River and Hands

PTSD and the Making ofWellness

Life is a continual act of creation. We do not control the materials we are given. We must invent our own tools. However shoddy or sublime, however poor or plentiful. We craft our own destiny from struggle, fantasy, sadness, and desire. Out of this sordid and complicated mix can come beauty, meaning, and redemption.

In River and Hands, Katherine Davis reflects on her own experience of suffering and recovery, from multiple cancers, from abuse and the resulting PTSD. Committed to empathy and art, she creates a narrative of overcoming adversity, her mission being everything that her abusers are not.

River and Hands is a dance of becoming and a song of celebration, an act of defiance and an announcement of her value. What others dismiss out of incomprehension and incapacity, Katherine Davis embodies—mind, muscle, spirit—working in unison to craft a better world.

A man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river but then he’s still left

With the river. A man takes his sadness and throws it away but then he’s still left with his hands.

Richard Siken, “Boot Theory,” Crush, 20th Anniversary Edition, Yale University Press, 2025, 21.

Resolve and Resist

Trauma as Superpower

Trauma is what you make of it. You can let it silence you, intimidate you, destroy you. But it can also be an opportunity for self-definition and creativity, for confronting and overcoming adversity, for standing up for yourself and for others. Your darkest moments can source the fire that gives life meaning and joy. True, resolution and resistance is not without frustration and fatigue. It requires work and thought, and a courage born equally of hope and despair. But it is suffering's ultimate reward, to laugh in the face of cruelty, to run toward risk and possibility, and to dance with abandon, because the moment of being and becoming is now and only now.