Real Trauma and Healing in the Minds of the Make-Believe
I distinctly remember the first time a stranger touched me where they shouldn’t. It was seventh grade. I was walking down a crowded, middle school hallway—the kind that smells like a sweaty gymnasium, no matter how much off-brand air freshener the janitor sprays. Passing a row of lockers, I was forcibly prodded in my backside. Thereafter boomed a crescendo of laughter. And as I’d turned, I saw a long crutch withdrawing back to its owner: a tall, older boy who’d recently broken his foot.
It wasn’t the first time I’d been touched there unwantedly. Just the first time in public, and by someone whose name I didn’t know.
No matter the degree of abuse an individual has experienced in life, be it the kind a teacher might overlook in a hallway, or the darker machinations that never fully stay buried in their basements, we all collect a constellation of scars on our path to adulthood. Some of us accruing more after we’ve already arrived. Because trauma comes in many forms, not all of them sexual. Sorrow is sorrow, no matter how depraved in origin. Yet, for better or for worse, sorrow can shape the way we view the world, and everything that happens within it, just as much as our joy. For like most bedfellows, they too go snugly hand in hand.
About a month ago, I posed a poll to my reader group, asking them which of a variety of topics they’d like to read about in my next blog post. The results were staggering. Of all the options, this one received nearly half the votes.
That should be no surprise—considering the statistics.
81% of women and 43% of men have experienced some form of sexual predation in their lifetime
1 in 5 women are victims of rape; 1 in 3 became victims between the ages of 11 and 17yrs
Every minute, 20 men and women are abused by an intimate partner
At least 1 in 7 children have experienced abuse and/or neglect in the past year
77% of child abusers are the victim’s parent
Reality is an ugly landscape; its most beautiful facets are countered by sobering evils. That is why it was so important to me, no matter the series’ failure or success, that The Haidren Legacy was knit together by these uncomfortable truths. Every detail is framed to not only sustain but cultivate systematic suffering. From the strict segregation of the Houses, to the disparity in their class structures; the enmity passed down through each genealogy and their secretive inheritances; the partisan clash of their politics and the discriminatory ink by which their policies are written. Orynthia’s collective world-building corrals the causalities of such traumas within its proverbial snow globe. A meticulous microcosm of sorts, mournfully crafted so that our characters cannot help but reflect our very real and complicated image. In other words, the world I’d wrote allows everyone we’ve come to love… to get hurt.
It allows them to get hurt, so we could see how they might heal.
While it was always my plan to assign degrees of trauma to most of the cast, it was only Luscia who inherited markers of my own. Her story is hers though, as remains mine. The trouble with this model, or challenge rather, is that Luscia’s infamous and outward scar (quite literally) gets more attention. Readers often forget she is not alone in her bruised, guarded layers. I can’t blame them. The haidren to Boreal is riddled with more layers than an Everlasting Gobstopper. She needed to be. That made her real.
Though anticipated, I received more than a little criticism when I debuted my venomous pair of MCs. My worst reviews bemoan the same thing: Luscia and Zaethan hate each other for too long. The reader wants romance—a friendship in the least—by the first half of the book. But when has prejudice ever thawed so quickly? Especially when that bias is generational? Compose prejudice against a backdrop of pain, abuse, and calloused scar tissue, you don’t get fireworks. You get lacerations. Deep ones. The kind you can’t forgive in the next chapter.
Too often the literary community dangles a carrot of personal carnage over the page, hoping the reader will salivate after its dark promises. In such cases, its used to color, not ground, the character. And so what happens, is we fall into the story and quickly forget the truth about pain and how viscerally it overtakes an individual’s world-view. Trauma causes upheaval. It’s not an accessory. Yet many modern books have the main character wearing her abuse like lipstick; the effects either forgotten by the second installment or utterly fetishized by the third. Both of those destinations do exist outside the binding, just not for most of us. No, most of us are left wading somewhere achingly in-between.
Writing my heroine’s navigation into adulthood was supremely complex because she is. While her backstory was always intended to be stained with shadow, it didn’t feel authentic to place a sword in her ethereal hand and expect her internal scars to wash themselves away. That simply doesn’t happen—no matter how magical the blade’s enchantment. There would be tells; micro and otherwise. Things she’d avoid. Fractures in her armor. An Achilles heel, so to speak.
