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The next year, the lead professor in the psychology lab I worked in asked if I would like to conduct my own study. I had worked with other researchers on every step of their projects, so he felt like it was time for me to have the room to design my own. As an undergraduate, I hadn't quite settled on my area of focus within psychology, so the first task was to figure out exactly what I wanted to do.
I think it was a combination of serendipity and subconscious that led me to study victim-blaming in cases of rape. As I delved into the scholarship on rape and responses to rape, I started seeing myself in the stories I found. I had never called what happened to me rape until I read remarks from other women and couldn't tell a difference between what they were saying and what I had experienced.
Around this time, I also went to the health clinic on campus, still suffering from persistent headaches. For the first time in my life, a doctor there took me seriously. He immediately started asking me questions about the pain and did a short neurological exam. I walked away diagnosed with migraines, samples of different medicines to try, and a prescription that would change my life.
Although I still struggled even after diagnosis—many of the medications I tried didn't work or we had to adjust dosages, and I still have occasional migraines today—I felt relief just knowing that I wasn't crazy. The migraines existed, they were real, I was believed. Eventually I was sent to a neurologist who helped me find ways of preventing—not just treating—my migraines, and the amount of pain in my life dramatically decreased.
In many ways, however, the best part of the diagnosis is that even when I do have a migraine, I know it's temporary. I know how to treat it, and while I once didn't know how I could live the rest of my life with this pain, now I feel a sense of control over it. I started eating regularly again as well, though occasionally I do become too obsessed with calorie-counting. But I developed a support network around me to help me through these times as well.
I am not trying to suggest that I've found some kind of "happy ending." I don't think of this as a happy ending. I am a survivor and I still have pain. But now I have words to put to those things, and I have other ways of expressing myself, through my art and through the things I compose, that help me to identify and tell my stories. I think here of the idea of constellating, explained by Malea Powell and the Cultural Rhetorics Theory Lab in "Our Story Begins Here," in which they explain that storytelling and relationship-building is a methodology, a meaning-making and academic practice that requires the recognition of the meaningful relationships between people, land, events, and histories. Importantly, as the title of their piece proclaims, I want to see this piece as not an ending, but as a beginning. This webtext has transformed into a storytelling practice that, for me, is centered in the recognition of my methodologies as feminist, as embodied, as digital, and as queer.
I can tell these stories because there are mentors here, in academic spaces, who gave me control that I sought in all the wrong places before. My academic mentors gave me the power to identify in particular ways, to understand my experiences both personally and in a larger context.
I now study trauma, which I was drawn to during my MA without totally understanding why. I now know that I was drawn to it because it helps me see myself and know myself in new and different ways. Some of these ways are painful; some of them heal me.
In reverse, I study trauma in order to put myself into the theories and stories that exist about trauma and survivor experiences. Trauma studies is not a perfect field, and as James Berger says, it often gets lost in ideas of "absolute catastrophe, obliteration, absolute transformation, total alterity" (569). I've heard many people question whether or not traumatized subjects can theorize, and I think this comes from a standpoint that sees trauma as such utter destruction that there is no way a person could ever recover.
But trauma survivors can produce too. We create things—beautiful, incredible things from mourning quilts to memorials to poetry and other forms of art. We also create knowledge and ideas. Our identities are not barriers to knowledge creation because we create and put words and ideas to things that never had a language to explain them before. We need to move past this idea that trauma scholars only study the "elegaic, sublime, sacerdotal, and prophetic" and into the idea that we have immediate and personal concerns too (Berger 577). And that we produce not in spite of being traumatized, but through it.
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