The Truth About Trauma

Sometimes I think I made up what happened to me

I was discussing my upcoming memoir (Black Girl From a White Suburb: Finding My Light Using My Voice) with my therapist the other day. Yes, I discuss my memoir in therapy because launching a memoir is a real brain teaser.

If you don’t have an emotional outlet, you will drive family, friends, and strangers away due to the amount of worry, stress, paranoia, anxiety, and dread one feels about putting their life story out into the world.

It’s unreal the stuff that comes up when you accept that people are going to know your secrets, quirks, mistakes, traumas, and even your wins. It’s especially harrowing when you know that writing a memoir was your choice and nobody forced you to do it.

I recently saw a video where Broadway phenom Audra McDonald described her desire to perform as a compulsion. I feel that way about writing my truth. I can’t stop myself from releasing my darkest thoughts. It’s how I process what has happened to me. I wrote and performed a solo show less than a year after my parents died, within eight months of each other. It’s how I roll.

So, I told my therapist that the more I recount a traumatic event from my past, the more I start to doubt that it happened.

There’s an iconic scene in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off when Ferris, his girlfriend, Sloane, and best friend Cameron go to the Art Institute in Chicago. Sloane and Ferris go off by themselves for a while.

Cameron comes across Georges Seurat’s “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,” which captures Parisians relaxing in a park on the Seine River in the 1880s. Seurat uses Pointillism, a technique of painting in which distinct dots of color are applied in patterns to form an image.

The more Cameron looks at a child in the picture, the more the image of the child starts to dissolve into the dots, which then dissolve into nothing.

John Hughes, the film’s writer and director, says about Cameron that, “The closer he looks at the child, the less he sees. But the more he looks at it, there’s nothing there. I think he fears that the more you look at him, the less you see. There’s isn’t anything there. That’s him.”

When writing closely about trauma, excavating detail and nuance, the deeper I go, the more I wonder if anything is there. I ask myself whether I made up or exaggerated what I think occurred. I doubt myself, the legitimacy of my pain, and wonder whether I should delete what I’ve written or let it remain on the page. I let it remain.

Our bodies don’t want to accept the trauma we experienced. If we’re not careful, we may ignore it or trick ourselves into thinking it never existed. That denial manifests in poor health, strained relationships, low self-belief, and a lack of determination to overcome.

My therapist nodded enthusiastically as I talked through my doubts about the very real things that I’ve experienced. My “compulsion” to write about those experiences and publish is healing, albeit unusual.

I wouldn’t trade it, though. It’s how I roll.

Black Girl From a White Suburb: Finding My Light Using My Voice will be released September 2, 2025.

The ebook is on sale for $4.99 to celebrate Pride.