The half-room rebellion: Drafts from a coward who mothers stolen pain

I keep the lights off so the blue of the screen can fake a horizon.

How to steal pain [badly]

There’s a way I hold other people’s stories like costume jewelry: turn them in my palm until the light hits and I can pretend it’s mine. A headline, a friend’s breakup, a photo from a ruined city I’ve never walked: if I press hard enough, it leaves an indent. Then I parade the indent as a wound. It isn’t malice. Please, trust me. It’s hunger. I want to belong to the choir of hurt because the choir is singing something true and I am terrified I’m only mouthing along. So I borrow their notes. I plagiarize grief the way a bored student plagiarizes citations: frantic, reverent, and slightly proud of the footnotes. Look, I say to myself, I too can ache. But it doesn’t fit right. Other people’s pain has different seams. When I wear it, the shoulders sit wrong and the cuffs drag. I spend the day in someone else’s catastrophe and still come home anonymous. Every theft has a tell. Mine is neatness. I sand down the edges so the pain can pass safety inspection. The original is jagged, unsanitary. My replica is curated for display; tragic, yes, but photogenic, thank you for asking. I can’t stand the smell of the raw stuff. I Febreze it and call it witness.

Blank page, loud room

“Write about what you know,” they say. Fine. I know how to open a new document and then immediately check three apps to see if anyone has posted a better sentence. I know how to scroll until my brain is a roulette wheel and the ball lands on “apocalypse” twice per hour. I know how to mistake proximity for permission. The truth is I can’t write because I keep auditioning as a version of myself that deserves to be read. The part requires me to be braver, funnier, more tragic. I’m none of these on command. I am a person in a half-room: the bed cut off by a bookcase, the desk cut off by guilt, the mirror cut off by a sweater that never dries. The other half is on the internet, where my life is perpetually almost. When I do manage a sentence, I put it in a museum of almosts. I walk the halls, nodding at glass cases labeled: Almost Poem, Almost Essay, Almost Courage. The security guard is me. The thief is me. The tour guide is me, too, whispering, “Please notice the craftsmanship on this unfinished thought.”

The [cowardly] rebel who won't leave the chair

I am not apolitical. No. I learn politics and I know when I leanly lean. But, I think... I am conveniently seated. I sign the petition, I retweet the outrage, I treat indignation like aerobic exercise: heart rate up, no actual movement. I call myself a rebel and then I hide behind the screen because the street terrifies me. The street is concrete and sweat and other people’s breath. The street would ask my body to believe what my mouth declares. Call it cowardice. I do. I can sense the part of me that wants to be seen doing the right thing and the part that wants to be unseeable while doing it. I want the halo and the cloak. I want to be applauded for leaving while already home in pajamas. Sometimes I fantasize that the half-room is an underground cell and I am writing samizdat that will topple something. Then the kettle boils and the revolution requires milk and two sugars. The pamphlet is a paragraph. The tyrant is the cursor.

If you were to rummage through my braid inventory

1. One borrowed sorrow that fit too well.
2. Three drafts that pretended to be essays.
3. A window that faces a wall and still calls itself a view.
4. A chair that has memorized me.
5. A conscience that wants receipts, not metaphors.

What I [actually] know

I know the names of two neighbors I’ve never spoken to. I know the noise the hinge makes when I consider opening the door. I know that my own pain is ordinary and I keep dressing it up because ordinary pain doesn’t feel enough. I also know this: the replica and the block and the cowardice are siblings. They share a mother named Avoidance. If I wear your sorrow, I can avoid meeting mine. If I rehearse the perfect essay, I can avoid writing the flawed one. If I posture as a rebel, I can avoid failing in public. Avoidance is elegant. It wears all my vocabularies. It knows how to make paralysis look like principle.

The unglamorous experiment [the volta]

Lots of things have happened recently. Good and bad.

I got called for a written exam for a job so amazing I thought my application would vanish unread. Not only did a real human respond, they even shifted cities across the country just to make it easier for me. And yet, as usual, I delayed. Delayed studying for the exam, delayed my own work, delayed the notes I had promised to review for those women’s community program, delayed new applications, delayed my care. Delay as habit, delay as identity.

So I arrived; scared, regret knotted in my stomach, bundles of fear jumping across my digestive system. But it went well. The people were supportive. My laptop failed; they gave me theirs. They handed me sweet water. A comfortable chair. I wrote and wrote all I knew. The whole time, I half-expected my manager or co-worker to call me into some meeting. They didn’t, at least not until an hour after I reached home. It went well, and I was lying in bed with the rain puttering softly outside, wondering how the day could possibly be so kind. Then at night, my mother became sick. Sick enough she couldn’t open her eyes. Fever too high. I fed her some bread with my sister. I rubbed some disinfectant on her puss-filled index finger. I slept alone. Thinking about her. How I should have filled her water bottle. Went to check. It was there. The next day passed watching her lie on the sofa, motionless. I gave her food, water, medicine, care, love, tears borrowed from my sister’s eyes. But I kept delaying everything else. I kept imagining I would respond to the ladies, imagining I would finish my work, update my blog, exercise, upheave my life. Imagining instead of moving.

Days passed. One, two—three? The ladies emailed again? Or was that the same email as before? She did send me a phone message and now it is gone. Disappeared. I lost track. Instead of replying, I scrolled through articles about people arrested five years ago in a political crisis, immersing myself in secondhand despair. Rotting in imagination while regret kept peeling me. 

Finally, tonight, I wrote my feedback. I scheduled the email. And I wrote this blog.

The hinge squeaked the same. I came back to the half-room and the blue horizon was still faking it, but something else was less fake.

Terms of use [for my own writing]

1. If I write someone else’s pain, it must include a cost to me beyond applause. If there’s no cost, it’s theft.
2. If I can’t write, I will write the inventory first: objects, sounds, receipts. When language won’t bear meaning, it can still bear weight.
3. If I call myself a rebel, my body has to leave the chair at least once. Otherwise I’m just adjusting the Bluetooth settings on my conscience.

Coda from the half-room

Look: I will fail at this tomorrow. I will put on a borrowed grief because it looks good with the outfit. I will scroll until the cursor declares a state of emergency. I will declare myself a principled introvert when the street is loud. But tonight, the museum of almosts has one empty case. The tag reads: Removed for conservation. I’m not cured; I’m catalogued. The chair is still here, but it is an unreliable witness now. It has seen me stand.

End of exhibit. Doors open to the left. Mind the hinge.

- Oizys.

If I’m no longer broken, who am I allowed to be?

As a girl, I would daydream about becoming a writer, one of those beautifully pained ones, damaged in all the wrong ways to produce all the right kinds of writing. A recluse, but viscerally open in my words. I imagined a life lived in quiet, curated chaos, my suffering arranged neatly on a page, bleeding eloquently between the lines. As I grew, and walked through those horrible, throat-scratching phases of life, that vision felt almost prophetic. And now, in a phase that is; comparatively... better (I do not know how long this is going to last, so I am both backhandedly excited and jittery about it), I feel divided. A part of me constantly fears that I can no longer write (or extract any pleasure from writing) the way I used to when I was destructively sad. Back then, every act of surrendering to despair was followed by a strange, guilty pleasure: I would create thick, messy, overloaded fodder for my daydream-writer’s mental masturbation. And now? Now I feel... clean. Functional. There’s no storm surge behind my ribs, no dramatic collapse mid-sentence. The pain is quieter now, less cinematic. And maybe that’s the problem. I catch myself mourning the drama. The girl who used to stay up until dawn writing about aching bones and rusted hope. The one who found poetry in self-destruction, who thought art was supposed to cost you everything. Now that I'm not hurting the same way, I wonder: what do I write about? Where do I even begin? And worse... do I even want to begin? Or do I just want to want it, to chase that memory of myself: bruised, brilliant, burning with something worth saying?

See, it is not like there are no things to write about. There’s the debilitating existential crisis. The preemptive guilt. The predicted regret of not having done enough with my life while I actively rot in my room, let my fears marinate me. The oddest family dynamic that I should be running away from. The fact that I have zero friends right now. The fact that I am so far behind the person I once imagined myself to become. The fact that everyone else’s success just bursts my bubble of imagination and makes me want to want what they have, even if that’s not actually what I want. The longing for some safety. Some love. Someone believing in me in a way I don’t have to audition for. But when I sit down to write about it, it’s like the words are coated in plastic wrap. I can see them, I feel them, but they’re just out of reach, suffocated before they’re born. Like they don’t want to perform unless I’m on the verge of collapse. I hate how romantic I’ve made my own despair. How I still hold it like a badge, like an old lover I secretly hope to run into, hoping he’ll beg me to come back. There’s something disgusting about that... this yearning for the suffering that once made me a better writer (I am not even sure about this, I am just judging on the basis of the pleasure I derived from writing like that), or at least felt like it did. Because when I was sad, truly, blisteringly sad, the writing came easy. Not necessarily good, but easy. It poured. It oozed. It didn’t ask permission. Now? I write like I’m applying for a visa. Nervous, apologetic, trying to convince the page that I’m worthy. And that makes me furiously annoyed. I want to write like I’m about to die again. Like I am scratching the rock bottom with my nails while they are banging the door angrily and if they break the door, it is the end of me. I want to write like I did when my loneliness was so loud, it echoed back in language. 

But maybe I don’t deserve that kind of writing anymore. Maybe contentment; or whatever this beige numbness is; has sterilized me. Maybe I’ve become the worst thing a writer can be: stable. And not the steady, solid kind. The lukewarm, inoffensive, clear-soup kind. I feel like a retired war poet who now writes newsletters for an insurance company. (While war still goes on in the world...) There’s still pain, yes. But it’s cluttered now. Bureaucratized. More filing cabinet than forest fire.

Just to entertain the other aspect of it... Parts of me, the shivering, crying, begging-it-to-stop, silently-resisting, hungrily-snatched, deprived-of-orientation inner childgirl, doesn’t want any of it to come back. “Please, no,” she screams from some old, blood-crusted corner of my gut. Not the beautiful pain. Not the poetic breakdowns. Not the nightly mental carnage I used to repurpose into prose. She doesn’t care if it made ‘good writing.’ She just wants quiet. Softness. To be held without agenda. Then there is the animal. (You remember about it.) It hasn’t left. It just slinks behind my ribcage now, quieter, sneakier. It keeps reliving the scenarios... the real ones, the fictionalized ones, the ones it borrowed from somewhere and convinced me were mine. It flashes them across my inner screen like a cursed film projector.. “Look. Look. LOOK.” Even as I fold laundry. Even as I reply to a harmless Slack message. Even as I blink like a normal person on a normal day. And real-time me? She’s busy fighting it. Fending it off with little swords made of routine and distraction... emails, dishes, walking to the store and pretending to care about avocados. It’s a silent battle. No medals. No victory laps. Just me, quietly losing and pretending that’s not what’s happening. Sometimes I think that maybe the animal and the childgirl are the same being.

