Trauma

For Carolyn Kizer

My severe hypothyroidism is taking a toll. For the past two weeks, gobs of hair have been falling out every day. I’ve been in bed since Friday. I need to have blood work done to see if the new dose of thyroid-replacement medication is improving things at all, but I didn’t have the energy to call the lab to schedule an appointment because the required opening up the cabinet where I put the lab paperwork, pulling it out of a stack of papers, finding the phone number, dialing the phone, and talking to someone. Too much. Also too much: doing my immunoglobulin infusions, the ones that keep me alive; preparing for the support group I’m facilitating that starts this week; hydrating; exercising; bathing; eating.

In this hypothyroid state, which has been creeping up on me since last fall, I’ve also been thinking a great deal about poetry and what I’m doing as a poet. A hypothyroid state isn’t the best one to be in when having these thoughts, but anyone who’s been hypothyroid knows these are the kinds of thoughts one has when hypothyroid.

Here’s my conclusion. Poetry is, at its worst, a discriminatory and harmful system. I’ve experienced discrimination and harm firsthand. But the system being what it is doesn’t make it one I can walk away from. I’m a poet. Being a poet isn’t something I chose or can unchoose. It’s a way of being.

When I was close to death in 2022, writing an imitation poem after Richard Siken is what brought me back to life and what allowed me to continue living. There was no question for me then that I was bound to poetry, to being a poet. It doesn’t matter that it was a Richard Siken poem. It could have been any poem, imitation or otherwise. I time-traveled in that poem. I found my way into and through time itself, not because I’m special or any given poet is special. What’s special is poems: who we are in them, who we aren’t, what we see, what’s beyond seeing. That dissolving when we need to dissolve. That emerging when we need to emerge. That liminal space between dissolving and emerging where we can live more expansively.

I came back to poetry. I can’t leave it again. I think my presence makes poetry better, not worse. I’ve written about what happened to me in poetry and beyond. I see issues at the systemic level and call attention to them. Because I’m older, I have a longer memory than a lot of poets do, which gives me insights others may not have. I make choices about where to send my work and who to associate with accordingly, which is necessary when poems enter the world of poetry, that less-than-optimal system that can and does do damage.

I’m neither a sycophant nor the poetry police. I call things like I see them. I’m not trying to make anyone feel bad about the unexamined biases that exist in poetry or the ways in which they may be contributing to those biases or at least not helping alleviate them. I do think we should all pay more attention to the institutions and organizations we support, the people we defend, and how we talk about those who are exploited and otherwise victimized within the system. But I know I can’t change anyone or the system as a whole. I can only control how I navigate it and who I am within it.

I suspect things would be different if poets didn’t have jobs to worry about or tenure or getting published or securing money for their projects or any of the other pressures that keep the system humming along without much change over the past several decades. I’m not fettered by any of that. I just read and write poetry.

I still remember Carolyn Kizer telling a group of poets that another famous poet tried to rape her. It was at a dinner before a reading she was giving. I also remember how the other poets at the table responded, which was to react in a flustered way and quickly change the subject. That was nearly thirty years ago, when I was just starting to write poetry. But what happened to her occurred decades earlier.

Poetry has had systemic issues that affect individual poets for a long time. These issues didn’t start yesterday, and they won’t end tomorrow. That’s why I’m not going to stop writing poetry or talking about what I’ve experienced and seen in the poetry community. Carolyn Kizer was talking to me that day in 1997. She was warning me. I heard her. I try to hear everyone who speaks.

The Fog

Writing used to be my way of working through things in order to discover beauty, complexity, and meaning, as well as what escapes meaning, to feel those textures and colors the body and mind together send to the surface like koi in a pond waiting to be fed. All those little mouths mouthing at once. All those fat bodies and watery fins. So much movement but not without pattern, like music.

Writing used to be my music, its notes distributed like lilypads the bodymind somehow reads through touch, for that’s what language is. Something we touch, not something we see. Something we touch and hear.

