The Silence: The Legacy of Childhood Trauma

Personal History
April 16, 2018 Issue
The Silence: The Legacy of Childhood Trauma
I never got any help, any kind of therapy. I never told anyone.

By Junot Díaz

I’d always assumed that if I ever returned to that place, that island where I’d been shipwrecked, I would never escape; I’d be dragged down and destroyed. And yet, irony of ironies, what awaited me on that island was not my destruction but nearly the opposite: my salvation.

During that time I wrote very little. Mostly I underlined passages in my favorite books. This line in particular I circled at least a dozen times: “Then darkness took me, and I strayed out of thought and time, and I wandered far on roads that I will not tell.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/16/the-silence-the-legacy-of-childhood-trauma