

for the only person who has ever made me smile during tough times, will
I’ve always thought that the world is an extremely strange and different place for the traumatized. The sky is a different color, the air is a different smell, and tomorrow is a different concept The sky is not bright blue, it’s just a reminder that the world is going on around you and you cannot stop the pain. The air is not fresh, it’s something you want to enjoy but can’t. Tomorrow is another day of fear, pain, longing and confusion
The traumatized might go through thousands of nanometer-sized emotions a day; trying so hard to keep it together. In the land of trauma, moments of hope are fleeting, moments of positivity, strength and optimism are intricately woven together with the burden of negativity, weakness, stress, pessimism, fear and lack of energy Imagining how things could have been, had you just done things differently, or worst of all, knowing that things were in your hands and you just lost your balance, messed up, did things that can’t be undone. People have lost trust in you, but the most painful, you have lost trust in yourself
That’s all to say that this mini-book is about my trauma and recovery, coming out alongside Fake Accounts 3 (go read!)
There’s an old poem that I’ve always been captivated by and one of the lines has stuck with me since the first time I read it. “Hunkered down, nerve numb, in the carnal hut, the cave of self, while outside rages a storm” It’s a line I’ve related to in my saddest moments; when I need to know someone else had felt the exact same way. And when we ’ re trying to move on and things have become terrible, the moments we always go back to aren’t the mundane ones They are the moments you saw sparks, felt stars, saw your future before it happened and then saw it slip away without any warning. These are moments of newfound hope, extreme joy, intense passion, wishful thinking, and in some cases, the unthinkable letdown. Times that went from zero to a hundred miles per hour and then hit a wall and exploded. And it was awful And ridiculous And desperate And when the dust settled, it was something you feel like you will never forget. But you can and I am living proof that you can get through anything. You know, I’ve recently been thinking about my previous work, and how the writing process was and I realized
that the themes of the past three books were very positive, philosophical and autobiographical, but the chapters about my trauma resembled someone who was healing, still in, and will for a while be in the process of healing. Those chapters were a very digestible, filtered way of explaining what had happened. This mini book is different, no filtering, no making it easier to understand, or distracting it with a shiny chapter on page 21 that makes things seem better; just a raw, unfiltered, painful, crude, harsh telling of the way things crashed and burned and eventually healed
1. year + red (taylor’s version)
January 2021, one of the best months of my life. You probably know, but it was truly something else. January 22nd, I met the love of my life, the one I know I was destined to meet, Will. Absolutely wonderstruck, I was so confused because I had no idea what to do with all the love I had for Will. Listening to “Enchanted” by Taylor. All my problems went away after one split second of meeting him. But also, the excitement, every moment filled with “this was the very first page, not where the storyline ends ” You know, my friendship with Will is going to continue and we’ll develop such a bond and I’ll see him later, that kind of feeling. I was absolutely shot to the ground by his beautiful round, brown eyes, and his beautiful black hair and rosy cheeks. His smile that could cause ten fields of lions to drop dead. And as the year went on, I saw him more and more april 9th, 2021, taylor released fearless (Taylor’s Version). All the nostalgia was so amazing and her vocals sounded amazing. May 21st, Olivia Rodrigo’s album SOUR came out, my friends making fun of it. The summer begins, and every month is a seasonal first with will july 18th, Taylor announces Red (taylor’s version). september rolls around, and my friends and I are having a great time. I’m looking forward to the next recording (Red) and am so excited to hear the vault tracks. It was originally supposed to come out on November 19th, but then she announced she would release it on November 12th. November 11th, Remembrance Day, comes around I’m throwing a listening party, I decorated it with tons of poppies everywhere, I cried the whole time (tears of joy), listening to All Too Well (10 Minute Version) It was crazy and the vocals were so good, the vaults were amazing and we had so much fun
2. finding out
23 days later, on December 5th, my world shatters. I find out my friends have been lying to me for months (sorry, to be clear, different friends than the ones that made fun of Sour with me, and different friends than the ones I had the listening party for Red with.) We were at a Sunday service at the church, we went together, every day usually We read out our first Christmas poems of the year, and the choir kids are all wearing jingle bells. After that, I’m walking around, passing candy thinking about how fun this is, thinking about the coat Will was wearing that day. Then I sit down at the table and one of my friends stands up to go see a delivery outside, he leaves his phone and I see a photo that told me everything I needed to know. I excuse myself from the table, trying not to burst into tears, there’s a bathroom line I'm standing there, shaking, my heart is beating so loud, I feel like everyone around me can hear it, there are around four people in line. At this point I can’t stop the tears, I see him come back and I hide behind the person ahead of me Eventually, the bathroom is open, I go in there, sit on the floor and process and cry for ten minutes, realizing what had just happened. I try and get myself together and go back outside I get back to the table and start stress eating, being at that table knowing that everyone knows, I cannot put the feeling into words. The dinner quickly ends, we ’ re giving out care packages and I leave, stop at a tree nearby and start crying my eyes out. I go to sleep, crying and wake up, feeling like shit. I get to the church, I had no idea what the next few weeks would be like.