I worked hard to learn how to write despite my dyslexia. To write, to read, to understand. I wanted into that world because of what poems could do.

              The fog comes
              on little cat feet.

If fog could be a cat, I could be anything in language, not what I was in my home. I didn’t have to be that child or a child at all. I could be something that made sense or was so far beyond sense that sense wouldn’t matter anymore. I wanted to do that with language, to unlock its magic. It took decades, but I did. I think I did.

I’ve come to identify with being a poet and writer, with sitting down at my desk and writing every day. I told people poetry was everywhere, always, like a faucet you can just open up and there it is.

I don’t feel like that anymore. I open the tap and there’s nothing. People are cruel. I’ve encountered more cruelty in the past three years, which is when I started writing again, than in the other twenty years of writing combined, with the exception of some awful things that went down in the poetry community in 2015. I’ve been personally threatened, accused of appropriating the term CPTSD (as if my trauma isn’t real), attacked both for not really being neuroatypical (based on how I appear) and for using the neurotype framework, told nobody should listen to me because I have bipolar, that I’m morally unclean, that my writing is doing harm, and more.

That’s on top of the more general comments people have made in response to my writing: things like everyone who has a mental-health label should be round up and forcibly removed from Utah or queer people are evil and satanic.

               It sits looking
              over harbor and city

These comments are like gargoyles draining the life from my writing and from me as a person. They go well beyond discourse. They’re attacks. They’re erasures. They’re discriminatory. They’re scary.

They’re what passes for engagement these days. We’re all seeing comments like this day in and day out, especially on social media. Some of us are participating in it in our own ways. Most if not all of us are negatively affected by it. Even outlets that are designed to give us a voice can end up sending us to slaughter with every piece of ours they publish. For civil discourse? For freedom of speech? Or for clicks, shares, page views, and increased reach? If an outlet wants to keep you angry at those who also trying to speak to the larger issues in our culture, our country, and our communities rather than catalyzing you to also speak and act in response to those larger issues in your own way, ask yourself what that outlet’s motives are and what effect the infighting it generates has on anyone’s ability to advocate for anything—or even to survive what’s become increasingly difficult to survive.

How is a writer who, for years, wrote for some of the largest medical organizations and research universities in the country, as well as an esteemed consortium comprised of the top medical and research centers, in this position? Who’s routinely had work in competitive literary journals and with well-regarded indy presses? Some of this is coming from social media and website comment threads and is in response to my essays and opinion pieces. Some of it’s happening with friends on Facebook, namely people who read my work and then project things onto me so that, when I am not what they think I am or what they want me to be to them, they can and sometimes do become irate, belittling me and my poetry.

This is how things are now. And they’re going to get worse. But I don’t have to keep saying OK to it. I’ve already started saying none of this is OK. Now, I’m grieving on many levels—what poetry and writing can and can’t be, what kinds of audiences it can and can’t have, what the writing community and our communities in general are and aren’t—and I’m waiting for the faucet to flow again. That may be the only faith I have left in me. I believe I can find my way back to poetry, and poetry can find its way back to me. I have to believe this to survive.

              on silent haunches
              and then moves on.

May the fog that obscures poetry move on. May the fog that keeps us from seeing each other move on. May the fog that blankets our entire country move on. Let it move on. Let it move on.

—

I appreciate my friends on Facebook who feel their way through the world using language and take the time to communicate thoughtfully. You are the antithesis to much of what passes for communication these days.

The poem used in this essay is “The Fog,” by Carl Sandburg. It is in the public domain.

Notched

I dreamed I was a crew member for a reality television show in which a group of women and female-bodied contestants were trying to overcome their trauma and abuse by getting a very old man—who was close to death and just wanted to collect sticks on the beach and fashion them into wings before he died—to love them. The goal was to get him to lay down his pile of sticks and follow one of the contestants. In this moment, both the old man and the contestant would be healed live on national television.

