In the Light

As soon as I read the Craigslist posting that described In the Light I was interested. I was and continue to be particularly drawn to the project’s focus on survival. Rather than reinforcing a sense of victimhood In the Light offers individuals an opportunity to acknowledge and share the myriad of strengths and insights that constitute a journey towards healing. The emphasis is on the positive. The focus is on something I personally believe and know to be true of my own life – our experiences, even the most challenging, heart-wrenching, negative ones, shape us. They give us wisdom and insight. There is good that emerges from the bad.

      I have since become the writer for the In the Light project. It is my responsibility to interview each survivor and write his or her story. I don’t go into these interviews with a pre-determined list of questions or looking for specific information. My intention is simply to offer survivors the time and space to talk about the parts of their life story that they feel they want to share. Every survivor has a story. And it is not necessarily a story about what happened to them but rather it is about how they have chosen to go on and live their life. 

      Despite wholeheartedly subscribing to this positive perspective, I approached my first set of In the Light interviews with a heavy heart and reluctant mind. As I walked the few blocks from my house to the studio the one thought that ran, on repeat, through my mind was: this is the last thing I want to be doing today. It was a raw, overcast Saturday in March and I was pre-occupied by my own life’s current tumult. It was not that I wasn’t interested in listening to other peoples’ experiences as survivors of child sexual assault; truthfully, I just didn’t think I had the emotional energy at that moment to do so. Emotions can be draining. The mere anticipation of facing someone else’s, and inevitably my own, felt like adding yet another heavy cloud on an already downtrodden day. 

      However, over the course of the ensuing afternoon, as I sat in the upstairs loft of The Carriage House studio (a space that we had been fortunate enough to get donated to us for the day) interviewing each survivor what I experienced in actuality was far from draining.

      The loft where I conducted the interviews resembled the living room of many urban apartments; a mixed match array of used furniture and common knick-knacks rested in various standard configurations around the room. The unassuming character of this room - with the one exception being the voice recorder conspicuously perched on the coffee table – mirrored the essence of the interviews.

      Amidst a string of very personal insights and experiences, there was much that was commonplace. I was struck by the unassuming way in which each individual spoke of offering his or her life – both the suffering and the healing – up for others to learn and gain strength from. Each person had felt at one point as though they were alone in their suffering; they were now in the midst of emerging from that feeling and wanted others to know that they could too. Each interview reminded me of the truly exceptional, and yet so often hidden, perspectives individuals carry within themselves.

      By the end of the day I realized that I had been so busy dreading the potentially difficult emotions that an interview would unearth that I had failed to remember how inspiring it is to listen as a story of survival unfolds. None of the stories were linear and very few of them followed a clear cause-and-effect trajectory, however each of them was ripe with insight, hope and strength – often times in ways that not even the survivor realized until after she or he had spoken.

      That afternoon I learned, yet again, that often when we confront difficult experiences good things can and do emerge.