Have you ever had rocks thrown at your head?
I have. It hurts. And not only when the rocks score a hit.
I spent my childhood & adolescence being bullied, harassed, and told that I was a worthless person. It’s very likely you did, too.
It’s why I started writing.
Why do you write?
I discovered at an early age that I had a power to escape a world without kindness, friendship, and unconditional love. I found that I could create my own worlds—worlds where people were kind to one another. Worlds where people could have awesome adventures. Worlds in which the bad guys always got their comeuppance. Worlds that made sense.
I discovered genre fiction just after I started writing it, and my escapism worsened.
Writing is freedom—and prison.
I was always in some semblance of “gifted” program, yet my teachers were concerned that I had a learning disability. I had trouble leaving the fictional worlds for the real one—the fictional worlds where I felt happy and safe, the only place where I was free to be myself.
Writing is survival—and sickness.
Have you ever worked a job that you hate? How do you cope?
I coped by writing.
I covered the three cloth-covered styrofoam walls of my corporate cubicle with image of famous writers, with inspiring quotes. It sounds cheesy now, and it was—but I didn’t care. I was in survival mode.
Every night, I went home and wrote off my frustration within the pages of a novel. It felt good. Cathartic. Healing.
Even if it often felt like a sickness, a compulsion, at the same time.
Writing is identity—and disguise.
Eventually, you become so wrapped up in your work that it becomes you, or you become it. When you tell people you’re a writer, it’s a public and permanent declaration of something amazing that you own and no one can take away from you.
If you tell people that you are a writer, it is so. Period.
I say it as often as I can.
“We don’t need you.”
So I’ve arrived at this weird place in my life where I actually like my job, I have several friends, and I have people looking up to me for expertise and advice.
I’d forgotten, a little, about my sickness, my compulsion, my need to escape. I’d gotten stale. Stagnant. Encapsulated in some kind of lovely purgatory where everything was soft light and friendly smiles.
Four words shattered that.
“We don’t need you.”
It all came crashing back to me, like so many rocks.
You forget how vulnerable you are. You forget how bad things used to be. You forgot how it felt to be a person without worth in anyone else’s eyes.
It hurts.
But you also forget how good it feels to sink back into the comfortable lap of escapism. You forget how it feels to wield a power that creates worlds and people and situations and stories.
You forget that you’re a person of worth, now.
You forget. And then you remember.
Image via Olivia Alcock.