It can seem perplexing from the outside, this pull that many women experience to make things better for those who have hurt us. The impulse to smooth things over to keep ourselves safe, as well as the constant messages many of us have received in our lives to “make things nice” no matter what harm has been done, can be so deeply rooted that it often results in behaviour that can later appear nonsensical to an outside eye. (The betrayal of oneself that results from this “making things nice” with an attacker can also make one bleed on a subterranean level.)

Dr. Lori Haskell, a renowned clinical psychologist who has written and presented extensively on the impact of trauma in sexual assault cases, writes: “Some sexual assault victims may continue to date their assaulters in an effort to neutralize the trauma or regain some control over an event that left them powerless. In fact, many reach out to their attacker again specifically to try to regain power in the relationship. While others explain that they believed he may acknowledge what he did and apologize.”

I burst into a workshop room where twenty other crabby-looking pregnant women had just been informed they couldn’t eat whatever the hell they wanted during their pregnancies and needed to draw their own blood three times a day in lieu of scarfing cupcakes. I worried for the peppy young nutritionist. She sat in the middle of the ring of famished, irate, heavily pregnant women. She looked as though she was surrounded by a pack of bloated, hungry wolves. There wasn’t a single question that was asked in a non-confrontational way. One woman kept asking about twisters. “WHAT ABOUT A TWISTER?! ARE YOU TELLING ME I CAN’T EAT A TWISTER IN THE MORNING? COME ON! NOT EVEN A TWISTER!” The group of women, who were mostly Asian, WASPy, or Black, had no clue what a twister was. Though I knew what it was, I initially had the good sense to stay well back from the fray. A Southeast Asian woman dared to ask what many were likely wondering. “I’m sorry. What is a twister?” She was met with a shriek of “YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT A TWISTER IS? FROM HAYMISHE’S! YOU KNOW! COME ON! WHAT IS THIS PLACE?!” The nutritionist, who clearly had not been on the job very long, acted politely curious about the exotic cuisine being discussed and asked someone to explain what a twister was. “It’s bagel-like,” I finally offered quietly, unable to stay out of any fray for very long. “Oh! You mean a bagel!” the relieved nutritionist exclaimed. “A TWISTER!! IT’S WAY BIGGER THAN A BAGEL!” was the response. “Oh, well,” the nutritionist said. “You can only get away with half a bagel in the morning, so I guess a quarter of a twister would be okay. But that would have to be it! And it’s probably better to spend your carbs on something more nutritious.” I decided she was suicidal. Twister Lady was in a state of total combustion. “Give me that sheet!” she said. She grabbed out of the nutritionist’s grasping claws the sheet of information about what could and couldn’t be eaten and in what portions. The nutritionist went red as she tried to ignore the physical aggression and suggested we all practise pricking our fingers. There were moans. One woman screamed.

Many nights in those years I lay awake wondering if the thing I wanted most would simply not be a part of my life. I regretted the inordinate and unseemly amount of luck I had had thus far. Why should I deserve to get the thing I most wanted, when so much had been handed to me?

She was adored. As an adult, I am still sometimes stopped on the street by people in their seventies or eighties who tell me how much they loved my mother, how much she made them laugh, how much she helped them and believed in them. One of her former colleagues told one of my siblings that they remembered her rushing into a meeting late one day, which was odd, as she was usually so organized and responsible at work. He noticed that her face was greasy-looking and sweating. He said, “Diane—were you just sunbathing?” She yelped. “Yes! I’m so sorry! It was just such a beautiful day!” She managed to pack these shards of joy into a life that was constantly overstuffed.

I take a deep breath and I answer Soap-Opera-Hot Doctor’s mother’s question. I say that I didn’t know how much I missed my mother until I was pregnant. I say that I didn’t know how angry I was at her for dying. I say that now that I’ve lived two and a half years with my child, and felt the intensity of our subterranean, inexpressible, and indelible knowledge of each other, I’ve gone from feeling that eleven years with my mother was not very much, not nearly enough, to knowing that to feel adored and cherished by a mother who was full of warmth and joy is quite a lot, actually. More than most people get in a lifetime. And because, as I became a mother myself, I was nurtured, for a short time, by a team of wise and skilled people at Mount Sinai Hospital (an incubator that finished off the work that my mother left undone), I’ve been able to remember, clearly, what was best in her, and to discover what was, in fact, fully formed in me.

