Use Your Words

When I was a kid opinions were dangerous. Thinking for yourself could get you in trouble. Worse, not being what you were expected to be could get you left out. My favourite colours, music, movies, tastes, were always curated for the people around me at that particular moment. Constantly trying to fit myself into their view of the world. To make myself a part of what they liked. To make them like me. This could get tricky when more than one person or group was around at one time and I had to slip between characters and moods to make sure everyone stayed happy with me. I had to be smarter, more helpful and more entertaining to be seen. I was good at it. And when all else failed I could bury myself in a book and become invisible. And so writing came easily. Seriously, I won awards, and my mother kept every one in a brag book.

Until I hit high school. I started getting it wrong. I couldn’t keep juggling all the different versions of me. Being smarter might win points at home but at school it makes you a target. When things get ugly at school and your grades slip things get ugly at home. When you’re not the smart one anymore you’re the troublesome one, the disappointment, the failure, the one that needs to be shipped out to live with someone else and eventually the one that needs to be medicated. You can try harder. You can add more versions of yourself. You can try to stay one step ahead of everyone else at all times. You can burn out even quicker. Writing wasn’t fun anymore. Writing was a way to dump some pain on a page and then lock it away in the dark until I was ready to deal with it again. Except I was never ready to deal with it again, it stayed locked away, and continued to be buried. My mother said my writing scared her and she didn’t want to see it again.

For a brief moment in time I found a happy place, a kindred spirit who made me laugh and feel alive, who found the stories buried in me and brought them out. We wrote for our friends and I was happy for a minute, but I still built myself into a character based on what I thought I was supposed to be around them. We wrote for ourselves and that was the realest thing I knew. But I ended up getting sent away again and the writing was gone.

It took me a very long time to realise that anti-depressant and anti-psychotic medications are what killed the writing. I managed to get back to my happy place and we got away from our childhoods and built a life together, we made a family, we planned a future, but the writing never came back. Last year I finally got to a place where I could stop taking those medications and I could feel the writing poking around at the edges of my brain, knocking on the door only to run away when I tried to open it. But while I’ve gotten better handle on my mental health my physical health is slipping further from my grip. Just today I saw yet another medical professional who can do nothing for me. Months on a waiting list to be told everything I already know. Be positive, work harder, push through it, you’re so young, you have your whole life ahead of you…

Plot twist, while I was resting today and scrolling absentmindedly a writing challenge popped up, and I felt the writing knock a little louder, so I opened door and stood on the other side trying to coax it in while it crept over the threshold, but once it was in it was IN, and it wanted to make up for lost time! So while my body may be failing me right now I don’t have to let my mind go along with it. I will take this opportunity to find my voice, to use my words, to have an opinion, to tell my stories, to show other people who I really am and how I really feel and to show myself that I can.