Writing Saved my Life

If I tell you that I am a Scorpio sun, Aquarius moon, Capricorn rising, does that bring a soft 'aaahh' to your lips? What if I tell you that according to a medium I spoke with recently all my chakras are blocked or misaligned and that my third eye has 'stuck' in the process of opening. What about if I tell you that I am and have been for over ten years an emotionally avoidant, disassociative, suicidal depressive?

Whichever explanation resonates most with you, the truth is that I have always been a few steps and a shred of pride away from total self-destruction. When subjected to the mortifying ordeal of being human, I curl in on myself and start to shake. It's not that I struggle to talk about my emotions, more that I struggle to feel them and, as such, when I do feel them it's like being slapped with the hand of God. I lie gasping in a corner and think to myself 'my God, how can I bear this?'

When I was a teenager, the only teacher I believed cared about me gave me a small notebook and a pat on the shoulder.

Until that moment, I had forgotten that writing was something I could do for me; write for school, for memory, for purpose? Absolutely. But to write for fun? When I was a young child I wrote stories and poems, and even copied ones I liked from books, pressed them between the pages of a huge dictionary, crammed them with flowers. Somewhere down the line I forgot about that and started to drown.

I don't know if you've ever wanted to die - really wanted to die - if not, I hope you never do. But if you have, you'll understand what I mean when I say that I was drowning and that some days I barely keep my head above water. It's not the pain or the bleakness or the weeping that kills you, it's the anhedonia, the weariness, and the complacency. The moment you are in most danger is the one in which you lie down in the middle of a depressive episode and think 'I can stay here' and resign yourself to that fate.

That notebook saved my life, and its successive siblings have too.

When I crushed that notebook between my hands, rubbed the paper cover until it went bobbly, and scrawled on every inch of paper, something happened. I didn't even write anything original, to start with. I wrote down what was swirling in my head.

Page after page of 'help me, help me, help me' and copied song lyrics and drawings of lips, eyes, fingers. Disembodied parts that should have made a person, surrounded by voiceless cries for help. I punched through the paper, scribbled, coloured, tore, and drove the other teachers mad. But something funny happened not long after I passed the halfway point in that book. I wrote a line, clumsy and strangely reminiscent of a fairytale,

"There used to be a door on the hill, never open, always locked, until she disappeared inside."

That was it. Nothing else - I never finished it, never thought about it. Never scribbled it out, or even scribbled around it. I can remember the feeling of the pen as it slid on the paper (it was a good pen, you know, smooth and easy to hold, and it wrote neatly all on its own). I went home and sat in wonder, just for a few minutes, and forgot about it again until the feelings bit me again. I was sitting on the bus going to work, back then I worked as a cleaner at a timeshare resort for £40 a day.

Cleaning four full-sized houses, top to bottom, for £40 a day. We were only supposed to do two, but more often than not we had 4. Then, by the time I was getting ready for university, we were doing 7 or 8 lodges a day in a team of 2 or 3. Talk about back-breaking.

The drive was picturesque and long, so fucking long, that I had nothing to do but think. And that meant feeling, too. Now I know how to grapple with that, but then I just felt like I was being crushed. I sat in silence, crushed, crushed, crushed, seeing in my head a girl running through the woods alongside the bus. And a little seedling was planted. The first notebook was long gone, by then, but I had another one. I always had one, full of nonsense, and I wrote her story.

Not in terms of plot, in terms of feeling. I pulled the feelings from my chest, one by one, and carefully trapped them on the page, and the strangest part of it all was that it worked.

By writing, by moving the feelings outside of myself, I was able to stop self-harming.

By moving the feelings out of myself, I released the pressure. Like emotional trepanning, writing punctured whatever was making me so self-contained and let the poison pour out. What I found, in the end, was that the poison wasn't anything bad. Not really.

I was a child, after all; there's rarely badness in children.

It was fear and longing and misplaced guilt. And the belief that I had been the one to hurt and disappoint my parents when the truth was that the world hurt them, and it was me who was disappointed. Though perhaps not always through fault.

Even now, as an adult, I find myself writing down song lyrics that capture something intangible, something that echoes in me without providing an explanation. And though I write professionally now, it's become no less of a selfish act. I still pour my poison into it - in fact, many of my clients seem to find the feelings and thoughts that were poisoning me helpful to them.

I used to think I was empty - writing taught me differently. I am full to bursting, and that's really what does the damage.