Dissonance exists in efforts to communicate about suffering and despair. Showcasing common societal flawed reactions to despair begs for discourse to create a more communicatively healthy response. Attempting to communicate the suffering of others and feeling like I was failing at that goal led to my own suffering. Using writing as a method of personal healing created an intersection of personal narratives of suffering and victim’s narratives (which can arguable only allow for the co-opting of the story and narcissism). Grappling with the limits of writing to heal provided a lens to see the victim’s narratives in such a way that created self-reflexivity. Rather than equating the suffering of the victim’s to my own, which I absolutely do not do, instead I found potential answers to despair in the post-Holocaust theologians. This dissertation is an experiment in trying to communicate suffering and meaning in a post-Holocaust world where my story and the survivors stories both have similarities of theological despair, an ethic of defiance, and most certainly a refusal to be changed by the world.