3. church + catharsis & this book
So, I joined the church in may of 2021 and there I met 4 amazing people who I fell absolutely in love with. We bonded over everything and by september, we were coming to the church every day, even if there weren’t any interesting ceremonies happening, we were there, just to hang out The church was quite big, with a tall roof, and dark brown walls with orange lights in the chandeliers. We sat at a nice round table by the water fountains at the back. We usually played cards and talked about our lives Sometimes we would sit at separate tables on our phones and just do our own thing. After I found out that they were conspiring behind my back; I walked around with a gaping hole in my chest. Every day I would walk into the church and sit with them or on my own. Slowly we started sitting on our own more and then occasionally they would all come to one person ’ s table and start whispering to each other I would pretend I didn’t notice it Often, I would walk up to one of them when I thought they were looking at something and start up small talk. “Hey, where’s my pen?” “Why is the bathroom line so long?”
“Do you have a charger?” And sometimes, as soon as I did, their energy would change and I could feel it. Then I had to get through the interaction without bursting into tears. I can remember the panic and feeling, so vividly to this day. I had never felt such pain in my life. 10 days into december and things had only gotten worse. We would have a day of avoiding each other and of me getting up to go talk to one of the nuns or to the bathroom so that they would maybe stop whispering about me. At the end of the day, I would leave the church and go up behind the large willow tree, right outside the church and just cry my eyes out for hours By mid december things had become so terrible that I was just so tired of pretending and didn’t show up to the church one day. I remember it so fucking well. December 14th, I was at home and I had back-to-back panic attacks all day because I knew that they weren’t whispering. They were talking out loud. When I wasn’t hyperventilating, I was screaming for the panic attacks to stop. They wouldn’t I ended up going to see my other friends at our “theatre” (people I know hang out in strange places). I went and just sat there, zoning out everything they were saying. But being around them calmed me down (guys I know you ’ re reading
this.) I went back the day after and everything was awful. So I decided to take the L, make myself look like a fucking idiot and just tell them I have to go to a funeral I left and cried all day. The church became a place of so much fucking pain and I was so fucking depressed.
Every day, I’d come in and just be so fucking anxious. The thing about it that was the worst was that I had to act like everything was normal. When something happens in your life and is causing stress, some people might know and feel empathy in the workplace. Friends and family are there to vent to and you just feel lighter. But this was so fucking heavy.
I had to pretend like everything was completely fine and I didn’t have anything to hide.
I decided to include a song that I wrote during this time.
Seconddayoflaughingjokes
Ilosemyfavoritetown
Anditfeelsfoggyandhazy
Andit ’sallsounnecessary
Flashbacks toeveryregret
Denialforallthequestions
Therearesomanypiecesonthefloor
Ipickthemup
Theyfallagain
December 17th, 2021
AndIliveeverydaylikeitwouldbeifthisweretoend.Theysayit ’llstop
Butthiswon’t.Nothiswon’t
Theysayyoushouldalwaysseeabrightsidetoeverything
ButIdon’t.Idon’t.Nobrightsides,justdarkflashes, loudheartbeats andashes.
