Writing Myself into Existence: A Personal Essay
There was a year of my life where I couldn’t speak out loud to my parents. For an entire year I was too ashamed, mentally ill, and in an all-consuming depression just barely finding strength enough to put thought to action and say something — anything — out loud.
Prompted by a need for control over how I looked, what people thought of me, and the illusion of promise that if I changed certain things about myself I would be happier, it soon became a days-turned-months long downward spiral to a solitary place and into a person I no longer recognized.
It was my struggle with anorexia and depression that drew the writer out of me.
It was out of simple necessity to communicate with my parents — the ones I felt I was bringing so much shame and agony to, the ones I didn’t have the strength to face or to argue with through strained justifications — that I was sorry to be this way, sorry to put them through this. I couldn’t physically tell them, so I wrote.
Every couple of days I would leave handwritten notes from torn-out pocket notebook paper on my mother’s bedside table. The following mornings I’d find them returned and answered on mine. I don’t even remember what I wrote in them, the sentiments that were exchanged. Did she know how much I wanted to communicate but just couldn’t anymore? The guilt I felt and the severe lack of energy left me unable to express what my brain was putting me through and why I couldn’t be normal no matter how hard I tried. How sorry I was I couldn’t be the daughter they wanted me to be — the daughter they could be proud of.
To this day that period of time remains a black hole in my memory, something I can never get back. It’s a period of time where I don’t know what my story is. The words are out there somewhere, on formerly crinkled up balls of paper that have inevitably been recycled (my mom is responsible like that), converted into new material to be written on. I like to think the notebook paper I write on holds previously recorded words of someone else’s story.
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Mandatory therapy was introduced that year. Reluctantly I was driven to hourly appointments every other week to sit in rooms I filled with silence. My parents attended the first three sessions with the idea that if I couldn’t talk to them, maybe I’d talk to a stranger. Why is she doing this? Why won’t she talk to us? How can we help her if we don’t know what’s going on? But even then I could not find the words.
I recall writhing in silent anger permeated by extreme melancholy in the uncomfortable chair next to them. Everything I sat on then was uncomfortable. The floor in gym class, the chairs at my school desk, the wooden-backed chairs in the waiting room. I could barely choke out words to explain what was going on because I could barely explain it to myself. When I did speak it was shaky and I, distraught. What I could explain was an abject understanding of how I had to live, why it had to be this way and what would happen if I didn’t.
It was as if my story was being written for me, and I no longer the author.
Three therapists and many tissues later these sessions were often followed by a new ritual of just mom and me time communing over Mexican hot chocolate, re-establishing our relationship in tandem with the progress being made. We never talked about what I told the therapist. She didn’t ask the questions she knew I wasn’t ready to answer. A mother’s intuition is quite astounding sometimes. Despite the malnourished and suppressed memories in the black hole of my brain, it is these sacred moments — these spicy, chocolate-coated memories talking about nothing in particular and saying everything at once — that I do remember.
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I spent that year listening. Listening to all the words spoken to me, enforced upon me, asked and whispered about me; to the words of the authors of the many books I read and lyrics of the songs I listened to. I spent the year thinking, slowly losing memory and reason and fabricating rationality through the stories I told myself. A routine life of carefully cut bread squares, hard-boiled eggs and half-portioned protein bars; of running and stretching regimens, and endless hours of bedroom solitude. In the repetition I found control. Yet it was the repetition that was absolving me of all control and my ability to see reason. The pattern became my day’s skeleton — and quite literally, my skeleton.
After a year and a half, I finally found my voice again. Nearly a decade later I am finally able to discern the mentally ill side of my brain speaking and the healthy me speaking. Yet at the end of the day, they are both still Justine speaking. It’s up to me to do my best to communicate which is who and who is which. Writing helps me do it best.
During that year it was through writing that I was able to communicate with those who loved me even when I couldn’t say it back. Because it hurt too much to know how much I was hurting them. Through writing, I could attempt to clarify even just a tiny piece of the madness, to help explain to myself who I was and why I was. It is only through writing that I can truthfully express myself in ways spoken conversation often falls short — completely raw, frequently nonsensical yet inevitably transformative.
Since then, I’ve written long-form emails and handwritten letters to ex-partners to explain myself or why it wasn’t working out. I’ve transcribed rant-worthy journal entries, stream-of-consciousness reflection posts and exceedingly dark lines of poetry. To adequately articulate my moods and behaviors in person I’d read from scripts written down in preparation. I bring notebooks to interviews and always carry one around to record those spontaneous lines of literature that often blossom in my head at inopportune times.
But these thoughts are fleeting. With a memory like mine, I try my best to capture the important ones so I can relive those moments again. I can’t afford any more black holes of timelessness.
Through writing, necessity gave birth to creativity in me and therapy for me — for the ability I have to demand truth to myself. It has given me back the power to understand my thoughts and to write myself into an existence of my choosing. To that, I owe my deepest gratitude.
My journey has been a series of haphazard journal entries, the occasional poem written in angst at a midnight hour under a swath of moonlight, an exploratory year of wrestling with the imposter syndrome and reading oh-so-many books about anxiety, depression, and the creative madness that exists in all of us. It hasn’t always been able to save me from myself or for others, but it has served as a steadfast outlet that is the one thing I have surrendered complete control to — and that is the one thing I can say for sure is my one honest truth.
