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melmel82's review against another edition
5.0
I Choose Elena is an essay on trauma, the impact trauma has on the body, the failures of the medical system, and recovery.
Lucia Osborne-Crowley tells her story, while discussing the long term affects of trauma and shame. This essay is well researched and gives detailed explanations on why the body reacts to trauma, and continues to react, the way that it does. How unresolved trauma can lead to chronic illness. How women continue to be doubted.
This book is such an important addition on the subject of trauma. While this book mainly focuses on sexual trauma, I feel anyone who has experienced trauma of some kind, could gain something from this book
Lucia Osborne-Crowley tells her story, while discussing the long term affects of trauma and shame. This essay is well researched and gives detailed explanations on why the body reacts to trauma, and continues to react, the way that it does. How unresolved trauma can lead to chronic illness. How women continue to be doubted.
This book is such an important addition on the subject of trauma. While this book mainly focuses on sexual trauma, I feel anyone who has experienced trauma of some kind, could gain something from this book
chloehunter51's review
5.0
I wish I could wrap the author and everyone I know who has been through similar in a big healing hug. My heart hurts finishing this book, for all of those mentioned that were abused and for the billions that can/could have related.
My favourite part though, was when Lucia writes of Peter Levine and his knowledge of trauma saving him from that very thing. This is a life-saving tip that I want to carry and share with everyone.
Thank you Lucia, for being so raw and open about an event you so badly wanted to bury deep so that, as you said, can help victims seek help before their trauma manifests physically.
My favourite part though, was when Lucia writes of Peter Levine and his knowledge of trauma saving him from that very thing. This is a life-saving tip that I want to carry and share with everyone.
Thank you Lucia, for being so raw and open about an event you so badly wanted to bury deep so that, as you said, can help victims seek help before their trauma manifests physically.
giveitagojo's review
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
5.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Sexual assault
half_book_and_co's review
4.0
4,5
"By far the most dangerous element of my assault was the fact that I lived in a world where it was unspeakable. I knew, as soon, as it happened, without ever being told, that I must say nothing. Indignity is painful but silence is a prison."
At fifteen Lucia Osborne-Crowley is a successful gymnast who feels deeply connected to her body, in control of every micro movement, searing through the air. Then one night, she is raped. She doesn't tell anyone and instead tries by her own to continue with her life. But her body begins to deteriorate. It takes her ten years and diagnoses of endometriosis and Crohn's disease until she is able to start to work through the violence she has experienced.
"I Choose Elena" is the second book I read in The Mood Indigo Essay Series (the other being These Bones Will Rise Again) and it is the second quiet triumph. Osborne-Crowley chronicles her painful journey and writes about the ways the body holds trauma. It's an essay about the realities of and discourses around sexualized violence, recent trauma studies, the hassle of getting chronical illnesses diagnosed (and the ways especially women in pain are treated by medical professionals), the long-time percussions of untreated trauma, and literature (the title alluding to Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels).
This book offers so much on only 150 small pages. In the last pages of the book, Osborne-Crowley emphasises how her access to help (medical etc) is not the norm and connect with privileges. I only wished for a few more sentences here and there to highlight how marginalized women are effected differently (for example when she looks into studies on how women's pain is undertreated).
"Once trauma finds you it does not let you go. And so we re-traumatize ourselves, believing we are rotten because we are the type of people to whom bad things happen, when in fact it is the living, breathing memory of the first bad thing that keeps sending us back, again and again and again, into the volcano."
"By far the most dangerous element of my assault was the fact that I lived in a world where it was unspeakable. I knew, as soon, as it happened, without ever being told, that I must say nothing. Indignity is painful but silence is a prison."
At fifteen Lucia Osborne-Crowley is a successful gymnast who feels deeply connected to her body, in control of every micro movement, searing through the air. Then one night, she is raped. She doesn't tell anyone and instead tries by her own to continue with her life. But her body begins to deteriorate. It takes her ten years and diagnoses of endometriosis and Crohn's disease until she is able to start to work through the violence she has experienced.
"I Choose Elena" is the second book I read in The Mood Indigo Essay Series (the other being These Bones Will Rise Again) and it is the second quiet triumph. Osborne-Crowley chronicles her painful journey and writes about the ways the body holds trauma. It's an essay about the realities of and discourses around sexualized violence, recent trauma studies, the hassle of getting chronical illnesses diagnosed (and the ways especially women in pain are treated by medical professionals), the long-time percussions of untreated trauma, and literature (the title alluding to Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels).
This book offers so much on only 150 small pages. In the last pages of the book, Osborne-Crowley emphasises how her access to help (medical etc) is not the norm and connect with privileges. I only wished for a few more sentences here and there to highlight how marginalized women are effected differently (for example when she looks into studies on how women's pain is undertreated).
"Once trauma finds you it does not let you go. And so we re-traumatize ourselves, believing we are rotten because we are the type of people to whom bad things happen, when in fact it is the living, breathing memory of the first bad thing that keeps sending us back, again and again and again, into the volcano."
hoovertronic's review
5.0
I loved how those booked explore the science of trauma whilst woven into the authors own horrifc experiences to give the science a real sense of truth. She is a powerful writer and using her words to help bring balance to an unequal world