How Writing Became Me

How Writing Became Me

"Tell me, Brandy, who are you?"

I was asked that question when I was thirteen-years-old as I stared into the face of my newest psychologist. He understood something about me that I had failed to understand at my young age. My life had been a whirlwind of trauma, disappointment, and anger.

I had no idea who I was. I was lost in the story of my life, the wrongs I had seen, the victim I had been. I was haunted by rape and abuse, abandonment and hatred. I was suffocating in my own sense of failure. I couldn't let go of all the horrible things in my life; I didn't know how.

I was merely a child lost in a world that had sucked me into it's violent vortex. I was unsure of myself because I didn't know myself. I was nothing but a marionette, allowing those around me to control my life. I wasn't good at anything and had a long list of failures. At thirteen, I was ready to give up my life.

When I looked into the kind eyes of a man who had no reason to care about me, saw the hand reaching out to me and heard the question he asked, I knew there had to be more to me than I understood. I went back to my room, a room I shared with five other girls, and pondered the question. When my thoughts were too confusing, I grabbed a notebook and a pen, and I wrote.


I was recently asked how I became a writer, but in my case, I don't believe that I became anything - the writing was already within me. It became me.

My parents were divorced before I was three years old. My mother worked nights and went to school during the day; she often lived her own life outside of us, her children. We jumped from place to place, living with grandparents, aunts and uncles, friends of the family, and babysitters; we were the truth behind the saying "it takes a village to raise a child".

I was the wild child, the thorn in the rosebush, the child no one wanted; the one desperately loved who couldn't be touched. I was lost with my own monsters, locked in a cage of misery before I was ten years old. I pushed away those who got to close with my rebellion; protected myself with a mile-thick shell that none could penetrate. I was hateful, spiteful, and angry on the outside and dying, crying, and terrified inside.

I was young when I began escaping into other worlds through my writing. It was how I dealt with not having a father; being raised by everyone but my mother. I wrote of having a twin sister, a superhero father, a mother who baked cookies.

As I got older, I wrote to make myself laugh when I wanted to cry; to tell the story I wished was my own. But no one took me seriously; they laughed at my stories and broke my heart.

Finally, as I sat in the midst of other kids like me, children who had been raped and abused, forgotten and abandoned, I wrote to tell them MY story. I wrote to heal wounds that had long been festering. I wrote because it was the only thing I knew how to do.

After days of writing my "introduction," the three page essay introducing myself, telling them who I was and why I was there, I read it aloud in my first group-therapy session. When I finished, with tears rolling down my cheeks, and looked up into the group, what I found there was not laughter.

Many of them were shocked into silence. Some of them cried with me. Others were angry. But when I looked at The Man, the one who had asked me that certain question within an hour of my arrival, I saw something within his eyes that made me see myself. And when I looked back down at the paper I had written, stained with my own tears, smudged and crinkled, I realized that those words, that paper, THAT was who I was.

All these years later, as I look back on it, I realize that throughout the years I wrote to escape my own life, then to explain it, and finally because it was who I was. It was the one thing that made sense to me. When I wrote, the world disappeared behind me and for once I had control. I was no longer the victim, I was the creator. My words on paper were clear. They weren't the mixed up thoughts of a child or teenager.

The rest of my childhood therapy was done through my writing. I wrote about my life. I wrote letters I would never send. I wrote poetry. I wrote stories of what I wanted my life to be like in ten years. The pen was never far from my hand.

I was healing. Something inside of me was changing with every word I wrote. And even after being released and sent home, I wrote. I wrote in my journal, I wrote poetry, and finished stories. I wrote letters to the father I didn't know, to the mother I both loved and hated, to the world that abandoned me.

Writing became me. It became as much a part of me as breathing. Without writing, I couldn't have survived, wouldn't have.

Today, my old wounds are still healing. Each stroke of the pen is a stitch in the flesh of my heart, holding it together when it would otherwise break. Today, I write just as much as I did then. I write for my freedom. I write to encourage not only myself, but those around me. I write to heal everyday wounds and see myself as I truly am.

I write because I wouldn't be me without it. I write because it is who I am.