I realized the man was being forced into a situation he didn’t want to be in and his life was being prolonged because he couldn’t leave Earth until he completed his wings. I saw that the contestants were becoming more and more traumatized. Their flesh peeled away from their backs like old papier-mâché falling from the form it was appended to, exposing their ribs. The contestants were carving deep notches in each rib for every day they were made to participate in the show. One woman had so many exposed ribs and notches that the camera crew couldn’t figure out how to shoot the final scene. I heard two producers talking off stage.

We wanted to show trauma but not this degree of trauma, one said. Who in America wants to see someone as crazy as this?

They adjusted the scene so all the contestants’ scarred ribs were visible but not too visible. I stood in a pool of red velvet drapery at the edge of the set trying to make everything go away, even myself. We were moments from taping the final scene. The old man was oblivious to what was happening. The contestant who’d been deemed the winner was elated that she’d finally be healed. Everyone thought she’d be able to get the old man to follow her as she ran down the beach and waves teased her bare feet.

The show’s final song played in the background.

              In your flowing sea-green gown
              Tempt father death and you’ll be found
              To have a body-mind unmoored
              To be life’s bride and not its whore

The old man found his pile of sticks, which had been stashed by one of the producers. He quietly began picking them up. I helped him. I wish I could tell you that made me a hero. It didn’t. I wish I could tell you the man flew off. He didn’t. I wish I could tell you the contestants healed or the producers learned something about empathy or the audiences who watched the show learned from the old man and the contestants. They didn’t. They didn’t. They didn’t.

Loosening Our Ties

My father had a tiger’s eye bolo that I loved. I wore it in grade school when we reenacted the Oklahoma Land Run. (Yeah, we did that. Also, there was more than one land run, but we only learned about and celebrated—for lack of a better word—the main one for simplicity’s sake.) I wanted to be a cowboy. My teachers protested. They wanted me to do whatever the girls were doing.

I’ve been looking for a bolo that’s like my father’s for a long time, but most of them are turquoise, and my father’s was shades of brown. I found one today tucked into the back corner of a gift shop. It was made of tiger’s eye. As soon as I saw it, I remembered that’s what my father’s was made of, and it’s also why tiger’s eye was my favorite gemstone as a child.

As I held the tie, I thought, “My father was more than the sum of everything terrible that happened to him and everything terrible he did, including what he did to my mother and me.” It was a surprising thought. I want to believe that—that there was an untarnished part of him tied to the traintracks inside his heart. He may have tied that part up. He may have wanted it tied up. But it still existed, whether or not he longed to free it.

I bought the tie to commemorate continuing to be in mental-health recovery after my trauma-induced mania two years ago. As I drove home, 104.1 played “Dust in the Wind” by Kansas. The sky was lapis lazuli polished and held to the light. The cliffs in and around Zion looked at once eternal and ephemeral. As much as their presence hints at forever, they are also literally dust in the wind.

I started crying. How could I not? How could anyone spend time with this land, this sky, and not untie the parts of themselves that are immobilized in their hearts?

Let the heart run. Let it rewild. Let it forget suffering. Let there be nothing to suffer from or for. Let us all loosen our ties and help others loosen theirs.

Good Dreams and Bad Wakings

I had an exciting thought about a poem at the tail end of a dream, and now I can’t go back to sleep. The fact that poems thrill me after three decades says a lot about poems. Perhaps it’s not just the Earth and sky that last forever, as the band Kansas asserts. It’s also the verse, the line.

I will never remember what happened to me two years ago today because I was overmedicated in the emergency room at Intermountain Health after being turned away when I went to the mental-health access center there for help the day before, but not before the access center kept me in a loud, brightly lit room for 24 hours with no bed, where I was left alone with two male nurses. What a terrifying thing for someone with a history of abuse at the hands of men to endure while in a state of trauma about her childhood abuse. Also, sleep deprivation and exposure to lights and noise, including music, day and night are more in keeping with prison torture tactics than with mental-health care, but sadly, the two are often one in the same. Shame on Intermountain for engaging in such practices.