Buttheysaytoneverletsomeonedrownyouinyourowndefeat
Everystarfitsintoaconstellation
Butnowthey’realltorn-uppages
Inthebook,I’mLiving.
I’m going to talk a little bit about this book, I will talk about the writing experience later, in the last chapter. So much is in the writing. For me when I read through these songs, I realized that Writing this book was a baby-step process. I didn’t wake up and just decide I wanted to write a book about my trauma. I read a lot of memoirs to prepare, listened to really cathartic records like Adele’s “30”, Taylor Swift’s “RED”, Bruce Springsteen’s “Tunnel Of Love'' and really analyzed how they went about sharing their experience with trauma and pain. Those are the best lyrical examples I can think of, off the top of my head. I’m always listening and observing and I’m very smart and I was really ready to start. I really wanted to do something different, I always want to write philosophy but I really wanted to branch out. I think this was the perfect time to write this book. It was originally written, without the title in mind, without the idea of a book even in mind. It was originally written just as a cathartic coping mechanism. Then I tried to make it a book and it was originally 158 chapters long and then I had to shorten it down to 10 because I didn’t want this to be a huge book, and obviously, because 160 chapters is insane but also because I didn't want it to be part of the fake accounts trilogy, I wanted it to be a mini-book, that was my thing, like:
‘I want this to be separate, and intimate, and honest, and raw and dark, go places I have never been and take the risks.’ Because it is a mini-book, only people who are interested in getting a closer look will read it.
I really really wanted that privacy and diaristic feel to it. Now, back to the 160 chapters; I wrote them from December of 2021 to March 2022. But I couldn’t find the courage to make it into a book. For me, the subject was so tough because it was about something that at that time was very current, for me. I would have a really hard time reading it back. So there would be no world in which I would be able to make it into an entire book, at that point and time. I needed an entire year of sort of retrospect to really be dedicated to putting this book out and to know what I would even make. The theme, the concept, if people would even want to read it. And I’m so grateful that I was able to do that and finally put this book out. However, this isn’t my new thing and I see myself writing other genres, I don’t always see myself telling stories about extreme guttural trauma at your formative age that really sort of debilitates you emotionally for years and then you have to develop ways in which you can move on with your life and then limp your way to a pen and paper or type-writer or computer and write a novel about it, you know; I can’t keep doing that. I would love to write mystery or thrillers, and really make characters, which is something I only did for fun, as a kid so bringing it to life would be so cool. Anyways, it was extremely cathartic to write this much about this topic and put it out and having it resonate with people.
So I want to start this chapter by sharing some journal entries.
December 8th, 2021
“Ugh I am so fucking tired. It just gets harder and harder every day. It just sucks so much. I am so upset. My plan is just to calm down, distract myself, anything to stop me from crying. I think I’ll need to go back to the church soon, they’ll be back and if I’m not there... Oh, they’re definitely going to 100% yep, I need to go. Hopefully, things will get better. I just have to suck it up, this is life right now and I just have to deal with it and be in hell.”
Oh my god, I am instantly taken back, reading this I am instantly taken back to everything. This entry makes me actually wanna fucking scream because it makes me realize how much fucking pain there was.
Now, I talk a lot about being torn and what that means, in this context is; I was torn between church and life, I cover this in other chapters but this book is about going deeper so here we go. I would start my day off and immediately go to the church. I’d spend hours there and while I was there, I would obviously be stressed about the situation but I also felt such immense guilt for being there and not being with friends, or family, or back home at the farm, or most importantly; with Will. During ceremonies, when no one was looking, I’d sneak off to the bathroom to cry and scream to let it all out and then I’d come back, hoping no one noticed and I felt so much guilt for wasting my time on this nightmare of a place, rather than being somewhere else. When I was somewhere else; with anyone else, doing anything else; I was constantly worried about what was going on behind my back, at the church and I couldn't focus on anything, I couldn’t take anything in, I was just completely torn apart between two worlds.
