Rae

"Our of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars." ---Khalil Gibran

“Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.” ——Khalil Gibran

When I see this quote, I’m drawn to write about my fictional character Rae. Rae and her two sidekicks came to me during a writing workshop I taught a few years ago. In the middle of the workshop I suddenly had the sense of three characters standing behind me. I had never had characters before, so the concept was entirely new. But these were unmistakable characters, not simply projections of myself.

I named the characters Rae, Margot, and Grace. Rae was definitely the strongest of the three. I sensed that Rae was highly-troubled. She seemed brittle and fragile. It took me a long time to get to know her through the writing of this fictional novel.

Rae had no idea how wounded she was; that was one of the most amazing things about her. She simply persisted through all kinds of emotional torment. She buried her suffering in a tomb that she created within herself. Of course I hadn’t known this when Rae first showed up. I learned it as I wrote with her.

I sensed Rae strongly, almost to the point of her physically being there. Of course Rae wasn’t physically there. When I say these characters “stood behind me”, I don’t mean they actually physically stood behind me. I mean I sensed them. Their essence was there, urging me to write.

I believe these characters were assigned to me to teach me how to write in a new way. The characters were also assigned to me so that I could tell their story. I have tried to tell their story to the best of my ability. It hasn’t been easy. But I am now at the point of bringing their story together in my novel.

Today I worked on Chapter Three. This is an organic process, not a linear one. It feels like I hold a living organism in my hands when I work on the chapter. I press and mold the chapter lightly, eventually easing it into its rightful shape. I don’t have full control over the chapter. If it’s ready to develop, it does. If it isn’t ready, it won’t develop. Fingers crossed, the chapter seems to be ready now.

Anyway, back to Rae. She is definitely a larger-than-life character. The kind Khalil Gibran talks about in this quote. Physically Rae is not tall, but she seems tall when you interact with her because of the walls she has built around herself.

Rae doesn’t like to let people in. Left to her own devices, she would probably never let anyone in. But even Rae is human, and humans need others to heal. Rae does want to heal, though, but she has no idea how to do it. Mostly because Rae has no connection to her wounds. Wounds are where the most healing, creative material resides.

Rae suffered great trauma at the hands of her parents. Of course, her parents didn’t know what they were doing, or they surely wouldn’t have done it. But Rae suffered mightily, and the only way she could survive as a child was to bury the trauma she suffered.

So Rae created a structure deep within her psyche. In this structure she stored every wound she received as a child, along with the other qualities she deemed particularly special. She didn’t do this consciously. She was just a child. But children can be brilliant when called upon to save their own lives.

You could describe the structure within Rae as an alternate personality, but I don’t want to psychoanalyze Rae. This wouldn’t do her justice. Rae is epically creative. She never even should have survived her childhood. Yet she did survive, and she created—or maybe tapped into—a whole other dimension of herself that I named Grace.

It took me awhile to realize that I should name Rae’s alternate personality. But I eventually understood that this kind of creativity deserved its own name, if for no other reason than the sheer force of will it took to create it. So I honor Rae for being such a creative being—superhuman and above the rest.

Because Rae needed to keep such tight control over herself, she affected others in a negative way. She had to invent all kinds of false fronts to put up and she fooled people most of the time. Maybe it’s because people are inherently selfish and concerned mostly with themselves. Or maybe it’s because people were frightened of Rae. But they never took the time to find out what was really going on inside her.

Rae contained multitudes. Great creativity comes from the deepest wounds, and that was the case in this situation. But Rae was not able to benefit from what was inside her because she could not connect with the truth of her experience. Rae lived her life with little to no understanding of who she really was. That made me tremendously sad.

I’d like to think, though, that Rae was able to live through Grace. I mean, that has to be true to some extent, as they do both live in the same body. Maybe, in some corner of Rae’s psyche, she actually knows what happened to her as a child and was able to live freely in the world through Grace. I guess that was the point of my writing the novel.