We Will Always Be Both Torn And Whole
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Bibliotherapy
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The article explores how language and writing serve as healing mechanisms for trauma. Bibliotherapy is the formal study of using reading and writing therapeutically, providing scientific and historical context for the author's personal experience of language as 'a rope across the darkness.'
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Kintsugi
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The article's central metaphor—'You can tear a thing apart and tape it back together, and it will still be torn and whole'—directly parallels the Japanese art of kintsugi, which repairs broken pottery with gold, treating breakage as part of the object's history rather than something to hide.
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Adverse childhood experiences
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The author references growing up in 'a house pinned between volatility and silence.' ACE research provides the scientific framework for understanding how childhood trauma affects development and how creative expression can serve as a protective factor.
We Will Always Be Both Torn And Whole
A letter about Writing in the Dark, the new CRAFT SCHOOL, and why creative community matters now more than ever
First of all, thank you for your well wishes about my abraded cornea. Wow. There is perhaps no pain quite like eye pain, like shards of glass stabbing! So glad it is slowly healing, and your kind messages have helped very much. I am so grateful.
What I had planned for today is to tell you more about my own writing journey, and how it brought me to this moment.
In The Part That Burns, I wrote:
You can tear a thing apart and tape it back together, and it will still be torn and whole. There is no other way.
That was the truth of my childhood—the sense that things will break, some will be mended, but nothing will ever be quite the same. Nonetheless, we keep on taping.
That tape, for me, was language.
Language, I discovered early, could offer a rope across the darkness. Growing up in a house pinned between volatility and silence, I became th…
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