Problem Behaviour is my illustrated memoir-in-progress about my experiences with child abuse. I am self-publishing pages of my project on Substack alongside my musings on how we can use creative writing to aid in recovery from trauma. You can subscribe for free by clicking here, and read more about this project below!

Content Warnings: non-explicit mentions of child abuse and physical violence, physical symptoms of fear, memory loss and recovery, unsuccessful disclosure, failings of the education system, discrimination within the publishing industry, and financial barriers to knowledge, [2,054 words – 8th January 2024].

Beginnings

The first representation of child abuse I had was within fantasy stories I was reading at age eleven. Through the page I met other children who faced a constant threat of violence, who felt fundamentally different from others, and had to go on a big undertaking to try and understand themselves and the world. When I was reading these stories, I had no idea why they were eliciting such a strong emotional response in me. It felt good, it felt bad, it felt real. I became fascinated with analysing storytelling techniques, and by fourteen, I was writing protagonists who were going through similar traumas. I didn’t know I had experienced child abuse myself and thought I had some sort of perverse fascination with it which made writing secretive and shameful.

In order to write about trauma well I knew I needed to do the research, so I took to the internet. These first searches made me shake and grow cold, my heart rate would increase, and my vision would blur. I felt like I had touched the live wire of the feeling I had been chasing. Through several weeks of research I began to connect the medical terms I found on the internet with the symptoms of CPTSD I was experiencing. The memories that had begun returning to me a year prior suddenly had context. I was child abused.

It was reality shattering but also a big relief, I finally had terms like dissociation, panic attacks, and triggers, to give me language for the distressing and scary things happening to me. This medical view of trauma didn’t give me the personal guidance I needed on how to recover from my experiences, so I went back to creative writing to find this support. The only published novels I had access to that specifically explored child abuse, were those written by foster parents who pitied and misunderstood their children and sensationalised their trauma. The only other stories I could find were those on fan fiction websites, thousands of examples of child abuse written by those who had actually experienced it. This discovery of such a massive archive of trauma writing really helped me feel in community with other writers and emboldened me to continue writing my own stories.

I began writing my speculative fiction novel, Break Tender. It was amazing to step into my own private world and explore everything I was learning in this safe and creative space. This was going well, but I felt an increasing need to share my experiences with others and didn’t feel like my fiction was the way to do this. I started verbally disclosing my trauma to people at my school which did not go well. I didn’t know what I wanted from the people I told, nor did they know how to respond. I decided that the best way to get people to understand would be through writing nonfiction. I shifted projects between confessional accounts of my experiences and creating educational content, but none of these projects made me feel like I was writing something well-crafted and true to me like my fiction.

Explorations

At eighteen I started writing nonfiction poetry to try and express myself, most of which was very long and involved elaborate metaphors, but it led to my first successful step into experimental writing. When I wrote ‘Sparkling’ I found myself getting closer to something true about my childhood trauma. I let my mind slip through fragments of memory and dipped into elements of my Synethsia to express my feelings. Here’s an extract:

“The racing of my anxiety crisp sparkling in a cup, uncontrolled footfalls shuddering in my bones, barely open eyes watching the door raw. Roasting the mirror’s image for what might have been. I am sick, unable to grieve sitting on the floor wanting your normal. Give me an excuse to blossom my back into rivets. Shadows should have been pulled close, softly shrouded around dew dropped eye lashes.”

When I started a poetry module in my second year of university, I dug out this poem as part of looking through my writing archive for inspiration. The strongest scene this text raised to my mind was of my father’s countdowns to physical punishment. I wanted to integrate this ‘three, two, one’, into the text but it didn’t look very interesting as stanza headings. I then had the idea to put this dialogue in speech bubbles. Microsoft Word struggled to integrate these odd shapes, so I opened up Procreate on my iPad and drew them in myself. There was still a lot of empty space on the page, so I started doodling in other imagery inspired by the text.

The majority of poems I’d been exposed to by this point had been ones taught at school. These were poems that used complex language and often required careful study to figure out their meanings. I didn’t find these poems particularly enjoyable or accessible. Part of re-claiming this form for myself during my university module was writing without worrying about the traditional rules of poetry. Of course my tutor told me to strip out all of the illustrations because marks were allocated on how well you replicated their idea of traditional formatting. This was very infuriating and demotivating, but my subsequent outraged rants really made me dig down into why I thought incorporating illustrations into poetry was valuable.

Illustrations can help entice readers – especially those who would usually be intimidated or put-off by traditional formatting.