This resulted in me having absolutely nothing to enjoy, nothing was worth it, everything, every event, every second, every minute, every word anyone said, everything I saw was just a ticking time bomb, ticking until life would get 10x worse. I felt like a broken being, just moping around trying so hard to function. I felt like life was going on around me and I was just in pain, watching it happen, letting it pass by. Watching everyone living normally, I felt like I was watching myself lose everything about myself, completely unable to stop it. My life, a living hell.
I wrote a version of “You All Over Me” with my other friends from the theatre, I thought: Why not share that with you too? Here it is:
“I lived, I cried, went to church, felt like a spy Held on to friends That ruin my plans. And wasted christmas season. Lots of tears swore that I’d get out of here. But no amount of evergreen gets you clean I’ve still got sadness all over me. The best and worst day of jan Was the one where I made this plan. Thought no one could ever find out the truth And I didn't think Things would get so weird. So I ruined my own life. Now every breath of air you breathe Makes me think you know something. I lived, I cried, went to church felt like a spy Held on to friends That ruin my plans And wasted christmas season. Lots of tears swore that I’d get out of here. But no amount of evergreen gets you clean I’ve still got sadness all over me..”
Obviously, this is taking a much more humorous look at my trauma with lines like:
“Went to church, felt like a spy”
But this was an interesting time capsule. And at the time I thought, why not try and make this a little funny? It was all I could do.
So around the beginning of January of 2022. I stopped going to the church, this was the big step. The first few days were just back-to-back panic attacks, all day I couldn’t move. But soon, I began to breathe normally again. I realized that I wasn’t going to recover easily and that this would be painful for years. So, I started to think about how I’d view this time, later on in life. What would I do with all this damage? Would I even be able to do anything with it? Or is the wound just never going to heal? I think there’s a time when the wound is so fresh, the trauma is all still there, in fact, it isn’t even trauma, it’s still the pain and stress and current hardship, but there's a time at the very end of your suffering, where; you wonder if it’ll ever go away, or if you’ll ever be able to make anything important out of it. That time, I see it as an evergreen tree that has had all its branches suffering in the wind during the fall and is now covered with cold and blood-sucking snow. How does recovering even seem possible, when the wound is so fresh?
Well, first, I decided, I was no longer going to be a victim to my trauma, I am going to be a survivor, even if I never fully make it, because I wasn’t sure that was going to happen. I just tried my hardest to change my mindset. I developed the “anti-trauma method”
This was a method that only lasted a few days, but I think it helped.. Basically, every time I thought about the church, a moment, going to church, or felt sad about it, I would acknowledge the feeling, welcome it, and decide to do something productive instead. I’ll give you some examples. I thought about going to the church, I went to my backyard and picked radishes to make a salad.
Once, I felt like screaming and felt a panic attack coming, I threw a huge new year party at the theatre and made everyone, including myself feel better about starting over in the new year. I took baby steps. And this method did help, greatly.
I realized that trauma is incredibly tough, and there is no easy way out. You have to put in the work, to try and get your life back. Nothing was easy. I remember one time I thought about what they might be doing at the church and tried to use this method and distract myself by making a soup, but as I was pouring the can into the pot, I just started weeping, I tried to keep it in, but I couldn’t. So naturally, I thought; ‘fuck this, this method is stupid, I just want to go hide in a corner and cry.’ but I forced myself to make the soup, and you know what? It helped. This method, slowly but surely, did help. During this time, I listened to Taylor’s song “sad, beautiful, tragic” and the music between the chorus and verse really hit me hard. But there was something calming about the song. I think maybe looking at how happy Taylor was now, and all the music she was making and how she no longer feels the way she did when she wrote this song, helped me and calmed me, subconsciously.
6. my acting career is over
hello?
is anyone out there? hello? hello?!
*sigh”
will anyone ever come?
will it ever end?
will it always be like this?
will i ever recover?
who do i tell?
who can i trust?
can i trust anyone?
i have to fight
only i can decide whether it ends. whether things will change. Weather i will recover who i can tell who i can trust.
is there a bird in the air, that’s free?
a little girl who’s having fun, swinging in the tree
if so, can i be free like the bird or can i be having fun like her and will my acting career ever be over?
