On Basements

and the fluency of survival

art by Brenda Coloma

content warning: child abuse

Subscribe to Reasons for Living for more of whatever this is—the honest, occasionally beautiful dispatches from a woman who is furnishing her basement and writing a novel about it.

I’ve been thinking a lot about basements.

This is partly because of the novel I’m revising—dear God, please let me finish this thing soon—which concerns itself with the sort of damage that rearranges the interior architecture of a person, sometimes for their entire life. And it is partly because I have a basement of my own, and have lived in it for a long time, and have been thinking about what it means to furnish a room you did not choose and cannot leave.

Here is how I understand it. I say “I” because I don’t want to presume how it works for everyone, though I suspect this will sound familiar to more people than I’d like: when childhood sexual abuse occurs, the survivor/victim is placed in a basement. Not literally—though sometimes literally, too. But metaphorically, structurally, in the way that matters for the rest of your life: something happens, and you go down into the dark. The stairs are not stairs you chose. The door closes behind you, and it locks with a terrible THUNK, and now you are in the basement.

My question is: are you there forever?

I used to think the answer might be no. That with enough therapy, enough time, enough of the right kind of love or the right pharmaceutical intervention or the right revelatory experience on a mountaintop in the company of people who understood and could reflect back to you that you are not alone—that eventually you’d be able to find the stairs. The door would open from the inside. You’d walk back up into the rest of the house, where other people live and would be happy to greet you, where the light comes in sheets and not in slivers. Where the floor is not concrete, and the ceiling does not press down like a hand.

I don’t think that anymore.

I think you get no refunds. I think the basement is where you live now. Not because healing is impossible—I rankle at that, and I want to be precise, too, because precision matters when you’re talking about The Thing That Shapes Everything—but because healing, in my experience, does not return you to the floor you were on before. It doesn’t undo the descent. What it does, if you’re lucky and stubborn and willing to keep going back to the people who can help, is change the room.

You can make a basement livable. You can make it beautiful, even. You can hang framed art on the walls—real art, not just motivational posters about resilience that involve cats hanging from branches, but things that make you stop and look and feel something other than cold concrete. You can bring in soft lighting—the kind that’s not for interrogation and is without fluorescent buzz. Rugs that are thick and quiet. Furniture that you chose, that makes you glad. You can string fairy lights across the ceiling and install a record player that only plays music that soothes your heart, and you can line the shelves with books you desperately want to read—books about other basements, books about houses with no basements at all, books that let you imagine, briefly, what it might be like to live on the ground floor.

But are you still in the basement? Yes.

This isn’t about despair. I want to be clear about that. This is not me telling you that nothing works, that survival is futile, and that the best you can hope for is a well-decorated cage. I’m telling you what I know at this point in my life, which is that the room is the room, and the room has always been the room. And the most honest, most useful thing I’ve learned—the thing I wish someone had told me twenty years ago instead of promising me nonexistent stairs—is that you can build a real life inside it; you can build a life with texture and pleasure and work you care about and people you love and days where you almost forget you’re underground.

Almost. That word is doing a lot of heavy lifting. But almost is not nothing. Almost is quite a lot.

Here is the other thing I’ve been thinking about, and is also the thing that’s harder to say (are you serious, Es, you just said something that’s going to make a lot of people upset, what could you possibly say next).

There is a language that belongs to people who live in basements. It’s not a language anyone teaches you; you acquire it the way children acquire their mother tongue, which is to say involuntarily and through immersion. You learn it in your body before you learn it in your mind. You learn it in the way you flinch, or freeze instead of flinch, or have trained yourself not to flinch, somehow, in the company of people who’ve never had reason to. You learn it in the silence that follows certain things that you say and in your own, well-trained half-second delay before you answer how are you, during which your brain goes through a rapid, invisible flowchart: what does this person need me to say? what can they handle? what is safe?

Basement is a fluent language. When two people who speak it find each other, the recognition is almost cellular. You don’t have to explain certain things. You don’t have to perform the careful translation that you do with everyone else—the one where you take the raw, jagged thing that happened to you and sand it down carefully until you can recite it, usually in a monotone with no pauses and as though whatever you’re saying is not that bad, to someone with a ground-floor life.

I’ve wondered for a long time whether people who don’t have basements can learn the language. Whether empathy, however deep and genuine, can approximate fluency. Can a therapist who has studied trauma extensively but has never lived in a basement truly speak basement? Are they instead reading from a phrasebook that includes I like pasta and where is the bathroom? Totally competent! One might even say helpful! But not with the fluency that comes from having it in your marrow.

I have not found that they can. I want to be wrong about this. I have loved people who tried because they are some of the kindest people I know, who listened with such attention and such care that I wanted it to be enough. And it wasn’t. Not because they did a bad job. Not because they didn’t love me. But because the language lives in the body, not the mind, and you can’t learn a bodily language through study. You can only learn it by having the body.

Last year, I attended a retreat for women survivors of childhood sexual abuse. I expected—I don’t know what I expected. Communion? The relief of being in a room where everyone spoke basement, where no translation was necessary, where I could say the thing and watch it land in another body the way it lives in mine?

And that did happen. There were moments of such precise, wordless recognition. Someone said a sentence, and the room went still, and I understood that every woman there had heard it in the same place in her body—not in her ears, not in her intellect, but in the basement, where the sound waves travel differently.

But here is what I didn’t expect: fluency doesn’t necessarily equate fellowship. A room full of people who speak your language is not necessarily a room full of people you want to hang out in. Shared damage is not the same as shared values, or shared humor, or shared taste in 3 AM diner food, or any of the hundreds of other things that make you want to keep a person in your life.

This was a useful and somewhat humbling thing to learn. I had spent years looking for my people among other survivors, as though the basement were a neighborhood and everyone who lived there was a potential friend. Big nope! It’s a condition. And while the condition comes with a language, the language does not automatically create a community.

I said at the beginning that I’ve been thinking about basements because of the novel. This is true, but it is also a convenient deflection—the magician’s trick of rattling off enough patter that you don’t see them throw the rabbit into a hole onstage.

The truer answer is that I am thinking about basements because I have been spending a lot of time in the worse version of mine lately. Not in crisis, and not in the way that sends you to a special phone line in the middle of the night or a locked ward where you have to give up your shoelaces. In a chronic way. The way that is, I think, the actual texture of survivorship for most of us: the low, steady awareness of the room you’re in, the concrete under the rug, the ceiling that’s definitely my ceiling but is also someone else’s floor.

I am thinking about basements because I am trying to write characters who live in them, and to do this honestly I have to be honest about my own. Because the novel keeps asking me questions that I have been answering on the page but not, until now, out loud: What does it cost to make a basement beautiful? Who can you invite in? What happens when you meet someone who lives on the ground floor and loves you and cannot, no matter how hard they try, hear the dripping of the pipes?

You’ll have to wait for the book to get my full thoughts on these questions. But I’ll leave you with this: the room can be made beautiful. It won’t be the same as a ground-floor room with big windows and natural light. But it can be beautiful in the way that all hard-won, deliberately constructed spaces are beautiful: because someone who had every reason to stop trying decided to hang the art anyway. ❤️

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If you’re a writer living in a basement—literal or otherwise—and you’re trying to turn that experience into a book, an essay, a body of work that matters, The Unexpected Shape Writing Academy was built for you. Not to get you out of the room, but to help you write from inside it.

Subscribe to Reasons for Living for more of whatever this is—the honest, occasionally beautiful dispatches from a woman who is furnishing her basement and writing a novel about it.