Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative

by Melissa Febos

There is no pain in my life that has not been given value by the alchemy of creative attention.

Expressive writing about trauma strengthens the immune system, decreases obsessive thinking, and contributes to the overall health of the writers.

Those who benefit from the inequities of our society resist the stories of people whose suffering is in large part owed to the structures of our society. They do not want to have to change. We see this in a thousand forms of white fragility, male fragility, and transphobic and homophobic tantrums protesting the ground gained by trans and queer storytellers. The resistance to memoirs about trauma is in many respects a reiteration of the classic role of perpetrator: to deny, discredit, and dismiss victims in order to avoid being implicated or losing power.

I’ll say it again, because it bears repeating: the resistance to memoirs about trauma is always in part—and often nothing but—a resistance to movements for social justice.

Listen to me: It is not gauche to write about trauma. It is subversive. The stigma of victimhood is a timeworn tool of oppressive powers to gaslight the people they subjugate into believing that by naming their disempowerment they are being dramatic, whining, attention-grabbing, or else beating a dead horse. By convincing us to police our own and one another’s stories, they have enlisted us in the project of our own continued disempowerment.

Still, the dominant culture tells us that we shouldn’t write about our wounds and their healing because people are fatigued by stories about trauma? No. We have been discouraged from writing about it because it makes people uncomfortable. Because a patriarchal society wants its victims to be silent. Because shame is an effective method of silencing.

I’ve spent my whole life being prescribed narratives about my own body: how it should and shouldn’t look, what it should or shouldn’t do, and what its value is.

If using art to tell the story that we have been telling ourselves is boring, then using art to tell the story that we’ve been conditioned to tell ourselves is even more tedious—a redundancy of a redundancy. Historically, the art that reinforces these scripts—including but not limited to those of gender presentation, compulsory heterosexuality, and patriarchal beauty standards—is partly driven by commerce: the more we believe we ought to be something that we are not, the more money we will spend in that mission. Those who benefit from a dominant power structure want art that represents them, that reinforces the status quo, as they want sex that reinforces the status quo, and the best way to do that is to reiterate it, in literature as in life. The genius of social conditioning is that it is viral and can adapt to any situation a human might enter.

Recently, a friend with similar pornographic predilections and I together wondered why we don’t get off on porn that mimics our actual sex experiences.4 I suspect it is because that sort of porn would rely upon the internal mechanics of intimacy, which a video cannot as effectively produce, whereas porn that is working off the scripts that are already embedded in us requires nothing else to trigger arousal.

For years now, I have ended my daily morning journal entry with the sentence: Today, I reject the patriarchy’s bad ideas. It’s a needed reminder that when I start to feel bad about my body or laughing too loud in a restaurant or start to wonder if I should shave my armpits, those are not my ideas. I like my body, laughing loudly in restaurants, and my soft armpit hair.

The next morning at around 7:00 a.m., I was walking my dog when my phone rang. “Mom! You’re supposed to finish the book before you call me.” “I did,” she said. “I stayed up all night reading it. I kept turning the light off, but then I’d turn the light back on and keep reading.” “But you know how it ends.” “I still needed to know that you were going to be all right,” she said, shattering my heart into dust. “I’m so proud of you,” she added. “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever read. It’s wonderful.”

My favorite Christmas carol as a child was “O Holy Night,” and it still is, because hearing the command to fall on your knees provokes some deep and abiding longing in me: to fall on my knees, to prostrate myself before something and be found lovable, to hear the angel voices, to be struck with wonder, to be let in.

In books, I found an archetype that could hold my own sadness, the loneliness of consciousness and the implicit knowledge of its furthest extremes, that could even make it romantic.

I was sober, and had finally faced the ways that my work as a domme chafed against my shifting values. I wanted to grow beyond the persona I’d inhabited as a domme and an addict—not because of what those identities meant to society at large, but because of what they had meant to me, the ways they’d constrained my perceptions of everything. As soon as I clarified that intention, my story stepped forward, demanding to be told.

Peter Levine, who first developed somatic experiencing, a body-oriented approach to trauma therapy, describes it as one in which “you initiate your own healing by re-integrating lost or fragmented portions of your essential self. In order to accomplish this task, you need a strong desire to become whole again.” That desire to become whole is a necessary starting point from which to establish stable ground for healing work.

Reading Gibbs’s words for the first time, I thought of AA’s fourth step, when the sober person writes an exhaustive inventory of their resentments, which is, inevitably, also a kind of autobiography. Many newly sober people expect to reflect on their own self-righteousness during this exercise, and many are surprised to find instead a humbling catalog of their own misdeeds.

The twelve-year-old who had been finger-banged behind the mall was the same girl who had been spat upon by the neighbor she adored. Her body had developed early and she was in the midst of a year characterized by relentless sexual harassment at school, and the shocking change of her body’s meaning in the world—a confounding degradation publicized as a promotion. Her own desire combined with social conditioning made it impossible to deflect or refuse every sexual petition. She did not enjoy being finger-banged behind the mall. She had only wanted to be kissed. She had followed the call of her own desire and unknowingly entered into a contract that promised more than she wanted to give.

“In confession, one promises, before God, never to turn away again … Speaking itself seals the future, testifies against myself—binding me to not return to sin.” This articulation of Gibbs’s reminds me of the often misquoted words of another philosopher, George Santayana, who wrote that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Perhaps it can also be said that those who cannot speak (or write) of the past are condemned to regret it.