I've been MIA for a while. I finally got Covid! I was out of town! All of this at the same time! I was planning my students' spring recital and navigating a job search. Happily, I am back.
There are a couple of things going on for me right now.
1) I have just attended (well, half of...) a Christian writers conference, She Speaks. I attended a local writers conference a couple months back, where they told us we need to figure out our target audience - who we are writing to.
I struggled with this. So many possibilities coinciding with my life story: trauma, singleness, childlessness, addiction, generational trauma, crippling depression. A veritable potpourri of issues! Go big or go home they say. This list isn't even exhaustive.
But at this conference one of the speakers said this: you are writing to ONE person. Figure out who that is and write for her. This was quite freeing, as if a great wall was broken down, like the walls of Jericho: Aha! I thought. I am actually writing to you, dear survivor, you who share some or all of these struggles.
After the first conference I mused that I should probably take a writing class. But with finances tight, trying to find a job, and fighting my own sense of inadequacy, this was somewhat of a daunting thought. However, all these writers have said: just start writing.
So I am writing for you who have overcome a childhood of abuse. I am writing for you who because of that abuse have been unable to sustain a long-term relationship. I am writing for you who has grieved that loss of family - no husband, no children. I am writing to you who, even though you've been walking with the Lord for years, still at times feel helpless in overcoming your past. I am writing to you who takes everything personally and has struggled at work because every time someone decides they don't like you or your work, you take it a personal failure and descend into another fight or flight spiral.
2) I am reading a book titled "What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing From Complex Trauma" by Stephanie Foo. She is not a Christian, but the book is very well researched while she shares her own, very painful path. It's been very enlightening and I'm only halfway through it. It focuses on the trauma she experienced, the trauma her family experienced, and her own Asian culture and how that fits in. Ok - I am not Asian and there are specifics with that, but I am the grandchild of immigrants who experienced massive amounts of trauma.
The reality is, the Bible is filled with stories of loss and trauma, starting in Genesis. The first trauma was when original sin entered the world and humanity via one act of disobedience. But that one decision by Adam and Eve was catastrophic. In the course of 1 to 2 days, shame entered their lives, they were expelled from a paradise that contained all good and perfect things: fulfilling work, fulfilling relationships, a creation that knew no violence, direct access to the Lord. Paradise.
They were cursed by God: the pain of childbirth, the reality that work would no longer be painless.
Then the Lord God said to the serpent,
“Because you have done this, Cursed are you more than all the livestock, And more than any animal of the field; On your belly you shall go, And dust you shall eat All the days of your life; And I will make enemies Of you and the woman, And of your offspring and her Descendant; He shall bruise you on the head, And you shall bruise Him on the heel.”
To the woman He said,
“I will greatly multiply Your pain in childbirth, In pain you shall deliver children; Yet your desire will be for your husband, And he shall rule over you.”
Then to Adam He said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree about which I commanded you, saying, ‘You shall not eat from it’;
Cursed is the ground because of you; With hard labor you shall eat from it All the days of your life. Both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you; Yet you shall eat the plants of the field; By the sweat of your face You shall eat bread, Until you return to the ground, Because from it you were taken; For you are dust, And to dust you shall return.”
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