Mid december, it had become too much. I needed to come clean to the people around me. There was no way I could keep this up. I had read a lot of books about how to cope with panic attacks and one of the things that was stressed in every book, I had read was that; you cannot keep things organized and calmer if you’re pretending like everything’s okay I had to keep this act up at the church, but with other people in my life, I had to come clean. So I did. I told my friends at the theatre (hi guys.)
We use google slides a lot. So I decided to write on one slide, the simple sentence: “I’m falling apart” and then just elaborate and explain what was going on. Of course, they made jokes because they couldn’t understand the severity of the situation, but they were so supportive and putting into words and saying it out loud, helped immensely. After that, things changed. I started getting my panic attacks in control. I was able to vent to them and I relied on that support so much. This also meant that….. Will could know.
I didn’t know how I felt about him finding out. I wanted Will to only see the best sides of my life and personality, and this was the ugly side. But I thought maybe by showing him I wasn’t perfect, he would understand me more. He didn’t really understand, since, again; it was difficult to understand the severity of the situation from a listener’s point of view. I told a very brief version of what was happening, nothing like how deep I’m going in this book. He didn’t say it was stupid, he seemed confused. I love Will, and even though he didn’t understand, letting him know, and hearing from him that it’s probably not that big of a deal, gave me a sense of security that I hadn’t felt in a while.
He was wrong. That week, I showed up to the church and they saw me and gave me a strange look. I went up and said hi and they said there was a fair going on in the back of the yard. They left. I went out, they weren’t at the fair I got cotton candy, hoping maybe I would just realize that I didn’t need them. After finishing the cotton candy, I went back in and had the most intense
panic attack I had ever had. The room was spinning, I couldn’t breathe. I fell on the floor and started screaming for help, as best as I could. People were staring. Carl was there and started freaking out. He helped me up and took me outside to the fair, I saw them all there, talking and pushed carl back inside. I explained to him what was going on and he laughed in my face but decided I needed to get away from them. So we got into his tractor. He had originally come for christmas packages and the christmas ceremony but he told them that he’ll come back next weekend. I got in his tractor and had back-to-back panic attacks for around 10 minutes, while he was driving. After they stopped, we went to go get some food and I slept in the back of the tractor.
I wrote in my journal:
“I can stop pretending. I can stop acting like everything’s okay and just be a mess, openly, until things settle down… if that ever even happens.”
Letting people in is scary and I feel as though, I already overshare a lot and letting people in on something so fucking traumatizing and terrible was difficult. But after the hard part, getting past the awkwardness of coming clean; came the… it’s difficult to find a word but it’s like the heavy load over my head wasn’t gone, but it was easier to carry.
7. christmas (worst)
The seeds of the pain were planted in october but it all came crashing down in december, as I already described. December 5th, was when I found out, and what’s interesting is; that was the first day of christmas ceremony readings.
It started out absolutely shocking and ruined everything within a split second and turned into long stretched-out periods of pain and suffering that I had no idea how I could ever recover from. But there was one thing that tied this time into one big giant knot. christmas, the holidays, red, green, white, christmas songs, cookies, and worst of all, at a time like this; happy people. People being happy during the holidays, carefree, looking forward to seeing their families and really enjoying the christmas season, taking it all in. And then there was me; lost in my worries, scared to death, every minute of the day. Every time I thought things couldn’t get worse, there were glimpses of even deeper, even heavier, even more stinging pain.
It was odd because it was like the beginning, like:
“Here’s the christmas season! And the pain begins!”
I walked into the church, after 10 minutes of preparing myself not to cry, scream, storm out or lose my mind. I would see red ribbons, the beautiful christmas tree set up at the entrance, glimmering at glowing, with such grace. Golden ribbon laces the staircase, and I sit down in constant despair. The wreath is up on the door, the whole church smells like candles and evergreen spikes. The kids are carolling “o holy night” “gloria” and “we wish you a merry christmas.” I look up at the ceiling and think:
“what a happy, joyful, beautiful, magical, pure, and terrible time to be miserable”
What I meant was; this is such a beautiful and magical time and I can’t enjoy it because of all the pain I am in.
