffy's promise that we can survive the end of the world would osmosis into my skin. The watching was my body identifying with a fictional person, my grief, my love. This led to me writing trauma I could never before write about, across two books.
Sometimes what may look like procrastination is actually pre-writing. The part where your nervous system decides whether it is safe enough to invite the vampires in.
I've often heard people say that fiction is a way for them to escape the world. I never had that relationship with fiction. It was always a way for me to deepen my connection to reality. Buffy started offering me both. I could disappear into her world in a way that kept me present in mine. That is writing as survival.
What have you been obsessing over that may actually be prewriting?
Pick a fictional character you love, one you deeply identify with, but who is kind of problematic. For me? Kathryn Merteuil from Cruel Intentions. She's performing a toxic role because who she really is is not palatable to the world. She has to mask herself to survive. She is constantly code-switching. We don't ever get to see the true Kathryn under this performance. And when she is outed at the end, despite how terrible her actions have been, I feel her tears deep in my bones.
As a queer person, I feel that deeply. The amount of times I had to mask myself, especially with my family growing up, and in high school, to be more palatable, is legion. I didn't even let myself think about who I really was until my 30s.
Here's the thing about masking: it's both not us AND it is us. When we step into a performance, it becomes a little bit ours because it's how our body learns to move. That's why living your authentic self matters. To live in one body, one identity, one you. But not all of us have the luxury of safety and authenticity in all situations and times in our lives. Not all rooms are our gardens. But we can bloom anyway.
Prompt: what character did you choose? Write about why you identify with them. Explore what they're masking and what you've masked too. Who is your problematic fave? The one you identify with more than you want to admit.
COMMUNITY PLAYLIST: THE FINAL GIRL
There are songs that remind me that I've survived things before this. Not necessarily triumphant yawps or anthems. Sometimes these songs are sad and they angel me in their dark sugar. They know what survival actually feels like. Like Tori Amos's Silent All These Years. Sometimes the silence breaks for our voice, forever budding in our throats as we endure until finally we don't anymore. We are our own again.
Songs contributed by Instagram followers. Follow me @erikjfuhrer to contribute to future weekly playlists.