I want to make you think. You don’t need to apologize.

If you have read one of my many articles, with the exception of a few, you’ll notice that they predominately discuss my own raw, personal experiences. No, they don’t often involve violence or the general need for a huge trigger warning, but… they are uncomfortable.

I say that my writing is “uncomfortable” for a few reasons:

1. They often involve me being in an emotionally vulnerable situation.

2. The stories delve right into quite nuanced and often silenced subject matter.

3. I receive an overwhelming number of apologies and notions of sympathy.

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Emotionally Vulnerable

Believe it or not, I am not a naturally emotional person. When I personally experience or learn about a tragedy, my first reaction is not based in emotion, as strange as that sounds to some. Rather, my first reaction is to try to understand “why.”

Even as a young girl, I was intrigued by mysteries and psychology. Because of my inquisitive disposition, I tried to understand the problems around me, even my own family’s maladaptive behavior. After much therapy, I now acknowledge that it was honestly my own way to cope with trauma. It wasn’t safe to express myself emotionally because it would’ve shown weakness in my environment. How it manifested in my adult life was through intense flashbacks at any subtle reminder of what happened to me. Before recently, I told myself I was defective, cursed. Could I not just move on with my life?

So after much internal work, I have finally healed enough to give myself space to remember and feel what it was like in those heart wrenching moments of my young life. Instead of wishing the flashbacks away, I write about them as if reliving the moment they happened. Articulating my experiences through writing and sharing them with others has been incredibly cathartic and healing.

When you read my stories, you are reading raw emotion that has been locked up within my body for years. You are reading release.

Silenced Nuance

This has been the theme of my lifetime. I have always been incredibly aware of things. I remember a therapist telling my mother to read books about “highly sensitive children” and “child empaths” because though I was logical, I could feel. And put simply, she and pretty much every other adult in my life didn’t know what to do with it. Instead of trying to accept what I now consider a gift, let alone tolerate it, my mother tried multiple times to put me on anxiety medication. I clearly remember the high level of guilt I felt for being “crazy” and putting adults through such apparent grief. This made me silence myself for years, fully internalizing that what I felt or noticed was wrong. Forget the many layers to social issues and interactions, I needed to accept that no matter how wrong it felt, it was “normal” and not to be questioned.

This is why I write about the situations that I do. Most of them surround issues that are often ignored or silently skirted around, never being second-guessed. Even though there are thousands if not millions of others who have experienced similar things, we don’t think about it deeply because it has been normalized.

My goal with writing is to help someone out there in the world finally feel seen and validated that, yes, it happened and that they aren’t crazy.

If not that, I want to make people think about things that have transpired in their lives and to reconsider the narratives they’ve been told to believe.

I want you to think.

Sympathy

Overwhelmingly, the most common response to my stories is an apology for what happened to me. Though I deeply appreciate that someone read my story and that the content compelled them say that, please know that it is not why I write.

I want to start a conversation about “why” these things happened, if not to me then to the reader or someone that they know. I fully believe that many of our society’s illnesses will only improve once we start raising our levels of self-awareness and communicate with each other openly.

Perhaps particular readers’ apologies are from a place of awareness, I don’t know. Either way, I hope that my writing cultivates a positive movement, whether it be curiosity, acknowledgement or validation.

Thank you so much for reading.