{"id":23637,"date":"2019-04-25T17:24:14","date_gmt":"2019-04-25T21:24:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=23637"},"modified":"2019-04-25T17:24:16","modified_gmt":"2019-04-25T21:24:16","slug":"author-and-activist-rebick-to-share-personal-story-at-library","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/author-and-activist-rebick-to-share-personal-story-at-library\/","title":{"rendered":"Author and activist Rebick to share personal story at Library"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Brock Weir<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Judy Rebick has never shied away from leading the charge\nfor social justice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A activist by nature, she doesn\u2019t skirt controversial\ntopics or miss an opportunity to get people \u2013 particularly the powers-that-be \u2013\nout of their respective comfort zones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But, in tackling the very personal issue of mental\nhealth, Ms. Rebick had to tackle some uncomfortable subjects of her own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She is set to share that personal story at the Aurora\nPublic Library this Wednesday, May 1 at 7 p.m. in an \u201cIn Conversation\u201d event\nhosted by this writer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wednesday\u2019s discussion will focus not only on Ms.\nRebick\u2019s storied career as an activist, publisher and television host, but also\nher new memoir, Heroes in my Head, which charts her own experience with\nclinical depression and Dissociative Identity Disorder, a disorder previously\nknown as \u201cmultiple personality disorder.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI think my story shows a different side of what most\npeople consider mental illness,\u201d says Ms. Rebick.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trauma of any kind can be destructive, she says, and\npeople tend to look at the destructive side of it, but looking back on her own\nexperience she says \u201csurviving a trauma can make you more creative in lots of\nways\u201d as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI like to call them mental injuries because, in my case,\nit is not an illness but an injury inflicted on me,\u201d she says. \u201cI fought to\nchange the world for women and children and part of that is because of what\nhappened to me. I find a lot of people who are active are active because it\nhelps them heal their own situation, their own problems, and make them feel\nbetter about themselves as they try to change the world to be better for\nothers.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ms. Rebick says she knew she didn\u2019t have an easy\nchildhood. Her father was domineering and had fits of violence outside the home\nwhile his \u201cyelling and screaming\u201d was a regular experience indoors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She says she knew she had issues, but didn\u2019t know she had\nbeen sexually abused until she started going to therapy in 1980.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Setting down on paper what happened next was a very hard\nprocess. While her five previous books took an average of two years to\ncomplete, Heroes in My Head took eight solid years start to finish. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI had to learn how to do something very different,\u201d she\nsays, noting that because she was disassociated, there were gaps in her own\nmemory she had to work hard to fill. \u201cI trained as a journalist and I have\nworked as a journalist. In journalism, you\u2019re summing up, but writing a memoir\nis more like writing fiction in the sense that you need to set scenes and get\nthe characters and dialogue, have to have people stay in a scene and not have\nthem sip through it. I also had to explore my own history as a journalist in a\nway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhat was hard was showing this other side of myself that\nI kept hidden my whole life. I am a very public person and I have never talked\nabout any of this. I don\u2019t think I even talked about any kind of sexual\nviolence. I had to face that people\u2019s ideas of me would be changed by this.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was a risk, she said, that people would think less\nof her but, in the end, the reception Heroes in My Head received was\n\u201cincredible.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI never experienced anything like it because I am a\nfairly controversial person,\u201d she says with a laugh. \u201cThis is the only thing I\nhave ever done that I got nothing negative, not even on Twitter. There was one\ntweet that said, \u2018How does she remember? This is all bullshit. There\u2019s no such\nthing as multiple personalities.\u2019 There was one tweet from somebody who didn\u2019t\neven know how to tag me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThis book is about the interplay between healing from\nabuse and activism. My mental injury actually helped me to be a better activist\nbecause it made me fearless, for one thing. I couldn\u2019t feel fear. People think\nof me as strong and fearless, and a lot of that is because I was so\ndisassociated from my feelings.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To join the dialogue at In Conversation: Author &\nActivist Judy Rebick with Brock Weir, reserve your free ticket at aurorapl.ca\nand come out on Wednesday, May 1 at 7 p.m.<\/p>\n\r\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Brock Weir Judy Rebick has never shied away from leading the charge for social justice. A activist by nature, she doesn\u2019t skirt controversial topics or miss an opportunity to get people \u2013 particularly the powers-that-be \u2013 out of their respective comfort zones. But, in tackling the very personal issue of mental health, Ms. Rebick […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23637","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general_news","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-69f","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-15 10:57:25","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23637","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23637"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23637\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23637"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23637"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23637"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}