They can aid in storytelling if utilised to provide additional meaning.

It creates an interdisciplinary challenge which can help keep the writer interested.

Finding a Shape

At university I had this big plan to write a memoir via a collection of nonfiction essays about my childhood. Each time I would wander into a new essay, I would find myself bumping into different themes that would take me off course from what I planned to write about. I thought, well, I just need to keep writing and then the structure will become clear. But the more I wrote, the increasingly lost I became with how to shape the narrative of my life. I also found myself struggling to write a long-form story from the perspective of me as a child with only fragments I have left due to my memory loss. I found myself stuck between the choice of making my narrator a mature voice reflecting on the past or mixing my memories with significant amounts of fictional glue to make it stick together.

In Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir, The Chronology of Water, she says, ‘I remember things in retinal flashes… a series of fragments and repetitions and pattern… without chronology.’ Her memoir in fragments creates an interesting and exciting narrative shape. A year after I finished university, I wondered if I could do something similar with my project by writing enough of these poems? pieces? to make a memoir in fragments. I would need to let go of my desire to intensely plan a project before writing it, and trust that I would be able to fit everything together into a narrative when I was done.

Around this time one of my Trans Writing Group members got in contact about their survivor writers group, You Are Here. This was a space I could bring my fledgling project to and be in safe company with other writers who shared my experiences. Over the course of those nine weeks I wrote eleven new pieces and shared them within the group. I was met with a really lovey and supportive response:

“Your work is mortifying, made all the more tender because you blend the child's voice with an adult's ability to articulate damage. Your work captures the ever present-ness of trauma.” 

“I really like the way you write about things that make people uncomfortable. That helplessness is visceral and brings us to your level, making the hidden highly visible.”

Over the course of this writing group I began to uncover the stylistic voice of the project. I found myself being drawn to writing from the child’s perspective, utilising simple language to get across the emotion and situation in a clear way, and developed my understanding of how I could use illustration to create interest and story. You can read two of these early pieces commissioned by Spread the Word here [coming in February].

Substack

My next big question was how to share this project with the world. Traditional publishing is not something I’m particularly interested in because of how marginalised people like myself are constantly excluded. Our stories are not considered ‘universal’ enough (i.e. white, cis, able, etc) to sell books to their customer base. This puts the responsibility on me to build my own online following.

As my project is shared as graphics, my initial thought was to publish solely via Instagram, but there are several reasons why this wouldn’t be ideal, for example the poor moderation service means my account can easily be taken down, content warnings provided in the caption isn’t idle, and some who use the app to regulate might not want difficult material popping up on their feed. That being said, I knew Instagram could be a very effective tool for using my images to draw people to my profile and redirect them elsewhere.

At this time I became increasingly aware of Substack, and how it could solve a lot of these problems:

Subscribers can have complete control over when they consume content because it arrives in their email inbox.

It reports a hands-off moderation policy, which obviously comes with its own issues, but means account security for me.

I can provide content warnings at the top of the email, as well as include other important accessibility features like audio recordings, alternative text formatting for easy reading, and links can go directly in the post.

A big part of the reason why I want to share this project over the internet, is to create a space for conversations and community to build around the topic of how we can use creative writing to aid in trauma recovery. This is something that is often spoken about in educational settings and in academic writing, but these spaces often have a financial barrier to entry which excludes many who would really benefit from this work. Writers who use Substack to self-publish their work often restrict a certain amount of their content to encourage paid subscriptions. As someone who is disabled with a very low-income, I know how unfair this feels – we should all have equal access to knowledge not matter our situation. This is why all content on my Substack is free, with a paid subscription available for those who have the means to support me financially.

So what will my Substack content actually look like? Something like what you are reading now with a mixture of pages from my memoir and reflections on my writing process. Through this platform I have the ability to post my creative work and then directly unpack the personal, psychological, and critical. I can share medical terms alongside creative expression to help my readers get a fully round picture of how I think about and process my childhood trauma. I can also share my love for non-traditional writing styles and encourage my readers to explore experimental writing for themselves.

Since my first unsuccessful attempts to disclose my child abuse, eleven years have passed. Through this medium, I can finally share my story in a way that feel true to me. I believe that sharing the secret inner world of trauma is a crucial part of reclaiming personal narrative and growing in confidence by using our voices. This process allows those who have felt isolated and ashamed of their experiences to become authentically known by others, creating a space for connection and recovery. What do you think? Let me know in the comment section on Substack, see you there!

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