"Shall I, Intrepid, Stand Alone?"

A poem for processing trauma finds publication.

Last year I submitted a few poems to Calla Press, and they were all accepted, much to my delight. These poems were particularly dear to me as I wrote them during one of the most painful, vulnerable, and creative times of my life—over 15 years ago. I put them up on my Xanga blog, of all things—a website long ago defunct—for my peers to read and not really understand. But I *wrote* them.

These poems and posts were the only way I exercised my authentic voice—told the truth to myself—at the time. Only the occasional internet stranger who wandered across my blog had any idea what I was talking about, and certainly nobody who read my writing there knew what to do with it. It was pain-soaked, through and through. Absolutely zero resources existed to properly respond to signs of psychological trauma and hidden domestic abuse within the rural midwestern communities to which I—well, didn’t even belong. In which I was trapped. Both religious and secular.

So the most response I ever got from people in person were blank and slightly frightened stares. I could only presume the same reaction happened on the other side of the computer screen.

And I still shared these poems.

I established them, in a place I could go back to and reflect on and keep safe, as a testament to who I was and what I was going through—even if God and I were the only ones to ever truly see.

I wrote them to tell the truth. Obfuscated, shadowed, indirect truth.

Yet truth nonetheless.

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Times have changed. Xanga shut down, and I nearly lost my decade-long archive—but my husband was able to salvage my writing. I combed through countless ache-filled posts to extract my poems and preserve them elsewhere, properly formatted. And, after the advent of the #metoo movement and my discovery of the survivorsphere online, I finally decided I might try sending some of my writing out for publication.

And I did get one poem, one essay, and a short story published!

But my old Xanga poems weren’t a good fit for anybody, which I rather expected.

Until Calla picked some up!

Photo by Kasturi Roy on Unsplash - cropped

I still don’t expect most folk who read my poems will fully comprehend them—but I was grateful that anyone showed enough interest to try, and to give others a chance to try.

And after a little while, I realized—probably, this readership—if you’ve signed up to process and understand issues of traumatic abuse with me—probably you all, if anyone, would be able to grasp and relate to my words penned over fifteen years ago.

So here is one of my poems, written when I was about 20, published this past April at Calla Press online (I retain the right to republish):

Shall I, Intrepid, Stand Alone?

What then? Shall I, intrepid, stand alone
And motionless, lest movement be the end
Of future dancing—so I lie here prone,
Entrapped that freer sprites might wand’rings wend?
Assurance of a whimsy safe to run,
At present, thanks be to a stroke of pain—
Should such a careless vic’try haply stun
To hapless sacrifice a victim vain?
‘Tis not a question for the great of mind,
Nor study for the scholars of the earth:
To seek an answer is, forsooth, to find
That self-wrought happiness slays others’ mirth.
Take joy from joy, bear grief to those who mourn,
Steal not from what each one has timely born.

I share it with you to provide some insight into the themes I struggled with while still in the grip of patriarchal religious brainwashing and the target of a dangerous narcissistic abuser. How could I find community, safe harbor to breathe, move, exist—if no one would see, acknowledge, and help me hold my pain?

I was begging for space to grieve. To be real in my grief and pain—and not alone. Not ostracized by those who would be inconvenienced by my unhappiness—or by what it might reveal about them and their social and religious systems.

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I am very happy to say, at this time in my life, I have at last found that space.

And I honor that much younger part of me who knew, even in abject despair and abandonment, that standing alone in the truth was still the only way to find hope and healing—and that it would be worth it.

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