Essay, written by a 17 year old survivor

In a quest to re-connect with my younger self, I have been looking for clues of who I was age 4-16. I looked for photos, but none seem to exist. Then I remember a piece of writing, an essay I wrote for a school assignment at 17, but never handed it because it was simply too raw.

The class was English creative writing. We were to write an essay entitled "me". This is what I wrote:

Why tell my story?

Today is exactly one year since I started writing down my story. And what a year it has been!

I started off very motivated. I wrote in blog-format, completing at least one post a day, some days more than one. I dissected all the horrors of my childhood in the minutest detail, recalling sights, sounds and smells, going back to old journals to verify dates, reliving everything as I sought to inject the appropriate emotions into my writing.

It all proved to be too much. By January of this year, I was sinking into a deep depression. Continuing to write through the pain, I eventually crashed back onto the bathroom floor with a paring knife, my tears mixing with the blood dripping from my arm.

The next day, frightened into action by my self-inflicted wound, I made two decisions:
1. I needed to stop the recall, to stop writing.
2. I needed to go back to therapy.