Member-only story
About Me — Stephenie Magister
15 years ago, an unexpected Xmas gift set me free
Circa 2007, my early twenties. Dead broke, always borrowing someone else’s laptop, committed to writing at least 2,000 words each day.
Whatever it took.
Musicians, artists, and addicts understand the obsessive pursuit that woke me every morning and sometimes in the middle of the night. I had so much to say. I didn’t need anyone to listen. I just needed to get it out.
Write the story. Save it. Preserve it.
I wrote by hand when I had to, but a laptop helped my hands move as fast as my mind. I later learned to slow down, to appreciate the patient focus of a pencil, but 2007 was barely ten years since I’d gotten out of the last hospital.
Along with standard hospital visits to document my rapidly diminishing weight — trauma and dysphoria manifest in all sorts of ways — I stayed longer periods at the Children’s Rehabilitation Center, then Millcreek of Magee Treatment Center, then Oak Circle Center of Whitfield, each one in that deep south state of Mississippi.
In the hospitals, pencils were dangerous weapons, so I stared out the windows and used my mind to write. I built a memory palace bigger than my mind could contain. When the months…
