Poeming beyond Trauma by Darla Himeles
“the legacy of trauma can be something other than shatter or silence”
Essay by Darla Himeles
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Poets are prone to grandiose declarations, such as “Poetry saved my life.” We’re not lying, but we’re often not telling the whole truth. In my case at least, I mean something less abstract, more active.
Poem, when used as a verb, encompasses much more than literal writing: we poem when we daydream the image, when we shape the question, when we map the metaphor, when we form and then transform the draft. Sometimes we poem to carry the self through, and beyond, trauma. We poem so that the legacy of trauma can be something other than shatter or silence.
When I refer to trauma in my own life, I am referring to sustained experiences originating in childhood. About 60 percent of the population has experienced at least one of the adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) that impact future health; one in six Americans has an ACE score of four or higher according to the CDC. You can take NPR’s handy ACEs quiz here, if you’re curious about your own. The higher the score, the greater the likelihood of consequential life outcomes, everything from chronic migraine or depression to heart disease, cancer, or early death. Dr. Nadine Burke Harris’s influential TED talk is a good primer on what the research indicates and why we should be paying better attention. Thankfully, multiple studies suggest that mitigating factors can counteract what otherwise might seem a death sentence—mitigating factors like feeling loved by a caring teacher or grandparent during childhood, for example, or working with a trauma-informed therapist, or finding healthy ways to express these difficult experiences or feelings (art, writing, movement) that otherwise might lie dormant in the psyche and/or body.
As you might guess, my ACEs score is high. And in light of what high scores seem to predict, my twenty-year dance with chronic migraines and over-thirty-year dance with generalized anxiety disorder and panic disorder seem more than coincidental. Maybe I’d have had these conditions regardless. Maybe, to adapt the title of Bessel van der Kolk’s important book on the legacy of trauma, my body has “kept the score,” my unprocessed traumas and painful experiences finding expression in insidious anxiety symptoms, brain fog, experiences of dissociation or depersonalization, pre-migraine auras, migraine-associated depressions, and so on. I’m lucky: I have great health insurance and healthcare providers—a phenomenal therapist trained in trauma work, a whole-person-oriented psychiatrist, a neurologist well-versed in the relationships between mental health and migraines, and a primary care physician who pays attention, takes me seriously, and helps me coordinate care across providers. On top of these too-rare privileges, I also have deep, loving relationships. My support network is real. And thank goodness, I can poem. “Poetry is not a luxury,” as Audre Lorde says in her essay of the same name; poetry is life-sustaining and freely available to us all.
The first time I decided I was a poet was when I was thirteen, lying belly-down on my bedroom’s carpet, with William Carlos William’s Pictures from Bruegel, a dictionary, and a spiral-bound notebook spread before me like a crescent moon. By then, my father had already been in prison at least once and had disowned me for what would be the first of a half-dozen times; my stepfather had died suddenly, the circumstances of his death unclear and confusing; and my mother, siblings, and I were evicted from our house, suddenly without a place to live. Lying on the bedroom floor a few days before we were forced to leave, I felt an urgency to write poems. They were terrible, but they were mine, and I carried my newfound poet identity with me, often secretly, into the next difficult years of my adolescence.
Poetry helped me name and reflect on experiences that I otherwise could not articulate, but some traumas would remain unprocessed for a long time. Repressing them helped me keep moving through my life, but that came at a cost: whole parts of myself were cut off from my consciousness, unintegrated and powerfully controlling of my anxieties.
It wasn’t until I was in my mid-thirties, for example, that I realized I had been raped as a young teen. At fourteen, post-eviction, I had been living with my boyfriend in his two largely unsupervised childhood homes (his parents, like mine, were divorced). These living arrangements had seemed the safest option for me post-eviction, but they were not ideal. At the time, I navigated the strange stressors and pressures around me in survival mode, just trying to keep my freshman-year grades up and not draw too much attention to myself. I had no mental space for my “emotional needs,” let alone my need to process what I now know was intimate-partner sexual assault. My knowledge of this assault quickly became locked down, inaccessible, even though I had physical flashbacks (I have versions of them still, even as I type this), and even though I had access to murky memories of the event, mislabeled in my subconscious as shameful or signs of weakness rather than as undeniable lived truth.
In the decades after the rape, I wrote poems about other childhood experiences that terrified and shaped me (as well as, of course, poems about other things), and over time, I found my voice as a poet. Some of those trauma-informed poems appear in my debut full-length poetry collection, Cleave (Get Fresh Books, 2021). One poem, “What It Felt Like,” dramatizes the terror I felt watching my dad physically abuse my mother when I was four or five; another poem, ‘Tony the Cat,’ expresses some of the collateral damage of that abusive relationship, including household animal abuse. In poeming my way through these difficult memories, I discover reminders of my own resiliency: I am no longer four or five; I am no longer in that house; my life, it turns out, gets better.
One of the hardest poems for me to write in Cleave was ‘Breach,’ about my rape. Because I couldn’t speak about that experience with anything close to ease, my therapist had suggested I try writing about it. The first draft was oddly flippant and superficial, but over time, I began to cut the bullshit and start leaving caesuras where my posturing and wordiness had been. I thought of these mid-line white-space gaps as wounds until my friend E noted that she loved how I’d placed so many windows in the poem’s wall of text. She saw windows where I had seen wounds, and suddenly the poem began to find itself. Or I began to find myself through it. With the caesura windows pouring light into my poem, I found a way for my adult self to comfort my fourteen-year-old self and assure her that we make it: we find love: we survive: we save our life.
Those poems were not easy to write, but working on them helped heal me, and I came to find at readings that they were often moving or healing for strangers in the audience too. When I poem, I feel my deepest childhood consciousness align with my adult self, making me feel momentarily integrated, embodied, and at my most real.
Indeed, one way we can mitigate the long shadow of our ACEs scores is to find ways, as adults, to illuminate what we have buried, at least long enough for us to reach out to the younger parts of ourselves with compassion and reassurance. Most commonly this kind of work is done with a trauma therapist, but it also can be one of the superpowers of poetry. We can poem our way backwards through time with self-compassion, and we can poem forwards, tenderly holding our younger parts’ hands.
When I say poetry saved my life, what I mean is that poems save my life, present tense. They offer me windows where I thought I had wounds. I can climb through them and keep climbing, poeming beyond trauma without minimizing or denying the rooms that have previously entrapped me. I can poem all of myself forward, into the light.
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Header image courtesy of GITA. To view her Photographer Feature, go here.
Darla Himeles (she/her) is the author of the chapbook Flesh Enough (2017) and Cleave (forthcoming, 2021), both with Get Fresh Books. Darla is a poetry editor for Platform Review, and her poems can be read in recent or forthcoming issues of Lesbians are Miracles, Naugatuck River Review, Atticus Review, Off the Coast, and Talking River. She holds a PhD in English from Temple University, where she works as the assistant director of the Writing Center, and lives in Philadelphia with her wife and toddler. Tweet her @darlaida, or find her at darlahimelespoetry.com.
