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.