Anonymous: Here’s How I Tell My Story

Marie: At first, denial had me thinking I really didn’t have much to write about when it comes to trauma or assault. I really thought everyone else’s trauma was more dramatic, their healing more thorough and others held a victory banner high above me, having survived! And the voices in my head had me convinced everyone else was writing about something with much more importance.

So, I’d better step it up.

What I learned brought tears into the back of my throat and humility right up to my cheeks. Survival is more subtle than banners and rainbows. The kind of survival I’m talking about is a unique, invisible, slow victory dance.

And the stories shared in our book, left me speechless and filled with respect for what a human spirit can endure- for what we can be like when we come out on the other side of it.

“…the trade-off between identity and honesty can be a complicated one.

This is truth-telling predicated, after all, on a lie – perhaps the biggest lie possible, the denial of who you are.” - Sarah Ditum, “The Guardian,” Sun 9 Feb 2020

Once I got out of my own way and opened up, the words came. The story took shape. There were textures and colors and smells I started to remember. I let myself write in a mess and not worry what it came out like at first. I wrote about a guy who nearly strangled me – but I didn’t feel the feelings. Not at first.  

I couldn’t name the names. Not the real ones. I made up character names and that helped me to inch forward with writing. The events are all true. The names, different – so that, I could write about them without worry. I learned things about myself that I don’t like, and I wrote those down, too.

Once the words were out, I could see that they were a representation of a ‘me’ that is in the past. I’m not there anymore. I’m okay. Acceptance of myself helps others accept themselves.

A subtle but strong shift - putting an old story firmly in the past.

“There are authors who choose anonymity or a pen name because it gives them the freedom they need to write without worrying about what friends, family or the world will think of their work. Perhaps they want to be free to recycle family history or let their characters be violent, deviants, or whoever they need to be for the story, without any raised eyebrows or backlash.”

“The Benefits of Publishing Anonymously or Taking a Pen Name,” October 15, 2013, Nillu Nassar, the author of the novel, All the Tomorrows and Hidden Colours

https://nillunasser.com/2013/10/15/publishing-anonymously-or-taking-a-pen-name/

Janet: As a writer and contributor to OSV: End the Silence, I had a few stories I wanted to tell. After reading our submissions up through the end, I wondered how just being a kid with a babysitter could be so dangerous. I wrote “Confession: Almost Fiction.”

Then I remembered getting applause when I danced as a little girl, wrapped in my grandmother’s scarves, and how one of my uncles cheered me on. Then 30 years later, the same uncle confessed his feelings toward me. I was momentarily stunned when I instantly felt attraction toward him. Nothing happened when I was a child nor, at the moment of the confession of his attraction, but I wondered…what if?

I wrote my character’s attributes. She ,

1. Was Catholic – I wanted to be so I could confess in a curtained room.

2. Had siblings – I was an only child

3. Felt like a victim – What if things went wrong through no fault of her own?

4. Is Damaged – I can play dead without trying, like I played during my rape.

I couldn’t tell when I was raped, because of two of my own perceptions: it was my fault and, my parents would have overreacted and felt as if they had failed.

The truth for in the story was we were both damaged victims. But having said that, she was no different from the subjects in the truth of our writers.

Like me, she fit right in.

We have several authors in “OSV: End the Silence” who write under a nom du plume. We invite you to create a character, give that character a rich environment for him/her to develop, then give her strength or dramatize his damage, make them/her/him suffer or triumph, then call yourself someone else…. as you find your truth anonymously!