I had never learned to express discomforts outloud. When I was a child I’d run to my room and scream into the pillow. My father would mock my tears from scraped knees and so I began burying.
Once I started high school I was bullied badly. The girls would tell me to go to the boys change room since I hadn’t hit puberty yet. I recoiled to the comfort of lined notebooks and coloured pens. Emptied out my head with no crowd to critique me.
When I turned 19 I was diagnosed with crohns. Went septic and ended up in isolation, body too weak to fight off anything. A scalding torch poking everywhere. Waking you from slumber in the pit of the night. Over and over, night after night. Forgetting what deep sleep ever felt like. Restless. I shrunk to under 89 lbs. Gulped down whatever recipe my doctor dictated. The only cure to all this internal buildup was the opposite of my prescriptions: Oxys, ativan, flagyl, imuran, & zopeclone ... a full pill concoction but not a magic potion. I cut lines across my body. Hoping I could let out the pain.. sharp claws ravaging me from the inside out. I became a surgeon executing out of desperation.
Time passes, I begin to heal. Medicine making magic. I begin to fall in love with the small triumphs. You spend so much time fighting to live you learn to stop and appreciate the sun rise even if you haven’t slept. The cuts faded to ghosts of what I once battled. I look back on my writing from that time, dark musty clouds of chemically induced toxins billow out of the pages like soot from industrial era chimneys. You can see my metamorphosis as the pages flip. I started spilling sunshine again. All the pain internalized dissolved. Time became drano to the clogged plumbing of my temporal lobe.
In the light you catch the invisible ink of scars from lives past but those are part of the story.
Overcome and carry on, the only place to the go from rock bottom is up.
