It takes blood and guts to be this cool,’ I said to her, and then we cracked up laughing. I was being sarcastic but the line stuck in my head. It’s arrogant, a little camp, and later, when it became part of a song, I sang it with a smirk on my face, a sneering top lip and a bored visage. I wasn’t sure if anyone caught the irony, but I do remember that was when I stopped reading reviews, good or bad. I wasn’t strong enough. I hadn’t learnt how to process them. The good ones swelled your head, the bad ones stabbed you in the heart, and sometimes they were so personal and cutting they would take your breath away. It’s just not worth the agony. Funny, that in those days you could ignore reviews – now it’s near impossible not to know what everyone thinks about you. You can read a thousand wonderful things about yourself, but the comments you inhale into your very core are always the most negative.

It was those conversations at the Rape Crisis Centre that gave me a clearer understanding of the impact of trauma, and how it’s possible to not be treated as a powerless victim. I don’t want to be pitied. I’m very uncomfortable with that. I want options and opportunity, and I want to be listened to and respected. I don’t want anyone to do all that for me because then I’ll never learn how to do it for myself. Songwriting is very cathartic and provides a method for doing that. In those days, I couldn’t find the words in conversation to express how I felt, but strangely I could sing them.

When our stories require us to pass judgment, to inflict shame on ourselves and others, to set ourselves apart, we cause harm. Bigot, prig, the voice in my head calls me. And, I must answer honestly. I must answer yes. I want to make it not so. I have work to do on myself. I need a new story.

It is of critical importance to recognise that for people who regard themselves as having no recourse to better their lives, the exercise of violence proves an intoxicating surrogate. Shame - despite its origins in the self - is an excruciatingly public emotion. To feel it is to feel oneself a reprobate. Overcompensation through personal achievement is not an option. When a person feels judged - hounded - by the jury that is public opinion, the only way to exorcise that feeling is to eliminate the jury altogether. In the mind of the perpetrator, transferring one’s own suffering onto another human being becomes a viable - almost noble - moral calculus, turning the master-slave dialectic on its head.

To fashion a persona out of one’s own undisguised self is no easy thing. A novel or a poem provides invented characters or speaking voices that act as surrogates for the writer. Into those surrogates will be poured all that the writer cannot address directly—inappropriate longings, defensive embarrassments, anti-social desires—but must address to achieve felt reality. The persona in a nonfiction narrative is an unsurrogated one. Here the writer must identify openly with those very same defenses and embarrassments that the novelist or the poet is once removed from.