Powerful message as new book from Crawley author tells us we are not alone in our traumas
A powerful message comes through The Silent Scream Anthology from Crawley author Maria Alfieri: you are not alone. The book, Maria explains, is a collection of raw and honest memoirs, anecdotes, poems and artworks about a variety of mental-heath topics including childhood sexual abuse, eating disorders, addiction, depression, anxiety, PTSD, self-harm, parenting difficulties and generally not feeling good enough in a society demanding perfection. Independently published by Pontem Publishing, The Silent Scream Anthology (hardback £22.99; paperback £13.99) is available from outlets including Waterstones, Foyles and Amazon. Maria, aged 37, explains: “I trained as an English teacher and worked in secondary schools teaching before I had my four children. Four years ago, when my youngest started pre-school, I started penning my first YA novel but found that I kept trying to tell my own story through the main protagonist. “Around the same time, I had embarked on a journey of self-discovery and had read a lot around the subject of addiction, eating disorders and shame. “I realised that I needed to stop hiding behind a character and tell my story honestly and vulnerably if I really wanted to step out of shame and shed skins and habits that no longer served me. I wrote a letter which I addressed to my childhood sexual abuser. I shared it with my husband in the hope that it would bring him some understanding as to why, despite having a seemingly perfect life, I still lacked selfesteem and would fall in and
out of depression and drawn to self-destructive habits. “His response gave me the courage to share it with others, in the hope that stepping further out of my shame would help me to finally move forward. I didn’t want to be hiding in a secret any more. I didn’t want to be trapped in shame and silence. “The response was incredible and those people I shared it with all came forward with stories of their own. The ripple of effect of reading part of my story was ‘Hey, me too – not in the same way as you, but…’ “After that I wondered how many other people were out there like me, feeling trapped in shame and silence, isolated in their experiences. And so I started The Silent Scream Anthology. In my vulnerability I found others were willing to do the same. People came forward to speak to me about their own silent screams and quite quickly I found myself amidst a community of courageous people exposing their wounds, not just for their own healing, but for that of others too. Women and men from all walks of life across the globe reached out, and like one candle lighting another, our stories spread hope. And I guess that is the appeal of the book for many people; to know that normal does not exist, regardless of whom you are or where you are: for readers to know that they are not the only ones feeling this way and that there is no shame in speaking up or reaching out for support. “The collaborators have come together to say to readers: ‘Me too. I’ve suffered. Not in the same way as you. But I understand your despair and struggle and I offer you hope’. “With the wide-ranging topics being covered and the mixed media content, there is something for everyone and actually, readers so far have found that they resonate with more of the stories, or at least elements of them, than they anticipated. The positive feedback has been overwhelming and has made the entire process so worthwhile.” Maria added: “I came to write the anthology based on my own experiences of struggling silently in dealing with my childhood sexual abuse. I developed anorexia aged 11 for which I was eventually hospitalised aged 12-13. Anorexia was a physical demonstration of a trauma I could not vocalise. I spent my teenage years starving myself and self-harming. My anorexia developed into bulimia. All my reckless and self- destructive behaviours were a way of me yelling to the world ‘I am not okay!” “But of course these cries were completely misunderstood, especially back in the 1990s and at the turn of the millennium. Despite gaining some control over my eating disorders I still struggled, sometimes daily, with that inner dialogue which told me that I wasn’t worthy. That I needed to starve myself out of life. That I needed to harm myself because I was a complete loser.”