write what you know
I fell in love with the taboo when the mundane became a threat. As a child I worried under LEDs and paneled ceilings about the nearest exit, the color of my pencil case, and whether or not the elastic waistband of my plaid skirt would make my stomach hurt before recess.
There were just so many questions I couldn’t answer. Why can’t you eat your lunch? Why do you draw on your homework? Why do you cry before school? Why are you so afraid of church?
Why are you so afraid?
I didn’t know. I still don’t. Perhaps it was the feeling of my classmates’ eyes on me every time I cried before Thursday mass. I hated the silence. I hated the song “On Eagles Wings” that we would sing in our green jumpers despite it being a funeral tune. It reminded me with each agonizing note that because I would rather watch Spongebob on Sunday mornings than tap my scuffed mary janes on creaky wooden pews I was a sinner.
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I soon realized that the tense stillness of church — cavernous and cold under the large golden crucifix — misrepresented the soundless peace that dug its toes into the blue carpet of the library, emptying my congested mind like a deep breath. How could they both be described as silence?
Before middle school, reading had been a chore. Island of the Blue Dolphins and Charlotte’s Web left a boredom-filled fissure between me and an appreciation of words. But the gap began to mend itself when the boredom turned to worry and I craved stillness instead of rejecting it. Everything about me was active — my imagination, my body, my pencil, my passion, my fear, my curiosity, my unquenchable desire to control everything around me. Nothing that kept me awake at night was curable. Prozac helped me get to school, but books — stories that distracted me from my endless what ifs and whys — kept me alive.
I read to escape the fear — the crippling phobia — that kept me from being a child. I found that the library was devoid of judgemental eyes yet filled with interesting people. Through stories I could live a million lives, ones where I wasn’t a commotion or a spectacle or a burden. Ones where I wasn’t observed — I was the observer.
I find it humorous, now, that I write to instill the same discomfort in others. I almost crave the wide eyes, the furrowed brows and pursed lips that once haunted me. My work is a disturbing presence, and it makes me feel powerful. I write to defeat my fears and to force others to fight theirs. I write to be a burden. I want my work to make you crinkle your nose in disgust when you think about it. I want it to linger the way the absence of useful words lingered with me in my childhood. I have found my voice, and it is disruptive.
After all, they do say “write what you know.”