I felt deeply ashamed and told him so. He said, “If this film is everything we want it to be, maybe, if we are very lucky, it will affect two or three people for a little while. The only thing that is certain is that the experience of making it will be with all of us, it will become a part of us, forever. So we must try our best to make it a good experience. It’s the most important thing.” He put his arm around me, ushered me away from set, and found a new way to shoot the scene. As we walked away from the set, something in me that had been stuck came loose.

So much of coming to terms with hard things from the past seems to be about believing our own accounts, having our memories confirmed by those who were there and honoured by those who weren’t. Why is it so hard for us to believe our own stories or begin to process them without corroborating witnesses appearing from the shadows of the past, or without people stepping forward with open arms when echoes of those stories present themselves again in the present?

A few years ago, I travelled back to Rome. I sat on the cobblestones at the far end of Largo dei Librari. The store where I used to buy my little chocolate ice cream balls had closed a long time ago. Now there were tables and chairs filling the small square, and tourists eating in the open air. I looked over their heads to the apartment we had lived in for those months in 1988. The air in the square had the same smell. Centuries old. Romantic and disgusting. As though something was rotting, beautifully. I wondered if the tourists could smell it too.

A year or so later, a girl awaiting a lung transplant asked to meet me. I spent a couple of hours with her and found myself forgetting the strange premise of why I was there. I liked her. A lot. She was funny and kind and she had a wry sense of humour about her own terrifying predicament. I would have liked to be her friend. The year before my mother died, we had moved from a suburb of Toronto to Aurora, a town which was an hour and a half by bus and subway from the school I went to, and I was never at school long enough to really maintain friendships throughout the year. I was under the impression that this girl would live, that we would talk often, but maybe I just didn’t ever ask anyone what her prognosis was. One day I called her to check in, and she was gone. Her father sent me a T-shirt with her face on it. I sat alone in my room for a long time.

The pain and sadness this left me with gradually twisted itself into anger. I started to see injustice everywhere. The technical crew, who generally showed me more compassion and kindness than anyone else on set, and who clearly had far more experience and expertise than the people they worked under, had no meaningful say in the show’s creation and were treated with noticeable disrespect by producers and some of the show’s directors. Many of the crew worked such long hours that they would talk about falling asleep and swerving off the road, or not seeing their children at all during the week because they left for work so early their kids were still sleeping and returned home long after they had gone to bed. I saw elderly background performers moved unceremoniously out of lunch lineups to make way for the show’s “stars,” including myself, after they had spent twice the time outside as everyone else, in thin period costumes, in sub-zero temperatures. Sometimes even the food they ate was different from ours, cheaper and less healthy. I became aware of a pecking order, one that I was near the top of, at least superficially. When I behaved in a bratty manner, no one held me accountable. But no one in charge seemed to care if I became so exhausted from work that I spiked a fever, or that I didn’t get time off after my mother’s death, either. Daily, I was fed a toxic concoction of coddling and neglect, which, unsurprisingly, did not bring out the best in me.

After years of clearing the land and cultivating it, the settlers in PEI were still paying rents to absentee landlords in Britain. The Tenant League was formed to support farmers who began to refuse to pay their rents. When the sheriffs came to arrest those farmers, neighbours would blow tin trumpets to alert supporters across the countryside. Sometimes dozens of people would answer the trumpet calls and arrive to surround the farmer in question, preventing his arrest. Finally, British troops were called in, but most of them were Irish, and when they arrived many found themselves siding with the tenant farmers. Though the rebellion was ultimately crushed, and the history of the Tenant League remains largely unknown in Canada, it had a profound influence on the Island. To this day in PEI, the acquisition of land by non-residents is highly regulated.

Craniosacral massage and a nine-week mindfulness-based stress reduction program do offer some temporary relief from the headaches. I meet five other people in the meditation program who are suffering with long-term concussions. We get together once in a while to share notes and resources on the various fixes we have been exploring. One woman is really into cold laser therapy, even though she admits it makes her headaches substantially worse. It’s a motley crew, and, for the most part, fully half of us don’t show up to the get-togethers. We are either in too much pain or we’ve forgotten. (Note to self: the presence of a brain injury is not a good organizing principle for a social group.)