So I gave her one of mine.
When my husband first introduced me to his parents, he had to have an awkward conversation with his father on my behalf. At the time, most who’d met me knew me to be a caring, if somewhat cold and standoffish, young woman. This paradox was confusing for them. They’d go in for a hug and I’d freeze, eventually succumbing to their embrace with delayed ease. But when the hugger was a man, particularly one of a certain age and countenance, I wouldn’t be able to breathe. Consequently, my husband had to look his dad in the eye, and tell him he resembled my abuser, and therefore should never initiate platonic touch with me, as he would his own daughter. Had to explain that even though an innocent touch was paternal and loving, that somehow made it worse. As a good man, it crushed my father-in-law to hear he could be perceived so perversely. But that was the reality. He didn’t cause it and neither did I.
I will never forget the day my husband broke his dad’s heart for my sake. He didn’t understand my scars, yet defended them nonetheless.
Back to Luscia.
Readers were excited when she started to train with Zaethan—assuming it was a tropey ruse on my end to stoke their mutual embers. And it was a ruse, just not in the way they likely thought. I needed Luscia to realize her weakness. Victims of abuse, those who’ve gratefully gotten to the other side in their healing, know that there is no final level to that process. And the danger in that, is as we fall back into normalcy, we stop self-auditing. We conflate our strengths so they overshadow those pesky triggers lurking under the skin (or on its surface, in her case). This was why Luscia would logically be so skilled with blades and other ranged weaponry. For even a sword is farther from the body than a fist. Sometimes our weaknesses are dressed in the same fabric as our strengths—usually the ones of which we’re most proud. So in Luscia’s prowess, also lays her insufficiency: when unexpectedly touched, she crumbles. There’s no way, in Orynthia or reality, she would pant for her enemy to run his hands up her thighs. It would make her want to vomit. It nearly did.
Enter Zaethan.
The scene I alluded to above was the chapter my editor feared for the most. In her developmental comments, she wrote, “[they, the reader] will never forgive him for this”. Without spoiling too much, this is the scene where Luscia faces the music. In a clash of wills (as both parties rage against the prison of their own limitations), Zaethan is desperate to gain the upperhand from his tutor. He’s tired of losing—he so rarely did before they met. He is tired. He is angry, at everything, really. He is never enough. Not to his House, his people, or namely, his father. So he does what we all do. Zaethan leans into his instincts—not the kind we brag about, but the kind seeded in our youth. The instincts imprinted upon us through our ideology, our fixations, and our culture. Zaethan epitomizes a Darakaian warrior, one who would use every advantage at his disposal. And to disarm Luscia as her blade cuts into his throat, he drops his weapon to act like a lover. When he lets go of his anchor, a weapon of honor, his voice takes on a familiar edge. The spirit of his own abuser sweeps off his tongue before he can swallow it down.
That was the real ruse all along. Though different than her story, he’s a victim too. He just wasn’t wearing his scars as loudly. Zaethan had forgotten himself because having never fully eradicated the roots of his trauma, in a blink, malicious weeds could break the surface of his veneer. Like many of us, he’d conned himself into thinking his pain didn’t matter. Or, to quote a less popular scripture, Zaethan essentially “looked at himself, went away and immediately forgot what he looks like”. He’d started wearing a mask—one more acceptable to himself, even if it wasn’t to everyone else. But Zaethan’s not alone…
To survive, we all stitch on a mask and eventually call it skin.
And that is why trauma is so violent. Removing our mask is a terrifying, bloody mess.
The good news is that sorrow and joy do go hand in hand. As does mercy and justice. Because it’s in those ravines where the best stories—stories like our own—unfold. Luscia and Zaethan’s interdependent sagas are not one in a million, they’re ones just like a million others. Their growth is awkward and roiling with tension. Restoration doesn’t happen overnight, but in unlacing their masks by one small, incremental (yet life-altering) decision at a time. In the end, their joy will be even brighter than if it’d never been polluted in the first place.
It’s been ten years since my husband had that hard conversation with his dad. Today, I never leave their house without hugging my father-in-law tightly goodbye.
Healing can happen. The mask can come off. We just can’t be afraid to undo the stitching.
