The Answer Is in the Wound

Also by Kelly Sundberg

Goodbye, Sweet Girl

THE ANSWER IS IN THE WOUND

TRAUMA,

RAGE,

AND

ALCHEMY

KELLY SUNDBERG

New York

Copyright © 2025 by Kelly Sundberg

Jacket design © Kelly Winton

Jacket art © shutterstock

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Sara Ahmed, Hearing Complaint, in Complaint!, pp. 1–26. Copyright 2021, Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Republished by permission of the copyright holder, and the Publisher. www.dukeupress.edu.

From Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma by Peter A. Levine, published by North Atlantic Books, copyright © 1997 by Peter A. Levine. Reprinted by permission of North Atlantic Books.

By Stevie Smith, from All the Poems, copyright © 1937, 1938, 1942, 1950, 1957, 1962, 1966, 1971, 1972 by Stevie Smith. Copyright © 2016 by the Estate of James MacGibbon. Copyright © 2015 by Will May. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

The Collected Poems and Drawings of Stevie Smith by Stevie Smith, copyright © 2018. Reprinted by permission of publisher Faber and Faber Ltd.

Any use of this publication to train generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies is expressly prohibited. The author and publisher reserve all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

The events and experiences that I write about are all true and have been faithfully rendered as I remember them. In some places, I’ve changed the names, identities, and other specifics of individuals who have played a role in my life in order to protect their privacy. The conversations I re-create come from my clear recollections of them, through they are not written to represent word-for-word transcripts. In all instances, I’ve retold them in a way that evokes the feeling and meaning of what was said, always keeping with the true essence of the exchanges.

Printed in the United States of America

This book was set in 13-pt. Centaur MT by Alpha Design & Composition of Pittsfield, NH.

First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: August 2025

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.

ISBN 978-0-8021-6425-4

eISBN 978-0-8021-6426-1

Roxane Gay Books

an imprint of Grove Atlantic

154 West 14th Street

New York, NY 10011

Distributed by Publishers Group West

groveatlantic.com

This book is dedicated to Teddy and Bob.

Pets mean so much to single moms, and mine got me through many lonely days and nights. I am grateful to have found two of the loves of my life when I needed them most.

Pain that gets performed is still pain.

—Leslie Jamison

"Disavowal, says the silence."

—Maggie Nelson

May this book be an exorcism.

Contents

Introduction

His Apologies in Erasure

Part 1: Captivity

It Was Once like This Before

Mornings, on the Ranch

Mates

The Sharp Point in the Middle

You Are the Star

The Sun Is at the Beginning of the House

Part 2: Rupture

Whirling Disease

Poppies

No, You

Spoons

Everything That Brings Me Joy Also Brings Me Sorrow Now

Part 3: The Problem

Silences

Still Screaming

Winter’s Burden

The Problem

When You Blame Amber Heard, You Blame Me Too

Where Were the Mothers like Me?

Everything That Brings Me Joy Also Brings Me Sorrow Now

Part 4: Love & Rage

The Witching Hour

Every Line Is a Scream

Ritchie County Mall

Couplet

My Mother, My Self, and I

Everything That Brings Me Joy Also Brings Me Sorrow Now

Part 5: After

Gifts

The Answer Is in the Wound

Victim Impact Statement

The Blue of Melancholy

You Are the Star

How to Not Be Heartbroken

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

Introduction

When I was twenty-four, I went into the wilderness seeking transcendence. I had been raised by a gentle forester father in an outdoors community in the rural American West, where transcendental narratives of wilderness as salvation were normal. John Muir spoke of two pines as a doorway to a new world, and like so many others before me, I sought access to that new world through my retreat from civilization.

What was I retreating from? I didn’t really know. It’s nearly impossible to articulate a sense of persistent dissatisfaction and malaise, but that was where I was at. In rural Idaho, I felt like an outsider. Even in the early twenty-first century, Idaho wasn’t a friendly place for women, and I had spent my lifetime watching men do things while women stayed home.

My hometown was predominantly Mormon, and most of the women I knew were homemakers. They stayed at home, took care of the children, and worked to maintain the appearances of their families, their reputations, and their bodies. It’s a stereotype, but sometimes, stereotypes exist for a reason, and the Mormon women looked a certain way. Thin, with clear skin, white teeth, and straight hair. Maybe this was because they avoided substances, even the benign ones like caffeine. Maybe it was because, by and large, they had money. Maybe it was because the expectations were so strong that they would do whatever they had to in order to look good.