It’s like, happiness was honestly the most painful of all, if the entire world was sad, while I was sad, it would feel mopy and gross and miserable but, it is 10x less painful than seeing the world go on around you, seeing everyone enjoy their time and the only thing you can do is just sit there, completely paralyzed and unable to smile.
And the cherry on top; will & emma were celebrating their anniversary. And I sat there, watching it all happen in front of me.
December 22nd, I write to Carl:
“This time, 12 months ago, I met will. My life began again. Everything was great, and now I sit here and all I can do is look back.”
It’s so fucking paralyzing, one of the things I said at the beginning of this book and that I think about a lot was:
“when we’re trying to move on and things have become terrible, the moments we always go back to aren’t the mundane ones. They are the moments you saw sparks, felt stars, saw your future before it happened and then saw it slip away without any warning.”
Living through the pain, christmas, the holidays, the new year, will’s birthday; it was so tough, not only because I was being betrayed every minute of every day but also because; life was once beautiful, and content and normal and I could remember it, as a wise woman once said all too well.
8. frozen in time, stuck for eternity
The moment I realized that things weren’t going to get any better.
I saw this moment of realization coming, I totally knew it but, it didn’t feel as paralyzing as I thought it would be, once it happened. I realize that… this is how things are going to be from now on. I remember a particular day in which I was sitting at my table at the church and I was thinking, but it was like nothing was going on. It was a pretty quiet day at the church, we were the only one’s there, aside from the nuns and staff. There were some people coming in and out, it was windy, I could hear it. Well into the morning, early into the noon and it just felt like nothing was ever going to happen, ever again. We would just sit and I would just keep pretending like I don’t know what they’re doing and they keep pretending like they don’t know. We would sit. Nothing would ever happen again. It’s the kind of feeling I had never felt before, and the kind I couldn’t imagine anyone ever being able to describe. I walked out and saw the bare trees, the frozen lake in the distance and the gray and dim sky. There was a funeral going on in the distance. Such sorrow filled me. Looking back, I could not ever experience it again, without completely crumbling to pieces. The people in the distance looked as though they’d given up, and under this gray sky, standing on the cracks on the ground, feeling the chill of the wind, in the shade of the bare trees, I had too.
I look at the frozen lake and think of will. How he was right around and I am here, frozen in time, freezing in the cold, completely defeated. I think of how much he always smiles and laughs. How he too, has experienced hardship and someone as beautiful and magnificent as him, has a stillness and a seriousness to him. No one is ever safe, I thought. No one will ever be safe. I will never be free, I will be here forever, and when I’m not, I’ll be screaming for the panic attacks to stop. There was no escape, no back door, nothing I could do to get out of this hell, I had created and made a lovely home in.
There was nothing I could feel, think of, or even try to grasp at, that I thought might be a rescue.
I walk along the willow tree, in all of its protection, and glance at the walls of my chamber of sorrow I go over to the lake and just stare, for minutes on end. It’s like I can see my life fading away before me, unable to hang on and save myself.
But it’s not fast, oh no no; it’s slow, and gray and dull and it doesn’t and won’t continue to happen without every inch of my being having to feel every second of it. Why stick around for that?
Why not jump into this lake and just die?
Break the ice, and it all ends.
No. No way, I run back to the tree and scream as loud as I can, for…. help? reassurance? anyone? anything?
“Help!” I scream.
A friend of Carl’s, whom I had seen a couple of times, comes up to me and asks me why I’m screaming.
“Can I stay at your place for a little while?” I said.
I wasn't thinking, I just needed a warm place to be. He asked me if I was a friend of carl’s and I said yes. He brought me into his car and I sat in the backseat trying to get as much heat as I could from the heaters.
“So what were you doing out in the cold like that?” Something along those lines, he said
“I wasn’t out there for long, I had just come out of the church, not too long before you found me.”
We rode around the town for a little while longer before stopping at a little
two-story house. I don’t know why, but I couldn't go home, I couldn’t go see my friends at the theater, or will. I needed to just be away from everyone.
