Survivors of childhood trauma, what grounds you? What puts you in your body, gives you joy, reaffirms your strength? It changes for me, depending on the day, the mood, the weather within and without. It suddenly occurred to me that I needed a pair of ballet shoes. When I was young, my dance teacher demanded our ballet slippers be tight, too tight. They hurt until they broke. The good thing about being an adult is that you can choose your own shoes.

It doesn’t work. Punishing people into perfection. I did not have the misfortune of being abused by world-class abusers, men in the restaurant industry, the ballet stratosphere, or the film industry. My abusers were small-town people with big dreams and few skills. They could scream, bully, pinch, and hit. They could tell you were nothing unless you worked harder, submitted more devotedly, conformed to the ideal they imposed upon you but were so far from themselves.

Invincibility. It doesn’t exist among humans, but I love invincibility as masquerade, as defensive strategy in cancer and trauma...