I remember my friend’s mother taking drugs to lose weight that were later outlawed. She would get a perm, then straighten her hair every day. The perm was purportedly for body, but all I knew was that, after all of that work, her hair looked like the hair on a LEGO person. She baked her own bread and made all of her food from scratch, but she also spent long afternoons in her darkened bedroom with migraines. As my friend and I grew older, and I leaned more into becoming who I really wanted to be, my friend’s mother told her that she was no longer allowed to be friends with me because I wasn’t Mormon, and that hurt me deeply.

The mythology of the hero’s quest was alive and well in Idaho, but as a woman, there were few models for me to follow, so I followed the models of men. I wanted to wear my Vans with dresses. I wanted to cut my hair into a pixie cut. I wanted tattoos and a nose ring. More than that, I wanted to have adventures. I wanted to do work that felt meaningful and important. I wanted to be independent. I wanted to be free.

It was the desire for freedom that compelled me to accept a job working for the US Forest Service as a wilderness ranger. A backcountry plane flew me into a remote airstrip and dropped me off at Indian Creek Guard Station in the Frank Church Wilderness. As I sat on the porch of my Forest Service cabin, I heard the words in my head: This is a story of a woman who went into the wilderness and came out unchanged. I was lonely in the wilderness, and it turned out that the silence didn’t make my thoughts more wise or prophetic. The solitude didn’t bring me closer to God; it only made me miserable.

Growing up in a rural, patriarchal community led to that dissatisfaction and malaise that led me to that job. Even as a child, I was outspoken, fiery, and smart. She’s got that redheaded temper, they said (because everyone knows who they are in a small community). She’s too smart for her own good, they also said. In high school, they made assumptions about my sexuality, did things like scrawl the words Fucking Dyke over a picture of me that was tacked to a bulletin board. I didn’t retreat; I bit back. They were unfazed, and I was miserable.

For a girl who grew up poor in the rural American West, there weren’t a lot of opportunities to leave. I dreamed of traveling the world, of working in New York City, but those were just dreams. My reality was that I would have to stay. Migration, in the traditional sense of the word, wasn’t an option for those of us who grew up with a lack of resources and education—­even for the smartest of us. Our migrations often happened in the spiritual realm. We accessed our spirit guides as a way of finding tolerance for our lives. Our reality was that, though progressive politics wasn’t yet a thing in the rural American West, white New Age mysticism was alive and well.

In high school, I worked at a local bookstore owned by a woman. The store carried books with titles such as Women Who Run with the Wolves and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Crystals hung in the windows, a tiny plug-in fountain gurgled next to the cash register, and wooden flute music piped through the speakers. Like every other bookstore at that time, we also carried the book Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. My high school English teacher had bought the book, and he would read chapters to us in class. I remember him telling us that it was never too early to learn that men want to be needed while women just want to be cherished. I remember thinking that my English teacher made me uncomfortable. I remember watching him sit on top of a desk in front of the class, then spread his legs wide open as if he sat that way all of the time. I remember thinking that, if I didn’t get out of that town, I would never be the person I wanted to be.

When I graduated, the three women I worked with at the bookstore gave me a meditation pillow and my first set of runes. They hugged me and told me to seek guidance from the spirits when I felt lost. They told me that they were so proud of me, that they had so much hope for my future. None of them had been able to finish college, and I knew I was lucky to be going to college at all.

I wanted to go to a progressive liberal arts college in the Midwest, but my family couldn’t afford it, so I landed at the University of Montana in Missoula, which was the closest city (population: 58,000) in miles to my hometown, but it was geographically difficult to access. First, we had to drive up, then down a winding mountain pass that crossed the Continental Divide and two mountain ranges—the Beaverheads and the Bitterroots. In many ways, Missoula felt like home, but in other ways, it felt foreign. There were students like me—students who had grown up in the impoverished local communities of Montana and Idaho—and there were students the locals referred to as Granuppies (granola + yuppie). The Granuppies had come from the East Coast to have the exotic experience of studying in the Rocky Mountains. When I told the Granuppies I had grown up in Idaho, they peppered me with questions, always curious what it was like to actually live in that region. They commented on how beautiful the nature was, and I found myself building up that aspect of my upbringing; I was too proud to admit I had been miserable in such a pristine place.

Here is the thing about towns with economies that rely on the land: The land isn’t as beautiful as it is utilitarian. My county had an economy that was dependent on mining, cattle ranching, and logging. By the time I was in high school, federal lawsuits from environmental groups had shut down most of the logging, and my family bore the weight of the community’s anger. My father was the representative from the US Forest Service who had to tell the logging companies there would be no more clear-cutting, and when I was in high school, he received death threats on our family’s answering machine. The neighbors had signs in their windows that read, this house supported by timber dollars. Those signs felt directed at us, and the realities of their homes were such that it was obvious that support wasn’t paying their bills.