I lay down on his couch and he got me some water He had a bunch of cameras and photography equipment. It was a really cozy place.
“So apparently, the weather’s going to get better soon..” He says as the winds howl outside.
“You don’t look comfortable..” He said. He got up to go make me some tea, he had a small little kitchen and went up to the stove. Put some water in and opened a drawer of various tea bags. He started talking about the new year, the weather, about carl, and I wasn't really listening. It was done pretty shortly and he put a teacup full of pinkish tea down on the table.
I started weeping uncontrollably. I had a few sips of the tea, it was very delicious. He asked me if I wanted to spend the night and I said no. He gave me some blankets to wrap myself in and sent me on my way.
I went back into the church and sat there in silence for the rest of the day. They were whispering, and talking, and I was just still, no distractions to make it look like I’m not paying attention, I just sat.
It was all only numb from here. I just showed up and was there and nothing else was happening, I wasn’t there, I was gone and nothing was going to bring me back.
I had decided it was time to give up, everyone already knew, it would be better if I just continue living like this.
‘It’s not going to get any better..” I thought.
9. moving on and healing
Moving on. healing. Can it even happen? Is it even possible? At the bottom of the barrel, with no clue how anything will ever improve or be worth it. What can you do? Do you even want to move on? Do you even want to heal? Time is a funny thing. It makes so much seem smaller, looking back; sometimes I try and gaslight myself into thinking that this wasn’t that bad and that maybe I was overreacting. But, that has nothing to do with what was happening at the time, it has to do with the passing of time. It’s crucial to recognize that we aren’t going to heal right away. It takes time and work. The pain begins, and you have no idea what the future holds. The fear, the screaming into the air to silence the loud thoughts of panic. You can’t find any reason to keep fighting, you can’t figure out how it’ll ever be okay. Every relationship, plan, and aspect of life, is nothing and has fallen to pieces. Nothing is ever going to be the same ever again. You don’t know whether you need to come to terms with this hell or try and escape it. Every moment feels like a loud bang, a loud crash like everything is just shuffling around, crashing, breaking, shattering, and burning. You scream and bang and everything rattles in the back of the truck, you’re in. You can hear the fire spreading, as everything, everyone you care about is slowly moving further and further away from you. You can hear the flames cracking and the screaming of every memory you’ve made, burning to ashes. Then the dust settles. How will life ever go back to normal?
After you’ve lost everything, is there even anything left that you can grasp at
and retrieve?
The word heal.
What does it even mean to heal? Does it mean that everything can continue the way it was, even improve? Or does it mean to learn how to live life, in a different way, so you can silence and shut out the big tv screen, in front of your face, replaying all the crashing and burning?
If it’s the latter, is that enough?
Can you just adjust and live life, after having been through hell?
Can you just live differently? And have that be good enough?
The answers to these questions are the hardest to answer. What you need to remember is to be kind to yourself. You will heal and you will move on.
