The phone rings at a quarter to midnight, just as I’m beginning to contemplate going to bed, having exhausted the possibilities to squeeze much more than ennui from the thoughts that are busy malingering in my head. I check to see who is calling and, with a grin, tap the little green circle to accept the voice of my friend.
His voice crackles. The phone connection in my condo is shit.
“I just wanted to remind you that you are worthy and deserving of love,” he says.
This is a simple call, though churning with power like the core of the sun; it is a straightforward message, though long-sought and hard-won. It’s so easy to dismiss the value of even a few seconds of heartfelt connection: to be honest, I’ve never been great at extending it to others, fearing rejection, so it’s humbling when someone else takes the time to show me how it’s done.
And this time, the message works as intended. For the next few minutes, I can’t stop smiling. It’s not the first time that I have been told something like this, but it strikes me that it’s only been recently that I’ve allowed myself to accept it. The great twist of being human, it seems, is how much we crave being loved, contrasted with how afraid so many of us are to freely express and receive it.
But the times, they are a-changin’ indeed, and as I reckon with the fear that sweeps through every inch of my social media feed, I find myself turning back more than ever to the simplicity of affirmations. To the clarity that comes from a fresh shallow pool that returns the most ephemeral of reflections. To the things that must be kept safe and tended, in order to withstand the shocks of what lies beyond.
Which is what brings me here, to this thing I started, and what I hope for it to become.
For as long as I have written, I have leaned on my own experience as a prism through which to narrate the world. There are many reasons for this, some innate and others consciously chosen. For instance, I have always been uneasy, at best, with the platform that comes with journalism: we have tremendous power to name the world, to describe people’s lives, to hold them up for scrutiny in ways to which the average person lacks the resources to equally reply. In this light, perfect fairness is, perhaps, impossible; the only thing I can promise my sources and my readers is my honesty about who I am and the position from which I am writing. Given this, they can evaluate for themselves how I have described what I have learned, and what I might be missing.
But the intimacy of writing goes beyond this as well. An equally large part, for me, is the enduring belief that the act of confession can be powerfully healing, for others as well as the self. Confession can give a form of social permission, and many people find it more difficult to negotiate the fear and stigma of public vulnerability than I do: I don’t, frankly, have a lot to lose by putting it all on the table. My bosses won’t call me into their office and tell me to pull it together. It won’t harm my career, or my relationships, or my life. For others, that’s not necessarily true.
But if one can speak, then others start to feel they can too, and that is the only force that can or ever has truly brought positive change to the world. On this end, for example, I have many qualms about the Bell Let’s Talk campaign — the revolution will never be #sponsored — but I can’t take away how it has given permission for thousands of people to speak their truths about mental health and survival, especially in what has traditionally been the buck-it-up world of sports. Conversations aren’t an end in themselves, but they are a beginning, and hey, this one works.
The first time I ever wrote about wrestling with my own mental health, a reader emailed to say they’d photocopied the column and given it to their friends, to whom they’d never been able to describe their own pain. That makes it worth it. The goal, always, is for people to read your words, but in so doing find themselves touching their own lives, their own hurts, their own stories.
What enabled this is that I have never found confession difficult. It is natural for me to process things publicly, to delve into the hurting parts of the soul and report back with what I have found. Confession is, on this end, quite liberating: a lot of shame is given room to fester under the name of self-protection, and shame just gives others leverage. By longstanding tradition, I don’t give anyone power over me, except out of love. I have some regrets, and I’ve done many ungraceful or unhealthy things. But I am not ashamed of who I am, what I have done, or what I have endured.
So there are very few parts of my life I choose to keep private: mostly, just the ones where other people’s lives are involved. The rest is wide open. Have a look at it, pick it apart if you want to, go nuts. I have spilled out my grief. I have written extensively on Twitter and in the paper about enduring domestic violence, and mental health challenges. In the past, I have written about recovering from body dysmorphic disorder, about my (admittedly limited) experiences with sexual assault, and negotiating life as a woman in a sometimes hostile world.
This form of writing has a long history in feminist discourse, which so famously recognized that the personal is political, that our experiences as individuals both speak to and challenge the structures of power that attempt to outline our lives. So for a long time, particularly when I was most immersed in feminist writing, it seemed natural to make myself the subject, to submit my own pain for public consideration.
It went well for awhile. The people who read my stuff most often liked it. The most successful things I’ve ever written are the blog posts or columns where I flayed my flesh open for others to see. The more raw the feelings were, the more readers responded. The more trauma was in it, the more they embraced it. For a time I just came to accept that’s what my voice was destined to be: the heart in the darkness.
Somewhere along the line, I stopped doing this as much.
Somewhere along the line, I put my voice on the shelf, bored of its repetition.
Somewhere along the line, I became quietly resentful of being most embraced when I confessed my own pain, or laid out my own vulnerability. It’s difficult to realize that people like you best only when they see you bleed. Besides, after awhile, you’ve done all your bloodletting. You’re tired of performing as broken. You’ve emptied your veins.
And then, and then, and then — it’s time for a change.
So this is why I’m writing here and now, and will try to again. I’ve spent a lot of time in my life writing about trauma, but I have changed. I have healed, and I am still healing, and — to my own surprise — I wake up each morning now and realize that I am okay. I am okay, and more than that, everything else will be okay too.
The challenge now is that I lost my voice somewhere along the way. I became bored of my own writing, and even moreso of my own ideas. I’d stopped playing with language, and stopped trying new things. I wrote to pay the bills, and when those were paid, I have had little desire to write; over time it became a job, not an expression.
It’s time to get that old passion back, and to do that, maybe I just need to carve out a place to play. A little place of my own to delve back into those old corners of the soul again, but this time to talk about healing. A little place to send out the thoughts that kick around in my skull, finding no outlet, losing their meaning.
It comes at a good time in my life, a time of transformation. There will be more to say about that in the months to come. But for now, it is enough just to declare that this is a time for emergence, as with the first green seedlings of spring: I have slept through the long winter, and now I am ready to see what the blue skies will bring.