Monday Notes: The One Thing Publishing In Search of a Salve Taught Me
Responsibility.
When I first published In Search of a Salve: Memoir of a Sex Addict, I knew I had been gifted some responsibility, but I wasn’t entirely sure what. I knew I was tasked with telling the unadulterated truth about my life experiences, but I wasn’t sure exactly why. Time showed me the answers to both.
Chapter one of my memoir begins with a description of masturbation, but not the sexy porn kind. In this chapter, the reader learns that my venture into self-pleasure was induced, at the age of nine, by child-on-child molestation. My editor and I had several discussions about how to begin this chapter. I’m glad we settled on this intro. Since publication, many readers, women and men, have confided in me that they, too, were sexually molested in a similar way. They’ve also confessed to other types of molestation, some are like the one I describe in chapter two and others much worse. Like me, they’ve lived with a secret and the shame that accompanies such acts.
Rarely is child-on-child molestation discussed. It was my responsibility to not only illustrate a marginalized type of sexual assault, but also to show readers how something that seems insignificant can still wreak havoc in one’s life.
Salve is a story about how unresolved trauma led me to a behavioral addiction. One of the unresolved traumas I experienced is adoption. Adoption is not usually explained as traumatic. That is because the mainstream narrative is centered on the adoptive parents and their beneficence, not the child who was taken from their mother and father. Babies, children, and teenagers don’t have the language to say, “I’m hurting because I miss my mother.” Instead, they may display one of the 7 Core Issues of Adoption, or like me … all of them.
It is becoming more common to hear from adoptees, but in many ways, we are still silenced. No one seems interested in hearing from us because it ruins the vibes. As an adoptee, it was my responsibility to tell a story that amplifies adoptee voices to demonstrate that no matter what adoptive parents think, many of us are not okay.
This book is about my personal healing journey. I’ve read a lot of memoirs, and I’m always disappointed with the ending. Generally, the author takes us through the ordeal of their life in hundreds of pages. Then, when we get to the end, they’ve miraculously “healed” by doing several rounds of ayahuasca, taking a trip to to some island or Asian country, or sitting in individual and/or group therapy for twelve weeks. As someone who will be on a healing journey for the rest of her life, I knew that type of ending would be inauthentic.
I felt a responsibility to share what “healing” really looked like. Healing is messy. Healing is being triggered and re-triggered. Healing is having tools but not wanting to use them because negative coping mechanisms are the easiest to access. Healing is falling a fucking part and then putting one’s self back together with some type of support system. One reader said he was mad because my marriage wasn’t wrapped up with a bow. Then, he revisited it and changed his mind. “This is how life is,” he said. And that’s when I knew I’d met my responsibility. I am not here to provide Hollywood endings. I am here to help usher in the truth of a matter, no matter how painful.
I cannot express how proud I am to have been gifted with this responsibility to demarginalize issues, and after many decades of lying to myself and others, to tell the truth and foster healing for others. I do not take it lightly.
It’s Salve’s one-year anniversary. I’ll be sharing thoughts, impact, and commentary all month!
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