Empowerment: Witing Our Way Back Home

 I am a sixty-two year-old trilingual poet and author living with disabilities. My novel "All That Remains" deals with issues of trauma and resiliency, as does much of my poetry. Most of my poetry addresses themes of mental illness, substance abuse and grief/bereavement, following the death of my daughter Charlotte Clear. I use her name as a pseudonym because in Judaism, we say, "May her memory be for blessing, and I do not want her name to be forgotten or erased. She died for no medical reason, which made the grieving process more protracted and painful.

I returned to creative writing following her death, no longer capable or, perhaps, more accurately, willing to continue my career as the author of scientific technical writing as the Founder and Executive Director of ECQ Group, Inc., a small minority non-profit consulting firm specializing in public health. Instead of writing grants for millions of dollars to protect the most vulnerable and fragile of our populations, such as people living with HIV/AIDS, the mentally ill/homeless/, inmates, undocumented immigrants and LGBTQ clients, I found myself entering the fragmented, dysfunctional and woefully inadequate mental health service industry, now as a client of services, rather than a provider or funder of such social service safety-net services.

Speaking from, own personal and professional experience, anti-depressants, therapy, grief counseling, outpatient trauma therapy and one voluntary inpatient hospitalization did more harm than good in my journey back to wellness. On the contrary, it was the therapeutic exercise of writing my way back home that produced my strongest work. To that end, I am working on a curricula "Poetry as Sanctuary" in which I combine my M.P.H. and M.F.A. degrees to reach traumatized populations across multiple modalities, but with a primary focus of bereaved parents and siblings. It is my sincere and profound belief that it is in telling our stories and our losses and our struggles, we empower ourselves. "Empowerment" has become a word that has left a bitter taste in my mouth; no matter how well-intentioned service providers and therapists might be, survivors, in company with one another, are truly the only individuals capable of "empowerment". Through writing, we empower ourselves, moving from the darkness back into the light.