When I became a published writer I began losing pieces of my private life. The first thing to go was time. Living in the suburbs, being married and raising a family became my second priority. There was a new baby in my life and it was called, “My Work.” This became my first priority and quite a few relatives, friends and neighbors did not like it. This was before they even knew what exactly I was sitting in my little studio, attached to the garage, writing about.
My first book of poetry, Durango, came out in 1979 after about four long years of wrestling with my inner demons. It told the secret side of my life, told the pain I had gone through as a child, as a survivor of incest and sexual trauma. It was also feminist to the core—Amazonian in its strength of purpose: To warn women to protect themselves from their own worst enemy, themselves. It predicted, though I could not see it then, what was about to happen to my life as I had known it.
The fact that Durango was poetry and not prose made me feel that I had still managed to keep the ugliest experiences somewhat hidden, while at the same time exposing them. But readers are sleuths. They not only read between the lines, they read the minds of writers. Some began identifying with the persona of these poems. I was shocked by this. I had thought my life so unique, the damage so especially my own. Well, it turns out that about 90% of humanity has not had a happy childhood.
So, not long after that, everything just went weird for me. I remember how I had written that book to stay alive, to keep myself from succumbing to the depression I was going through as a post-cancer-surgery patient, a suburban housewife suddenly addicted to writing, trying to be honest while living in the shadow of my own lies, trying to convince myself that life has meaning, has purpose when I felt quite contrary to that. I just couldn’t hide the truth of who I really was anymore—an angry, hurt, neglected, abused, incested, and now cancer-damaged, extremely sensitive “child.” This emotionally arrested child was imprisoned in an adult body with a highly educated adult mind.
If God hadn’t flung me out of my closet writing space into the public arena, I might not have eventually celebrated my past. It made me strong, not weak. It made me hyper-vigilant, not blind. It made me out-spoken, not silent. It was going through the horror of it that made me capable of opening my heart to others. I am certainly no Emily Dickenson. I was not meant to be a recluse. My spirit longed to soar, not just to fly with the eagles, but far above the clouds.
At the time, though, even while giving readings from Durango, I was tormented, as twisted up as a corkscrew run over by a truck. Fear grew into a perpetual state, relieved only by sleep. Sometimes I became so full of terror I could barely function. On occasion I would be paralyzed. I started to have migraines that lasted up to four or five days. And often I felt nauseous, the way I had when I was pregnant. Now that the book was out, so was I. I was naked in suburbia, naked as a newborn baby. But there was no lullaby to hush me up.
What’s more, for me to write Durango was a paradox at that point in my life. For example, though I wrote the truth of what had happened, I had no conscious memories of the actual acts of rape committed against me. Conscious memories did not come until 1990. Prior to that I knew I was “molested” but I was not connected to the images or to the pain of those past events. I was writing from behind the veil, so to speak. Once the truth came out, there was no more veil to hide behind.
It was as though the persona, the writer of that book, was another aspect of Terry, the dutiful and the sacrificial. It was an alternative personality that one of my psychotherapists would later identify as “a helper.” Here was the writer who dared to explode the Keeper of the Secrets. Not surprisingly, this persona was also the Integrator, She who would weave all the parts together, She who would continue to be the Warrior, the Wounded Healer, who would fight for the rights of others, She who would eventually merge with the God Self. But I was also the She who was the Brand New Poet, the Voice that had to speak in metaphors and similes to not completely strip the sheets off the corpse. Now I am grateful about this emergence, the butterfly easing itself out of the confines of the cocoon. I’m not ashamed to stand as bare as an egg in front of you—in front of myself.
Back then, though, I felt raw and defiled, betrayed by my own pen that opened me up and showed readers I wanted more, much more out of life than what I had—a life that other women I knew envied. I hated the fact that my own work made me feel ashamed. I could have felt proud, but I didn’t. For one thing, I wasn’t ready to be a person who had survived incest, a woman with excessive passions, a woman who believed in love, but not monogamy, a woman who refused to be kept, a woman relishing her bits of freedom. In those days, very few were talking about sex abuse, wife abuse, child abuse.
My mentor, the poet Anne Sexton, who was also my field faculty advisor at Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont, had made such historic references to the abuse of women in her earliest books, and so had Sylvia Plath. This is why they became my most influential modern poet heroes. But unlike them, I came to see I was breaking new ground. I had no intentions of doing myself in, as they had done, because of the trauma; I was going to fight back. I was determined to survive. Nevertheless, I was still quite split.
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