What If ‘What You Know’ Is Rape?

Write what you know, they say, whoever ‘they’ are … But what if what you know isn’t fluffy kittens, or interesting garden tips and tricks, or wise dogs with funny thoughts. What if what you know, is how it was to be sexually abused by a family friend, gang raped by some young men I’d idolised, and sexually abused by work colleagues?

How would I write about that, when the reality of it was something I rarely allowed myself to think about these days, happily married to a good man, mother of a fine son, and safe from the predatory behaviour of workmates, because I’m now a writer, and not working in a office, with Happy Hour an excuse to all get pissed, and ‘see what happens …’

Well actually, I have written about the sexual abuse, a poetry collection I put together and got published in 2011, one year after my diagnosis with Multiple Sclerosis, which I am now learning, may in fact have links to sexual abuse – who’d have thought it? Well the body knows about these things, and some researchers have looked at these things, and noted the statistics about sexual abuse, and about Multiple Sclerosis are similiar … coincidence? I wonder.

Maybe there is another book in that thought, but at the moment, I’m working at feeling settled, and safe. This past week with all of it on the media, and getting hooked up and unable to escape, and feeling and remembering things I’d thought gone. A dear friend pointed out that what I’d written on Social Media sounded exactly like Complex PTSD, with memories hitting me, things I’d barely remembered, humiliating, frightening things I don’t want to remember, but my body and brain remember, whether I like it or not.

At the moment, I don’t feel that is the next book I want to write. I have a novel to finish, and a poetry collection to put together, on much happier subjects … What I am interested in doing with these sex abuse issues though, is to run workshops or at least one workshop, looking at finding peace through poetry. Being able to write things down, and making it into poetry, can be a healing thing, the idea of therapeutic creative writing is far from a new thing.

I know this, I have a book to prove I know it. I also have a blog, where I have looked at these issues, http://www.damagedchildrenpreciousgems.wordpress.com the blog having the same name as my poetry collection on the subject. So if anyone out there in South Australia is interested in such a workshop, let me know, I’ll happily present it!