And I Have a Right to Be Here: An Exercise on Noticing
And I Have a Right to Be Here: An Exercise on Noticing
Laura Sweeney
“What is your body telling you?” my trauma therapist asks as she guides me through a body therapy exercise. What do you notice?”
Without this therapy, I’ve been “missing the turtle in the road.” I’ve not been fully present in my body and surroundings. But today, I am not hijacked.
Today, I’m making progress.
Today, I noticed a turtle at Ada Hayden Lake lying on its back. It had a red Indian-like mosaic painted on its underside. I emailed my sister, “I saw Grover today.” Grover was the turtle we found at the intersection of Water and Grove Street when we were kids. The turtle Mom was going to give to her friend Becky Banks, the elementary education teacher, until one of the neighbor kids stole him and replaced him with a baseball bat. As if that was an even trade.
I thought of the poem “Lake Lavern” by one of my National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) students. I’ve used this piece many times as an example of “moment work” as well as another student’s poem, “Restrain the Dragon Mask.” I admire these students for their efforts. The NAMI students know each other’s ailments and afflictions, and they notice that when they write, all becomes quiet. One anorexic girl says she blogs because she believes in “writeness and rightness.”
In a Writing the Hard Stuff class I noticed that the participants included a lawyer raised in a home for unwed mothers, a pianist with a recent mastectomy who strategically places scarves to cover her wound, an administrator thrown out of her home as a teen only to become one of the highest-ranking assistants in the Iowa attorney general’s office, and a son who makes up different stories for his senile father every night like Scheherazade. These are people with a need to explore and express “writeness and rightness.”
I’ve tried all kinds of therapy for my own chronic back injury and related trauma, from Christian counseling to trauma therapy to hypnotherapy to emotionally focused therapy, or EFT. But I’ve noticed writing does something no other therapy does. The social interaction and group process are an integral aspect of writing as healing.
When I write, I am “here-now.” I love the feel of typing, the clacking of keys. I come to the page to breathe. I come to the page to think. I come to the page to protest. I come to the page to seek peace. Here, I am not minimized or patronized or demonized. I have a right to be here, writing and righting. But plucking and wood pecking and clacking on keys—where is the peace in that?
Here are a few tips on practicing the art of noticing:
- As an entry point, I recommend Louise DeSalvo’s, Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives (HarperCollins, 1995), a survivor’s guide to the transformative power of writing. This text offers tips for writing a healing narrative: connect emotions to events, balance negative and positive emotions, provide specific images and details, reveal insights r