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.