Perspectives Molded by Pain: A Writer’s Journey

Speaking through a selection of visceral, poignant poetry and passages from a memoir-in-progress, lifelong Connecticut resident Cora Santaguida, this Tuesday’s featured reader at Curley’s, will describe her experiences coping, adapting, accomplishing and just plain surviving through the legacy of formative psychological and emotional trauma over the last few decades.

Forced to retire early in 2003 from mentoring, job coaching and youth empowerment work in the public sector, Cora sustained tenacity in shining light on personal shadows both for her own benefit and that of many others enduring similar challenges in silence, accumulating experiences by turns moving, infuriating and generous-minded, all contributing to the profound interplay between self-expression and self-discovery on the road to recovery.

A cum laude graduate from The College Rochelle with a BA in English, Cora has run for public office twice in Stamford (where she serves as a Justice of the Peace). She continues to involve herself in political and social justice activities, mostly surrounding the 10 key values of the Green Party.

While repression might serve as a short-term self-defense mechanism against violent affronts to one’s potential, dignity or welfare, many suffer in modern society because of its own collective exercise of a repression that is more willful in its evasiveness than subconsciously protective.

Current proposals by the Pentagon to artificially excise horrific events from the memories of war veterans (theoretically eliminating PTSD), is the most recent of numerous efforts at manipulating consciousness (see here and here), symptomatic of a way of life so ill both in how it defines--and globally projects--itself, that it would sooner reshape the human condition from scratch before acknowledging the fundamentals of human sensitivity.

Whatever is repressed, suppressed or decompensated for, the following video to Five Finger Death Punch’s “Remember Everything” (whose lyrics inspired one of Cora’s tattoos)  argues with authority and anguish how that which is done to the mind and body is at least as important as the impact it has on what both do over the course of a lifetime: