Wait—Did That Really Happen?

By Amy Roost

“Nothing has really happened until it has been described.” ~Virginia Woolf

Surely everyone knows the feeling of having experienced something so disconcerting or shocking they ask themselves, Did that really happen? But that’s not what Woolf was referring to. She was emphasizing the describing not the happening.

She was referring to trauma, her own. Specifically, the sexual assault she endured.

I too suffered sexual abuse by my older brother, and for decades I’d desc...