Pain as a Noun

I grew up in a house where terror was an everyday temperature. The kind of home where you learn to read footsteps, hold your breath at the sound of doors, and measure safety by how quickly you can disappear. For a long time, I thought surviving that meant I was "fine." I became a good student, a good Christian, a good teacher, a good mom. I could name multiplication facts and Bible verses, but not C-PTSD.

This book grew out of the gap between "fine" and the truth. In my forties, after a horrific car accident, the slow unraveling of old memories, my body finally stopped cooperating with the story that everything was okay. Panic, flashbacks, and OCD-style mental rituals crowded my days. I found myself clinging to therapy sessions the way younger me clung to hope that someone would notice what was happening at home. Healing, which I had always talked about as a goal, suddenly felt terrifying-because what if letting go of pain meant letting go of the people and patterns that kept me alive?

The poems in Pain as a Noun live in that tension. They move through four main rooms: the "terror" of childhood, the loops and whiteboards of an anxious, rule-keeping brain, the complicated safety of therapist attachment, and the deep, layered grief of losing my mom and other anchors. Some pieces sit very close to my actual story; others are written from the voices of younger parts of me who finally got language. All of them are attempts to tell the truth gently, without turning suffering into spectacle.

I write under the pen name MJ Lane to keep a little distance between my work as a teacher and this more exposed part of my story. My students don't need the details of my trauma for me to love them well. But I'm offering this book to the adults who might recognize themselves here-the ones who grew up in terror houses, who sit in therapy wondering if they're "too much," who feel guilty that grief and pain are hard to loosen their grip on. If that's you, I want you to know this: you are not broken for needing people. You are not weak for having symptoms. You are not failing at faith because healing is slow or complicated. Sometimes the holiest thing we can do is tell the truth about what hurt us and let another person stay in the room.

These poems don't offer neat resolutions. There is no tidy bow at the end of trauma. But there are small, stubborn threads of hope woven through: a hand on a shoulder in a therapy room, light on a camera lens, a verse that lands at just the right moment, a nervous system learning-very slowly-that safety can exist in the present tense. Thank you for holding these pages with care. I pray that, in some quiet way, they help you name your own pain as something real, not imagined-and remind you that even in the heaviest rooms of your story, hope still remains.