I found this sentence really stuck out to me, “Healing is neither a return to some former state of perfection or the discovery of some mythic autonomous self”. That is what is interesting in writing, the protagonist isn’t going through his quest to get back to who he was before he was broken, but to deal with who he is now, heal wounds but not erase the scars. You can’t just figure out some way to be ‘okay’, there is only the daily struggle of dealing with what ‘okay’ really means. Sometimes really horrifying things happen to people, but there is no going back, only what happens next. Who are you going to be from now on?
Part of PTSD is the silence in the victims. They want to protect the people around them from whatever they learned or experienced that was so damaging. So it makes sense that as part of the healing process one must tell their story. If they keep being burdened by the ghosts of their past then they will never be free, they must give them life and words so that they can come to understand and externalize the events. In writing they can control what happened to them and even some maybe small ways, redefine their experience and let the healing begin. Because now it is on their terms, not that of the oppressor.
Writing helps people deal with reality because not only does the writer have to connect with themselves but also with the outside world. They discover connections between the two and realize that everything they feel and go through is reality.
Unfortunately, there are many times when the self is dominated by something larger, groups of like minded people who believe their stance on reality it the most correct and informed, when in actuality all they are doing is downplaying the struggle of the self. We must write about the community and culture but we can’t forget about the people who live there. Facts are important but so are opinions, thinking is a necessity but you cannot neglect what one feels.