Those neighbors were poor. Poorer than us, at least, and in a community that was so small, so angry, and so desperate, the folks who weren’t hungry were rich. To be rich was to be contemptible, and it would be dishonest of me if I didn’t admit I had internalized that mindset. In Missoula, I envied the ease of the Granuppies’ lives, but I didn’t respect them, and no matter how much I meditated or consulted my runes, the spirits didn’t give me guidance on how to reconcile such extreme class disparities. I dropped out of the University of Montana after one semester and returned to my hometown. Between three jobs, I worked seventy-hour weeks in the service industry while living in my parents’ basement. This was not the life I had envisioned for myself, so when I had the opportunity to work for the Forest Service, I took it. It was an easy decision. In rural Idaho, working for the Forest Service was one of the few ways to make a living wage, and beyond that, I would experience the wilderness as it was meant to be experienced.

During my one semester at the University of Montana, my freshman composition instructor had themed her class around wilderness. We’d read Edward Abbey and Henry David Thoreau, and I’d learned that wilderness could both heal and restore the spirit. No one was freer than Abbey and Thoreau had been, and I believed that, if I followed their paths, I, too, would be independent and wise. The wisdom would show me that I needed no one, and if I didn’t need anyone, then it didn’t matter that I didn’t fit in.

I’d grown up in a strict Christian family but had stopped being a believer in my early teen years. Still, the spiritualist in me craved nature’s transcendence. I often thought of a print on my neighbor’s wall. It was called Footsteps, and had a painting of footsteps in the sand, along with a dialogue between Jesus and an unnamed person. Jesus told the person he would always walk beside them, but the person asked why there was only one pair of footsteps in the sand during the toughest times?

Jesus answered, Because those were the times when I carried you. The picture was cheap, and the sentiment trite, but, still, I looked at those footprints in the sand and yearned to be carried.

At Indian Creek, I spent a lot of time alone, but I also spent more time with men than ever before. There was the trail crew that came in after weeklong hitches in the woods, the backcountry pilots who popped into my office to chat with me, and the river guides who led guided trips down the Salmon River. Those trips billed themselves as offering the full wilderness experience. For a mere $2,000, tourists could float through sixty miles of wilderness while dining on fresh seafood in the evenings and participating in group-led beach yoga in the mornings. The river guides were good-looking, tanned, and charming. The trail crew, rugged and rough. The pilots, surprisingly intellectual. Being the only woman in a forest full of men meant that I got a lot of attention—mostly unwanted. After killing a nest of baby mice for me, one of the trail crew guys asked if he could sleep in my cabin that night. I said no and locked my door. One river guide told me that, as a woman in a certain industry, my role in the wilderness was to let men into my bed. Another river guide said I could be pretty if I tried. I was so tired, by then, and started crying. He got flustered. I know it must be hard, he said, not unkindly. I’m not sure what he thought was hard. I didn’t know how to tell him that I wasn’t crying out of sadness; I was crying out of anger.

And then, finally, there was the co-worker who talked constantly about his ex-wife. He called her a bitch and told me that he’d been arrested for pulling a gun on her. Still, he complimented me, said that I was nothing like her, that I was soft and sweet. I enjoyed his praise: I didn’t take the time to think about what it meant that he abused his wife. At one point, I complained about the other men, and he said, Don’t listen to those men. They don’t deserve a second of your time.

Thank you for being nice to me, I said.

He looked down, embarrassed, then back up. Girl, you’re easy to be nice to, he replied.

And I was. Somewhere between the first river guide, and the trail crew member, and the next river guide, I had learned how to be a woman that was easy to be nice to.

My boss was a woman, an Amazonian, psychic redhead named Sheri. She flew in occasionally to check on me, and perhaps it was her stature—she towered over most of the men—but they cowered beneath her. They hated her, but also respected her. Sheri was gruff—known for being difficult and opinionated—but she was also kind. One night, we sat on the porch of my cabin, and she laid out a spread of tarot cards. You’re smart, she said, but you’re going to have to get tougher.

I understood what she meant. I had gone into the wilderness seeking the experience of a Granuppie or one of those tourists who paid to float the river in comfort, but instead, I was having the experience of a working-class woman on the job.

Transcendence would have been easy to find if I was rich, I thought.

But I wasn’t rich. I was a woman trying to exist in a man’s world and no amount of meditation or divination was going to change that. Only I could change that, so I did. It took me a long time. I went back to college. I moved out of Idaho. I graduated from three state schools with an MFA, a PhD, and a mortgage-sized amount of student loans. I got married, had a child, lived through an abusive marriage and painful divorce, then became a single parent. I became tougher, harder. No longer soft or sweet, I was kind, but not nice, and I chose not to care if I was easy to be nice to.

On the night of the 2016 election, when America elected a man like my former