As I was writing Chopping the Onion, one of the questions a reader of it asked was, ‘why now’? The answer for that spans over the past twenty years.
As I started to heal I wanted to do it in the most complete way possible. I wanted to find every memory and feel every heartbreak associated with it. I wanted to feel the betrayal and anger and sadness and confusion and fear. Anything associated with the abuse I wanted to feel. I thought I could move past it all and just get on with my life. I wanted to do my healing in such a complete way that, maybe, wherever this relationship pattern was coming from could be made extinct. I hoped if I felt every emotion something would change for someone else and they wouldn’t have to go through the hell I was living. With the intention to go through the process as consciously as I could, I kept having a feeling that I needed to share my story. I needed to write a book.
Years went by and I lived my life incorporating the recovery from incest into my life. Struggles and celebrations were my means for healing the wounds of childhood. They became my way of learning to love more, trust more and find some semblance of peace with the confusion.
The path has not always been smooth and many times I felt I didn’t do it, the healing, right the first time around. As the years have gone by, I’ve realized that it’s part of the recovery process. The issues will keep presenting themselves in different ways so I can hear the message behind them to become a more whole and loving person.
A few years ago when I knew I needed to make a change in life I made a vision board for myself. On it were a keyboard and a typewriter. While I knew the message was it was time to write, I ignored it. I went down my own path. As this choice played out in my life, the struggles became increasingly more difficult until I could no longer ignore the message of: IT’S TIME TO WRITE.
Chopping the Onion is the result of my listening to this message. I needed to do something productive with the thoughts and emotions I was experiencing. I believe it is a universal theme for healing and people will be able to find themselves in my struggles and celebrations. I chose to reveal the most intimate details of my thoughts and emotions through the recovery process because of the repetition of issues and the way my life has presented the same issue in a new form so I could heal another part of myself that was lost as I survived. While some of the writing alludes to the details of the abuse, the book does not go into graphic detail of what was done to me. This book is about healing.
Dusana Michaels 