how she tapped into her sexual assault to write the television series, Exposure

When I was little and watching Disney princess movies, I so distinctly remember wanting the stories to be entirely conflict-free. I didn’t want a parent to die, an evil stepmother, a tense quest to battle the dragons – I just wanted to watch the day in the life of the princess. Watch her wake up, make pancakes, get a head massage, play with her dogs, ride her horses. Just happiness. Screw adversity.

Then life happened, and I went what the actual f–k? I started to learn the value of storytelling, and being seen on screen. The power of its connection in making our suffering feel not so agonisingly lonely.

Beyond my innocent pancake days, as an adult storyteller I felt compelled by the writerly pull to step into the lava – the core of our suffering, and what can become the potential core of our transcendence. But I want to make it clear, sexual violence should never be linked to lofty statements of “things happen for a reason” and “there is a silver lining to everything”. Sexual assault is implicitly wrong, criminal and a heinous act of egregious male entitlement that destroys life.

But it happened to me. It’s a trauma I will never transcend from. A trauma that shattered a decade of my life when I should have been forming healthy attachments. PTSD I continue to navigate.

It was in 2019, after I had written the very first draft of my TV show Exposurethat this burning hot lava became clear. I was on a work trip to LA, and I woke up in the middle of the night in my hotel room in West Hollywood and realised: this draft, this show, was the paradoxical echoing of my burning rage towards men and my shameful desperation to be validated by them. Trauma isn’t neat or clean. It’s messy, complicated, and at times, f–king humiliating.

I wanted the same gender who had so brutally violated my integrity to restore it. This was an agony I lived in for an appalling amount of my youth. What I didn’t realise the night of my West Hollywood epiphany was that acceptance was still an abstract concept. Denial still had its stronghold. Exposure became my calling. Jacs (the lead character) had been born and she was going to take me to my knees before I could stand back up again.

I was in the lava. It scorched my skin and melted my flesh. I couldn’t run or hide. The drafts were due and I was forced to sit there and write through it.

LUCY COLEMAN

I wrote episodes one to four feverishly. The drafts flowed. It was Jacs as I knew her: angry, embarrassing, everything suppressed and buried down.

Then came the first draft of episode five. And, well, it all just started to come undone. I was in the lava. It scorched my skin and melted my flesh. I couldn’t run or hide. The drafts were due and I was forced to sit there and write through it. A fictionalised version of this life-shattering event. I was forced to face this irrevocable moment when I walked into the path of a male perpetrator. That it really had happened. That it really was horrific. And the fact that I was in tears day after day. That it had really happened to me.