The Importance Behind
My Book’s Title
“I think I have a title,” I told four writer friends.
My memoir’s title had come to me after months of writing.
The book was nowhere near complete, but they knew enough of the story that I
felt comfortable sharing it with them.
“Oh, I want to hear it,” one of them said, “but hold on.”
She left the kitchen, where we sat on barstools around the
counter, and returned in less than a minute.
“Let’s test it out.” She held up a crystal pendulum and
asked me to say the title.
Healing practitioners had used crystal pendulums to indicate
energy flow during my sessions with them, and I knew others who used them to
test decisions. I considered my own intuition more like a faint pulse than a
strong heartbeat, but I knew this friend to be deeply intuitive.
“Toward the Light,” I said, my voice steady despite the
butterflies in my stomach.
She repeated it. We watched the crystal move in the “yes”
direction.
The others chimed in.
“I like it.”
“Perfect.”
The crystal’s movement and my friends’ responses confirmed
what I’d already decided.
Toward
At twenty-two, I left small-town Iowa for a yearlong adventure
as a nanny in Paris. Two months after my arrival, just as I was beginning to
feel at home, I was sexually assaulted after a morning run.
Plunged into darkness in the City of Light.
I chose to stay in Paris, where I leaned on a community of
newfound friends, wrestled with questions of faith, and found purpose in caring
for six-year-old Lily. My memoir, Toward the Light: A Year in Paris,
traces the beginning steps toward healing in the weeks and months following the
assault.
Toward. Not into.
On my birthday, six months after the assault, I went for a run
in the park where I’d been assaulted, this time with a friend. I couldn’t go
alone, but I’d created a community I could call on when I needed someone beside
me.
The book’s title isn’t a promise of arrival.
Healing after trauma isn’t a destination. It’s not about
“moving on,” “getting over it,” or “carrying on.” It’s a path of acceptance,
integration, and moving forward, taken one step at a time.
It’s a path I’m still walking.
The Light
A scene in one of the book’s opening chapters recounts the end
of a very long first day in Paris. Exhausted and disoriented, I stand on tiptoe
and lean toward the tiny window of my room on the apartment building’s top
floor. The Eiffel Tower sparkles in the distance.
Sometimes I can see the light, but it remains just out of
reach.
There is another light. The one I learned about in Sunday
school when I sang “This Little Light of Mine.” The one I first experienced
months after the assault, on a visit to Monet’s gardens in Giverny, where
sunlight peeked through the wisteria draped over the Japanese bridge. It is the
spark of the divine that dwells in each one of us. An unknowable and unnamable
God, beyond my comprehension and as close as my next breath.
Toward the Light
My book is a story of hope, but it’s only the beginning of an ongoing
journey toward the light.
Over the years, I’ve learned that moving toward the light
isn’t a linear story of forward progress. It’s more like traveling up and down a
spiral staircase. We circle around and revisit places we’ve been before with a
new awareness. Perhaps it’s easier to navigate the second (or third or fourth)
time around. Sometimes we return to learn the same lesson again, and that’s OK
too.
Years after the assault, a therapist showed me an illustration:
the word “trauma” in the center, with spokes pointing to its symptoms,
including depression, anxiety, shame, worthlessness, hypervigilance, and
mistrust. No one had ever told me these were symptoms of trauma. In that
moment, I circled back to Paris and understood what I’d been carrying. I was
not broken. My body had been protecting me in the only ways it knew how.
On the spiral staircase, there is only deeper exploration.
Just outside my office window, leaves turn from green to red,
shining in the fall morning light. Today, I’ve taken more steps up the
staircase than down. The light shines a little more brightly here. And I am
grateful.
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