How To Write Your Story When You Don't Like Yourself or are Afraid of Yourself

I used to think there was a black seed of bad in me. It was a thing I could feel, the seed. It was like I was an apple that was, at its heart, rotten.

My body twisted around the seed, the way you might if swallowed a knife and it stayed in your guts, cutting you every time you moved the wrong way. The only problem is you don’t know what the wrong way is until you get cut.

This, I think, is one reason people who live with trauma seem to have ADD or ADHD. It’s because they carry a seed of sef-hatred or self-disregard inside of them and they are either in pain or worried that the thing they are doing will make them hurt all over again.

This black seed is why, despite going to graduate school, despite countless workshops and hundreds of hours of trying, I could not write my story. I kept writing around the seed, using language to hide the seed, make it something else, someone else’s, instead of writing my way straight through it.

I need to find a new way to tell my birth story because the story is turning out to be my life. This is the way it goes, “I was born,” then I start to stumble because I don’t know what noun to use next. Mother? But I never met her. Woman? But she gave birth to me. First mom? That feels weird since she didn’t want to meet me as an adult. Birth mom? That sounds rude. Like a cow had me in a field and then walked away. I’ll say mother. “My mother could not keep me and ten weeks later I was adopted by my parents.”

I tell the story that way to show that there was a gap. In my story I skip over day one to week ten because I don’t know where I was, and my brain focusses on that gap. I was the baby that was left. I was the baby who no one knows where I was, or no one who knows is talking about it. I was the baby who maybe didn’t get held much her first ten weeks of life. I was the baby who was alone.

I spend an inordinate amount of time by myself. Being with people is both food and painful. If I go a day without being with another person, I feel not good.