four journals

Journal #1. $2.99 from Walmart. Didn’t want to even buy the damn thing. Spiraled wire binding. Pink cover. I hate pink.

“Okay, let’s try this instead. Go to the store and buy a journal. Write in it. Whatever you’re feeling. Just get it out. Let it out.”

Dr. Durr was my therapist. My mom bought him for me after one of the bombs that made up the lining of my chest cavity, nestled between my ribs, resting over my lungs, exploded. That was the first time she realized I wasn’t her perfect daughter, built out of skin and bones. I’ve had my bombs for my entire life. Avoided them. Never looked at them directly. Pretended I was fine. It was fine. Everything was fine.

Of course, I eventually exploded. All over Christmas dinner when I was 15. I was the atomic bomb that Oppenheimer created by accident. Too flawed for governmental use. Too dangerous to be fixed. And that was the day when some shitty argument finally lit the fuse. When my bombs finally killed me. Perfect Mallory was dead.

So, once a week, I sat in a room, and the explosives I was built out of finally got a name: chronic depression and anxiety. Chemical imbalances in my brain. Probably caused by my dad leaving. Or maybe the bullies who laughed at my fat thighs and stomach rolls. Definitely a direct result of my emotion-suppressing tendencies. You can’t be perfect if you’re sad, though.

The writing might have been Dr. Durr’s last ditch effort. Nothing else had worked. Not long chats or affirmations or tough love. Not even pumping my teenage veins full of Prozac and Xanax. He wasn’t a bomb squad, couldn’t diffuse my exploding body, and I just didn’t care.

But I bought the dumb notebook. The ugliest one I could find. That night, I wrote “ANGRY” 418 times.

I’m six, hiding under my blankets from the sounds of yelling and plates shattering on the ground. The sounds of my family falling apart. I distract myself by getting drawn into my Magic Treehouse book. I’m eight and my dad left, and my mom has to work four jobs to take care of three kids all by herself and I feel alone. I find new friends on the pages of my beaten-up Harry Potter novels. I’m eleven and I have to put my mom to bed after she passed out on the bathroom floor before my little sister sees. I’m in the real world now, no time for books, and I realize that I have to grow up before I can even be a kid. I’m twelve and I do my best to be the perfect child, the easy one, the parent to my baby sister and my Asperger’s brother. I’m fifteen now, and I am full of boiling, flammable rage.

I filled up half the pages of my new journal before I wrote any word other than angry. Before I threw it against the wall and screamed. Before I finally cried for the first time in 3 years and 7 months.

The next word I wrote was “sad.” And then I had to buy a new journal.

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Journal #2. $10.99 from Amazon.com. Thick, lined paper. Flipping the pages sounds like music. Grey, boring, unremarkable cover. I don’t want anyone to notice how important this plain-looking book is.

“Senior Superlatives! And the winner of class clown is… Mallory!”

I still bottled my emotions up. Packing gunpowder and volatile chemicals into my bombs with each bitten-back word. But writing was an outlet. A safe place where I could acknowledge my feelings. No one would ever know that I was anything other than the goofy, loud, superficial girl.

I used Comedy Girl to hide my truth. She was the girl who always smiled and laughed. The girl who never cried. Secretly taking antidepressants behind locked bathroom doors. She was the armor I built to protect my fragile skin and glass bones and atomic bombs that still rested in the spaces between my ribs.

I realized that I had the ability to write more than single words one night. I tried stringing some angry words together. Created disjointed, chaotic phrases. They sounded terrible. That was okay, I think.

Eventually, my mess became actual sentences which turned into paragraphs and stories and fiction and non-fiction. Until writing became my oxygen that kept me alive.

I’m sixteen, hiding under my blankets from the sounds of my mom and her boyfriend having sex two rooms over. This time, though, I have a flashlight and a pen, and I write a story of a girl who lived in the ocean where sound was muffled. I’m seventeen, and I have a severe concussion after a disappointing basketball game, and I can’t write because my eyes won’t focus on the page. It is the hardest six weeks of my life. I’m eighteen, and my friend stopped being my friend. But I write my first poem about a girl with titanium skin, and I’m okay. I’m nineteen now, a college freshman, and I feel free.

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Journal #3. $27.50 from Barnes and Noble. Jagged edges. Cream-colored parchment. Soft leather cover tied closed with a leather string. I now know that my soul deserves such a nice container.

“Take Burnside’s class. It’s the only class that taught me anything about how to actually write, and you’re too good to keep hiding behind an anonymous blog.”

My boyfriend forced me to click the box that registered me for English 316. I didn’t want to take it at all. I was good at hiding and going unnoticed. And I knew there were workshops and that I’d be put on display.

I took it anyways. I still wrote comedy for my pieces that would be read by everyone. Actually, most of my writing was funny. But there were a couple serious ones. A few with real feelings. And I was proud of myself for stepping outside of my comfort zone. For putting my name on my true self.

I still didn’t want people to read my writing. A class full of strangers was different than a room full of friends. It was easier to pretend it was still anonymous since no one really knew me.

My bombs were still here, ticking along to the beat of my heart, not yet diffused, but less dangerous now. My writing helped to contain them. And maybe someday, my writing could also help me find the confidence in myself that I had yet to discover.

I’m twenty, hiding under my blankets trying to stifle the sounds of my laughter from a dumb joke my boyfriend told me. I write a text back about a girl who is happy. I’m still twenty, and my roommates and I type essays with shaky, overcaffeinated fingers trying to finish in time. I stop and grab my pen to write something real about a girl made of coffee and stress. I’m twenty-one, and I get a full-time job offer at the end of my internship. I break a pen writing too excitedly about a girl who is twenty feet tall. I’m twenty-one now, and I am in love with so many things, including myself.

I like to think that, slowly but surely, thanks to the miracle of the English language, the beauty of words, both written and read, one by one, those bombs will stop working. And I will be able to repair my broken bones and stitch my tattered skin and glue my fragile heart until I am whole once more.

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Journal #4. It’s on my Christmas list. I don’t know the specifics, yet. But I know that it will be beautiful and strong. Just like me.