To top it off, they failed to give me my thyroid-replacement medicine for hours, thereby exacerbating the state I was in by disrupting my endocrine system, which in turn negatively affected my HPA axis. That axis is key to emotional regulation. I don’t have a thyroid thanks to thyrotoxicosis and cancer, so my thyroid-replacement medication is critical. My TSH was already 11mIU/L when I got to the access center. It should have been less than 1mIU/L. The access center made my hypothyroid state even worse by not administering my medicine in a timely fashion.

The ER overmedicated me after I said Joseph Smith was delusional. What I actually said was, “Sure. It’s fine when Joseph Smith does it, but not me.” I wasn’t being hyperreligious. I was deconstructing religion, in that moment Mormonism, as well as the unwritten social rules that appear to govern when someone is seen as insane, divine, or both. Crazywise, as some call the latter. But not, largely, Southern Utahns, and certainly not ER workers at Intermountain.

That’s the last thing I remember. I blacked out for more than a day, this one: September 9, 2023. It’s a dark, rough-hewn box I can’t open, but I think Sharon Olds’ devil from her collection Satan Says might be inside it. By that, I mean my father.

Get in Line, Brian Kilmeade

Days of Bruising in the Sunflower State. Kansas City, Kansas, June 19, 2015.

You want me dead, Brian Kilmeade? Trust me, there’s a psych tech in Kansas who couldn’t agree with you more. This photo was taken three days after leaving KU Medical Center in 2015 with bruises all over my body after being beaten by a psychiatric nurse who also put me in a face-down hold, despite that position being illegal in most states and despite my having asthma. He threatened to hurt me even more if I ever “tried anything.”

What I had “tried” was getting my inhaler because I couldn’t breathe. The staff refused to give it to me, saying it was expired by one day, and they didn’t have orders for another one. I’d just been diagnosed with common variable immunodeficiency by the lead immunologist at KU Medical Center, but the staff in the psychiatric unit said I was making my diagnosis up. I also had thyrotoxicosis at the time, but nobody at KU Medical Center did the simple test necessary to reveal that was the case, even though it’s in their algorithm to test the TSH level of anyone who presents with symptoms similar to mania. The psychiatric unit’s former director implemented that policy.

Photos of these bruises are also on file at Shawnee Mission Medical Center, where social workers from KU Medical Center and a local organization for women took me to document what had happened to me. Of course I never did anything about what happened. Lawyers weren’t interested in my case. The state human rights organization wanted me to tell my story over and over again, which was retraumatizing. And my records from KU Medical Center were not accurate. This incident, for example, didn’t make it into the record. Nor did the EKG they had to do while I was blacked out, which I’m only aware of because I woke with a node still stuck to me. Nor did my being undressed, washed enough to be wet all over, and dressed again, but without my underwear.

The staff withholding my medication didn’t make the record. Nor did the staff throwing food on the floor for me to eat. Nor did two male techs standing in the doorway laughing at me. Nor did a female nurse dogging me in the hall outside my room while saying “I didn’t do anything to you,” as if this absolved her from everything that was done. Nor did the staff hanging up the phone on me while I was trying to call my immunoglobulin company, which I’d been instructed to do to set up my infusion deliveries after I left the unit,* or important organizations like the one that was trying to advocate for me, or my friends, or my family members. Nor did their crushing me in the doorway to the room where the phone was located while trying to remove me from that room. Nor did their playing violent movies in which women were being beaten. There are more nors, I’m sure. But you get the idea.

—

* Having these infusion deliveries set up was a condition of leaving the unit. The staff repeatedly refused to let me use the phone or hung up mid-call in an attempt to keep me from being discharged.

My Kingdom for a Pencil (in the Psychiatric Ward)

Two years ago today, I came out of my medication-induced blackout at the inpatient psychiatric unit and began working on an elaborate origami project that involved making the Sydney Opera House with a theater and stage inside it. I used paper placemats and pages from a colorful book for this purpose. I was given a copy of the Book of Mormon by the staff, but I didn’t use its pages in my project. It sat in my room idle as I worked.

