Cynthia with Antonia Tuni Deignan Author of Underwater Daughter A Memoir of Survival and Healing - a podcast by CTR Network

June 17th, Father’s Day of 2018, only days after moving from Ohio to Indiana and into a community where she knew no one, Tuni went down shockingly and unexpectedly in a terrible bicycle accident. She suffered a compound fracture (bones poking through skin) through her right elbow and a neat break that split her left wrist in half which resulted in four surgeries, two titanium five-inch brackets, thirty screws, many months of round the clock opiates, and for the first time in her life, the inability to fully move her body.

The accident happened not in her twenties or thirties, during her career as a professional ballet/jazz dancer. Nor did it occur in her forties when she was dabbling in weekend competitive running races, duathlons, triathlons, and obstacle course competitions. The Father’s Day accident blindsided her six ways from Sunday when she was fifty-five years old.

Without movement in my wheelhouse, who was I? What next? Eventually, after half a year she titrated off of Oxycontin, addressed her heart, and began to write. And it was her childhood that came pouring out and onto the page. She faced the sexual abuse of her father, naming it and claiming it. With her time spent writing (all that she could do with both arms splinted) she began to understand better why she was so shut down, why she had so much difficulty standing up for herself, believing in her own self-worth, why she had sabotaged friendships, careers, and true love. The physical impacts of sexual trauma during her childhood, she discovered, had lodged in her bones, and buried deep into her cells.

The emotional responses that went hand in hand with those experiences laid there as well. Quiet. The writing became a daily habit, a daily need. A creative pause, an opportunity for reflection, butt in the chair, fingers tapping, the words fell into sequences, sentences, episodes. They became poems, explorations, and difficult truth-telling. Slowly a story unfolded and unearthed the woman she had longed to be. Unafraid. Confident. Worthy. Not to blame. Allowed. Loveable. She made a vision board, a one-year, five-year, ten-year plan. Shared her writing, submitted essays, published. As her health returned, everything felt possible, and her time in the past of escaping into a dancer’s a wonderful but wordless silhouette transformed into her sixty-year-old self, realizing she had a lot to say and a lot to do. Today, she moves and dances her heart away.

She added tennis to her repertoire two years after her accident, to strengthen her arms. (Her doctor thinks her recovery is miraculous.) She volunteers weekly at assisted living centers guiding seniors in meditation and body awareness. She holds weekly online meditation sessions followed by writing prompts to help women discover, examine and unleash their voices, their truths, their hidden traumas. She wants women to come out of their silent corners, be loud, and stand proud. Her memoir, Underwater Daughter comes out May 2, 2023, with She Writes Press, almost five years to the day of her accident on Father’s Day of 2018. Her memoir is available from Amazon, Bookshop, Barnes and Noble and other booksellers. More information can be found at www.antoniadeignan.com

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