Finding Catharsis in Poetry

By Sandy Chilson
Director of Marketing and Outreach
Author of chocolate, featured in Songs of Survival, Vol. I Iss. I 

Have a story you’d like to share about survival? Submit your piece, whether it be poetry, prose, art, or photography, to our literary journal, Songs of Survival!

I’ve always found it easier to write letters or send texts to people than to speak to them face-to-face. There’s something freeing about having time to curate my thoughts and hide during a tough or awkward conversation, to avoid someone hearing the tremor in my voice or seeing my bottom lip quiver as I try not to cry. There are things in my life that I can’t bring myself to share out loud, but recently, I have found respite in writing. 

After being in an abusive relationship at 16 that has left me with PTSD to this day, I felt like I couldn’t tell anybody. And I didn’t for years, but when I did mention it, I beat around the bush and felt awkward and uncomfortable. I didn’t like using the specific terminology to describe what had happened to me but, by refusing to do so, I could never assert the extent of my trauma. Eventually, my experience was just reduced to “the bad boyfriend,” because that was all I could manage to say out loud. It was so much more, but I just couldn’t make the words leave my mouth. 

I kept quiet about it for years as I suffered and bore the pain by myself. The frequent nightmares that still wake me up drenched in sweat, the panic attacks whenever I got close to a certain part of town, the startled responses and running away from curly brown-haired men in public, I just kept it to myself. I didn’t know how I would tell anyone. Not even texts could make this a bearable topic to broach. 

But my God, did I want to tell somebody. 

Starting Survivors to Superheroes with Jules and Jamie was an amazingly healing experience. It gave me hope and support, but even then, I was still suffering in silence, refusing to elaborate on what had really happened to anyone but the two of them. I am by no means a writer, but in December of my senior year of college, I sat down and wrote a very cathartic piece of poetry. For some reason, being able to articulate my story via poetry gave me a strength that I didn’t anticipate: I shared that poem with several of my friends to whom I had never divulged the truth. I felt a weight lifting off of me just by putting it out there. It didn’t change the lasting effects of the trauma, but no longer bearing the burden alone was more relief than I could have ever imagined. 

Telling my story as a piece of art, as poetry, felt not only bearable, but powerful. Being able to imbue the story with feeling and intentional artistic choices gave me control. I was no longer the victim in my own story; I was the narrator. I still feel okay sharing my poem with people. In fact, I want to. As much as I can tell people how confused and lost I was, it doesn’t have the same effect as reading the words scattered across the page so that the reader feels my confusion. They can feel the sense of falling down the page, jostling from left to right, unclear where each line ends and the next begins. The artistic license that I can take with poetry does my story justice in a way that I couldn’t achieve with plain old words, spoken or written. 

I’m grateful for the opportunity to publish this poem in Songs of Survival. This is my chance to open up in a way that feels comfortable and powerful to me. This is what my survival looks like. I hope that others find the same power over their own story, whether it be through prose, poetry, visual art, or anything in between.