I wrote and performed rap songs with another patient named H— to the delight of other manic patients on the unit. Those with severe depression were not moved by our artistry. We were good at the rapping, and our antics provided a counterpoint to the aimlessness, the hall-wandering, and the five-minute interfaces with the psychiatrist each day in which he blamed us for having depression or bipolar.

I used a deck of cards to map out human networks that are responsible for abusing and trafficking others. The kings and jacks were big players in those networks, and they were also stand-ins for my father and his best friend. The networks were very organized and knew how to hide other cards, and themselves, as needed. My father’s name was Jack. He was a jack of all trades, even ones that weren’t legal.

I wrote short poems and made notes about my stay using a tiny pen that only sporadically worked. Pencils, Intermountain. Give patients on B-Ward pencils.

In my chart, the staff noted that I was well-behaved and posed no threat to anyone. I did throw paper at one point, down a long hall, overcome suddenly by how dehumanizing psychiatric care is. Nobody noted that in my chart, but one tech did scream, “If you do that again … ” without completing the threat.

I declare today, September 10, the Day of Origami and Rapping forevermore. Long live folded paper and battled song.

Folding and Unfolding

This is the two-year anniversary of my stay at the local inpatient psychiatric hospital where the psychiatrist described me as being involved in sex trafficking, as if I was trafficking others as an adult as opposed to having been trafficked as a child. The psychiatrist also said my trauma had nothing to do with my mania, told me in so many words to be a better wife when I expressed my concerns to him about my husband’s behavior, refused to help me get services from the local organization that helps people who’ve survived sexual abuse, and wrote in my chart that I had a poor prognosis because I have no insight into having bipolar.

And he was supposed to be one of the better psychiatrists at that hospital.

This is also the day I briefly saw Utah poet laureate Lisa Bickmore and thought she was some kind of healing Earth goddess, which I still think is the case. When I’m manic, I see essences. Lisa is a lot more than a healing Earth goddess, but she also has the essence of a healing Earth goddess.

These are the final days of my hegira, the one I declared over before it was over. Over the next few days, I’ll be sitting with everything that happened two years ago in a process that’s like folding now and then together the way two ingredients are combined in baking. Not that I bake. I prefer folding time to folding things like whipped eggs and melted chocolate. When I need to eat something, I just eat it. I rarely mix it with something else.

On Poetry and Healing

I don’t approach poems as therapy. I just come to them as myself.

Poems allow us to reclaim our stories, understand trauma and survival, realize that growth and healing are possible, lessen shame and embarrassment, and give us a sense of belonging.

The hippocampus, which situates our memories in time, doesn’t function properly under stress or during trauma. My poems are an external mechanism for placing traumatic events in time, which keeps them from feeling never-ending and ever-present. I think of it as a kind of assistive technology, like a keyboard for my dyslexia or glasses for my farsightedness.

Poets use the beauty intrinsic to poetry to shape their experiences and change the way they live in the mind and body. What’s made is more than noise. It’s a way of singing through pain or, as Orr says, allows us to order the disorder that’s in and around us, that’s intrinsic to the world we live in.

I see great value in dreams and writing about them, not only because dreams are where we do unfiltered processing of our experiences without the imposition of an artificial sense of time or an enforced rigid inner governance but also because we can more freely make leaps when talking about dreams, since that’s exactly what dreams do. Injecting a bit of the surreal into the poem can help us bring our dream wisdom into our waking lives—and therein lies not just surviving, but the ongoing work of healing.

Poetry’s concision and beauty allow me, as a writer and reader, to enter into myriad experiences—some like mine and some unlike mine—and to see common human impulses at work. A collective psyche emerges—a collective conscience and collective unconscious—as a backdrop to the individual experience. Poetry has taught me a great deal about my own psyche, my own mind, my own impulses, and my own needs. But it’s also contextualized all of that within a larger environment and larger swaths of time than a single human timespan. Poetry approaches the archetypal, the mythical, the things that lie deep in our ancestry: things we can’t, and shouldn’t, ignore if we’re going to survive on this planet and help this planet survive.

