I have spent years teaching others to write. I have preached the power of the written word, have espoused the virtue of writing as empowerment, a vehicle for agency. I have doled out journals, pens, prompts and passion. I have helped the most hesitant budding writers unlock their voice.
And yet, decades ago, I lost my own, and with it, I lost the most important part of the writing process: the ability to share my work. For most of my life, I wrote in solitude, in secrecy, in shame. I hid journals in dark corners of crammed closets, jammed notebooks into duct-taped boxes under guest room beds. I locked Word documents behind cryptic passwords I quickly forgot. I trapped my words in a bomb shelter trying to protect them, to protect myself. If my words escaped, I feared they would start a war.
They had done it before, in when I was Notebooks filled with poems and half-written letters to my best friend revealed the details of my inner life. Every word had been read, violated, while I was away on a camping trip with my honors history class. When I returned, I found my shredded words arranged into a satanic circle lying in the center of my twin bed. The streams of paper were topped off with a torn picture of my ex-boyfriend and a potpourri of dried prom corsage flowers.
My mother screamed at me, made dire predictions about my future. I was a liar. I was promiscuous. It was all there in my diary, but my mother homed in on the words that fed her fears. The words that told her I lied about his parents being home when I went to his house. That first night, I lay awake thinking of ways to kill myself.
My words had become self-impaling bullets, exploding on impact. I felt like a criminal. My mother stayed in her anger for a long time, while my anger dug itself into my cells and covered itself in layers of shame. Our silence was broken when my mother sent me to a psychiatrist.
