Writing To Heal

When I was ten years old, my parents adopted a seven month old little girl from South Korea. I was ecstatic; my only other sibling, also a sister, was a mere eighteen months younger than me, and I had no memory of her babyhood. I looked forward to dressing the new baby up in the outfits we had been collecting since the adoption agency sent us the first picture of her. I was convinced that I would be her favorite sister, that we would share a close bond I had with no one else, and that our family would be exciting and made new with the addition of a small child. I was right about most of these things, but I was in no way prepared for the rest of the reality of adoption. 

My sister had been in a foster family from the time she was ten days old until she reached the age of seven months. Then, in a space of three days, she was taken from them, placed on an airplane, and sent to our family- away from the mother who had raised her and two older foster brothers. We were unprepared for the struggles that arose from her trauma. At ten years old, I did not fully grasp why she had night terrors, why she refused to let my father touch her, and why I couldn’t asleep anymore because of the constant sound of her uncontrollable crying. As the months wore on, our family relationships deteriorated until eventually I was unable to handle the extreme amounts of conflict and anger in my house.

I turned to fantasy. My parents were conservative, and gave me next to no chances to read realistic fiction as a child that may have alerted me to the fact that my home life was not, in fact, entirely normal. I had no books that dealt with the battles I was fighting at home, sadness for my sister, resentment for my parents and their punishment of her grief. Instead, I had other worlds to escape to. Hogwarts became my home; the Inkworld my secret hiding place, and my adventures nearly always took place in Narnia. 

These books were not enough. When I was seventeen, I had stopped eating; I dropped from 120 pounds to only 91. And then one day, my best friend introduced me to two books: Wintergirls, by Laurie Halse Anderson, and Thirteen Reasons Why, by Jay Asher. She didn’t know it yet, but I was fighting deeply suicidal thoughts at the time. After being sexually assaulted and struggling for nearly five years with what was later diagnosed as an undetermined personality disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, and generalized anxiety, there was too much holding me down in my own world for me to be able to escape anymore. As I read more and more of these books, books that spoke frankly of eating disorders, mental illness, deep depression, I began to recognize myself in these fictional characters. Later, I found Anderson’s book Speak. As a victim of rape, the brief but succinct description of Melinda’s assault almost seemed to break me all over again, but as I continued it brought something else, a slow but thorough kind of mending. 

The power of writing to heal is one of the most remarkable things I have observed in my (admittedly brief) lifetime. I have spent my entire life writing poetry, short stories, the beginnings of a few novels, and plan to spend my life teaching others how to do so, but my primary goal in writing is to save myself. And this is important, because I know now the impact one person’s words can have on their reader; it can, quite literally, save lives. I know, because it saved mine.

baby's breath

I am already in a drugged fog as I unlock the door to the house where I used to spend my childhood holidays. This is no longer unusual for me; I’ve grown accustomed to the velvet buzzing that fills my head on a nearly hourly basis these days. Tonight, however, my hands tremble as I twist the key, and it takes me three tries to remember the trick to getting the door open. The quiet thumping in my chest has turned begun to rattle my entire body by the second attempt, my body tense, waiting to see his headlights come around the corner. I forgot to leave a light on when I left. Stupid bitch, I curse myself. Should have remembered. Or better yet, should have stayed home, safe in the cave of your bedroom.

The house is abandoned tonight, and only shadows greet me. Only shadows, and yet something else makes me uneasy, something darker and deeper than the blackness of the unit hall. I feel my palms sweat, and turn into my makeshift bedroom, locking the door. I turn the light on, then change my mind, despite my fear, and shut it off. There are fresh, open wounds in my being, and after weeks of being hunted, I want to curl up in the quiet night to lick them.

I pull my clothes off, and the majority of the predator’s reek along with them. I turn down the blanket on my bed, and when my bare skin hits my jersey sheets, a new scent fills my head. Blood. I don’t need the light to see the stains. I am left with nothing but ruined sheets, and somewhere miles away, his are wet only with pleasure. Something in my stomach kicks. People speak of feeling phantom limbs after the real ones are gone- what about phantom fetuses? I put my hand on my graveyard of a belly, and I know who gutted me. There is a large hollow to fill, and I slant my blinds open just enough to let a sliver of moonlight in. Illuminated in it I find exactly what I need; a slim orange bottle half filled with white tablets like flower petals. My hands shake and tip the bottle over too far, spilling all of the contents into my cupped palm. I mean to return all but two milligrams, but somehow in my hand the petals arrange themselves into blossoms of baby’s breath. I freeze, staring down at them.

The next time I feel the stirrings behind my navel, something in my chest snaps, and my lips break apart as I tip my head back and pour, pour, pour the pills into my mouth. They instantly begin to blossom, stale and almost lemony on my tongue, which is frozen, unwilling to swallow and silence itself. I am curled in a ball in the nest of my sheets, a naked, broken baby bird, when I see her. She walks out of the darkness of my closet and climbs into bed with me, fits herself against my back, the woman who has not slept here with me in almost three years now. She gently reaches around, takes the bottle with the remaining seeds of quiet inside it, and whispers in my ear, plant them. And I do.