Stephan Torre says that, for him “… writing comes when it must, when it’s too hard to hold in the joy or grief without blurting it out.” I love that way of approaching poetry, but I personally don’t wait until the point of bursting. I try to do the work every day of cultivating making music out of noise, as Kim Addonizio writes in her poem “Therapy.”

Gregory Orr talks about something similar, which is that the act of writing a poem gives the poet more control than they had at the time of the traumatic event they’re writing about, which in itself is empowering and healing.

And then there’s all this beauty intrinsic to poetry, which the poet uses to shape the experience and move it into a different part of the mind and body. What’s made is more than noise. It’s a way of singing through pain or, as Orr says, allowing us to order the disorder that’s in and around us, that’s intrinsic to the world we live in.

Poems as Time-Stamps

During Saturday’s Utah Poetry Festival panel discussion on Poetry As Survival, if there’s time, I’d like to talk about why trauma is a wound of the present and how poetry (and other forms of art) can help with processing those wounds.

One of the reasons trauma from the past plays such a role in the present is because our brains don’t time-stamp traumatic events properly. The hippocampus, which is responsible for encoding and storing dates for our memories, can’t do so when levels of arousal or stress are too high. Instead, memories are recorded in great detail but without a time-stamp associated with them. That’s why there’s an always-ness to traumatic memories, an endlessness, a nowness.

The first way poetry addresses this issue is by allowing us to move time around as we write. As Gregory Orr says, this gives us more control over a situation we may have had little or no control over when it was happening, which in itself is empowering. The very act of writing about the experience is an act of survival. But the act of writing also gives us a past, a present, and a future—that is, the sense of time and its passing that’s missing in our encoded memories about what happened.

Even if we write about an experience in the present tense, the act of putting that experience in writing, moving it from the body to the page, from feeling to language, helps us do the time-stamping necessary to process what we’ve lived through. That’s what I believe anyway, as a poet who lives with trauma but who’s not a psychologist or neuroscientist.

The second way I believe poetry is helpful is that it serves as a creative historical record that we can revisit anytime we want and reinforce what we’re learning as we heal. I realized this last fall when I was looking through my older poems. Together, they serve as a network of external time-stamps that reinforce an “I am here” as opposed to “I am still there” message. I can read my poems and situate them in time in a way that helps me make sense of my past and my life as a whole. This thing happened. Here is when it happened. Here is when I wrote about it. A year ago. A decade ago. A week ago. Not now.

And that’s the point of time-stamping: to know what was then and what is now, as well as what isn’t now.

I’ve had similar experiences when I look at photos I’ve taken, but the time-stamping isn’t as strong for me as it is with poetry, probably because I just point at things and click. I don’t put artful effort into my photos the way I do with my poems. I’m also not stepping into parts of my life or into the world itself in photos the way I do—or the way I hope to—when I write a poem.

I love language in ways I can’t properly articulate. I’m dyslexic and had extreme difficulty with reading and writing when I was young. It was poetry that allowed me to enter into language, not dull language but magical language that gave me access to worlds outside my family, my home, my town, and what happened there. I have a strong time-stamp associated with the first real poem I read. It was in a children’s book tucked on a shelf in what was once my sister’s room, but it wasn’t a nursery rhyme. I found it, and I loved it, and it was mine. I know where I stood when I read it, how the paper felt, what it did in six lines, and how I came alive reading it. Fully alive. Fully present. I had no idea at the time what a gift the poem would be or how it would shape my life and my healing.

For me, healing is a process and there will always be an ongoing-ness to it. But the poems I write are essential parts of my mind at this point, externalizations of what my hippocampus can’t do as readily as someone who hasn’t experienced trauma. I hope I also create beauty, at least sometimes, in and through my writing.

I’ll close by saying that I’m not talking about poetry as therapy. I approach poetry as an art, and I also recognize its healing powers, which for me are rooted in psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and spirituality.