Just fractured... before and after. One begging me not to open the door. The other already halfway inside. Because really, what is the animal if not the child who wasn't rescued? What is rage, obsession, reliving, but grief that's grown claws? The childgirl weeps, starves, curls in on herself, begs for it all to stop. But she wasn’t saved. She stayed there. Alone with all the teeth and shadows and silence. And at some point, something inside her snapped its neck in a different direction. And that’s when the animal was born. Not out of strength, not really. But out of necessity. Out of adaptation. Like a body that grows armor instead of skin. Like a scream that, after being ignored long enough, learns to growl instead. The animal is the childgirl, but post-mutation. She’s what happens when tenderness gets no witness. When the crying goes unanswered. When touch never comes. So she learned how to tear. How to replay. How to haunt me with the scenes that broke her because she still believes that maybe this time, someone will stop them. That someone... me, I guess, will finally barge in and pull her out of the burning room. But I don't. I just sit there, frozen. Watching the fire. Again and again and again. And so she keeps looping it. And the child keeps sobbing. And I keep being both.

And trust me when I say, I want things to get better. Even better... I want to leave. I want to be better. Build friendships. Have love. Have a kind heart with zero smokes out of it, no fire alarms going off inside my skull every time someone touches my arm a second too long. I want the safety I was too young to know I was missing. But. Of course... but. A part of me starts preemptively longing. Pre-grieving. Because if (and when) I get better, if the childgirl is finally wrapped in something warmer than silence, if the animal is gently put down, if I stop bleeding through my words and start living through them, then what? What am I? Just a… well-adjusted adult with hydration goals and a therapy budget? A “nice girl” with manageable emotions, a skincare routine, and no diary full of nuclear fallout? Will I wear linen? Say “I’m doing great, actually” and mean it? And will that version of me still be me? Or just a polite ghost of everything I had to destroy to get there? See, I don’t know who I am without the ache. Without the underground tunnels. Without the wild-eyed obsession with making art out of damage. If I’m not built from ruin, am I still real? Or do I just become a bland survivor with nothing left to say? Do I become… boring? Because pain was my proof of depth. Sadness was my flex. I made my suffering look good. Sculpted it. Dressed it in metaphor. Made it palatable enough to pass as poetry. So what happens when I’m no longer starving for rescue? When I’m no longer burning at both ends just to stay warm? Do I fade? Do I vanish?

Or worse... do I go on, ordinary?

So I keep spiraling... not in self-pity, not even in despair, but in this slow, maddening unpeeling of self. Because maybe, just maybe, I’ve spent so long romanticizing the pain, feeding off its drama, curating its aesthetics, that I don’t know how to write from anywhere else. I don’t know how to be from anywhere else. It’s not even martyrdom. It’s muscle memory. My spine remembers collapsing. My lungs remember the scream I never let out. My mouth still twitches in the shape of a confession, even when there's nothing left to say. And here’s the cruel punchline: I do want to be better. Not performatively better. Not Instagram-inspirational better. Actually better. Whole. Boring. Soft. Holding hands with someone who loves me in the daylight. But. Look, I know... once I get better, it does not absolve my past. It does not dissolve my wounds. It does not disinfect my trauma. It doesn’t work like that. It’s like this: Take a bowl. Pour a lump of porridge. Then scoop in some thick, grey sludge. That’s the trauma. Then another layer of porridge. That’s time. That’s healing. That’s therapy and chamomile tea and moving cities and "forgiving your father" (ugh..) and trying again. But the sludge? It never goes away. It’s caked in. It seeps. And no matter how much one heals, it stays suspended there... unappetizing, invisible from the surface, but there. Living with you. Inside you. Even if I go in excavating like a scavenger, teeth bared, fingernails cracked, I would still find myself lathered in the sludgy porridge of... what else? Life. This life. My life. Messy. Uneven. Undone. And maybe that’s what it is. Maybe healing isn’t cleansing. Maybe it’s just learning to live with the texture. The occasional bite of sludge. The weird mouthfeel of memory. The taste of something that doesn’t go away but no longer poisons you on contact. Maybe that’s enough. Maybe that’s survival. Maybe that’s me.

I don’t know. It’s Sunday. Midnight. I’m all clean after my everything-bath. I’m moisturized from top to bottom like a well-oiled emotional wreck. My mother is softly snoring beside me. And I just had this... itch to write before I slept... only to wake up to Monday. So...

- Oizys.