10. fake accounts
The success of fake accounts, I couldn’t have been more proud. The first week of July and it was already changing my life. That first week was so surreal, I think my whole life was just improving and things were starting to become much better It felt great because that book was something I was so passionate about. I had been working on it for a while, so I was a pretty different person when it came out, compared to when I had begun the writing process I like to think of books as tattoos, sometimes, I obviously don’t have any but I really like asking people the stories behind them and something they’d say “oh you know, I don’t really like this one that much anymore, but it really well represents a certain point in time in my life” and that’s how I feel about this book, a time capsule. Reflecting is honestly fun I think writing is supposed to be fun, even when writing about something serious or difficult, it feels so good. It just connects with you and is something for yourself. You know, putting it out and having it resonate with people is amazing but I think for me, personally; writing is something you should do for you I learned so much about myself, working with other people and what I want to say and how I want to say it. I’ll take the lessons that I learned while writing fake accounts 1, with me for the rest of my life. Sometimes it just comes naturally, I think one of the most important things as a creative person is carving out time to work on your art. I think all of it just comes down to your relationship with yourself, I think prioritizing myself from the beginning has really been a savior to me. Also, being able to determine your own success and not letting numbers or other people determine it for you I am so much happier when I’m proud of myself than when other people are proud of me. I know most people like a mix of both but, after such intense trauma, I’ve realized that I am the only one that matters. All the ingredients in fake accounts are really versatile because there are heavy subjects, happy subjects, introspective and thinking-outside-of-the-box practices and lots of timeless writing I am always writing and I’m not insanely good at writing, but I kind of like it that way, you know; figuring stuff out, not caring, that’s me. Some chapters on Fake Accounts 1 just kind of came to me- I love to think of writing as this magical creature that you need to catch and expand on, we ’ re truly just vessels for art and
sometimes you do have to work hard to make an idea come to life but there have been a few chapters that just kind of almost wrote themselves in a way Like my chapter “coming out” I wrote that chapter in 15 minutes or something and it all just came really easily. It’s one of the things I love about writing. this book:
I started putting this book together, super recently but there were brief notes I wrote that really began the process I was thinking a lot about the trauma and how much I had to say about it, and how this time, a year ago (around march or april); I was trying my hardest to move on, Then I started working on fake accounts and that really helped me move on as I already described but, it also made me realize that I have a skill I can use. With this book though, I just couldn’t stop writing, there was so much I wanted to say and the idea of it being a mini-book was already established so I needed to shorten it down. As I already said, originally for this “mini-book” I had written around 160 chapters and then I cut it down to just 10 Again, I can’t say this enough, I JUST couldn’t stop writing. So much was in my mind and I just wanted to share my story and get it all out.
I was in the library a while ago and being there makes me think so much about the early days of when I first fell in love with writing. I’ve always loved writing really emotional stories about my or other people's life. I’ve always been so intrigued with books that hit such a deep stone of a person ’ s psyche. I think being an author is the best job and the best craft. There’s nothing that connects people and there’s nothing that’s a more telling window into someone ’ s soul than a book they wrote about their life. Coming from this place of hurt and trauma and battle wounds and you manage to turn it into something that you ’ re proud of, and something that other people can enjoy and that brings acceptance and light and joy into the world, there's nothing better than that. Writing this last chapter too, it’s like; I took all that trauma and you know, not just the experiences but all those memories that were at one point unbearable to the point where I couldn’t function, I took that and put it into a book that might help someone but more importantly, helped me, and I’m not afraid to say that, I’m not afraid to be selfish This book is for others but it is mainly for me. Writing this honestly gave me closure, the green light to move on and continue writing and loving Will and I’m not afraid anymore. December,
christmas, the church, the snow, the album that came out then (red), I put it all into something better and made it the theme of a book about my trauma You know, the deluxe versions are all christmassy, that’s the theme. And as I talked about, christmas made me so sad that year because life was falling apart and I had no idea how anything would be okay. But by writing this book, I’m kind of reclaiming christmas in a way. It was mine. They took it from me. They took things from me that will take a while to fully get back, and I’m taking it slow, and christmas was one of the first things I took back. Who knows? Maybe I’ll write an entire book about the next thing I take back, make it an adventure. All I know is; hard experiences aren’t just hard to deal with, they’re hard to move on from And that’s what this whole book has been about. Yes, things crash, and they burn, but if you can’t get closure if you can’t process those emotions and let go of the thoughts saying “what if I did this differently” or “what if I did that differently” you ’ re never going to heal. But just do that work and it is easy, I swear it. I got through the hardest thing anyone could go through and I got through the aftermath and I am telling you that you can too.
Go fight the memories, go!
There is nothing holding you back from moving on and getting that green light to move on and live.
Really live.
Maybe you’ll even put your trauma into something meaningful as I did. I wrote this book to release everything and I mean everything. And I'm not sure if it was pouring my thoughts into it, working on the cover and making the theme so beautiful but tragic to look at, the passionate solidarity, or if it was just simply time passing, but something was healed along the way. Sometimes you need to talk it over (over and over and over) for it to ever really be... over. Like your friend who calls you in the middle of the night going on and on about something. You have completed this book, and hey, maybe now we can all agree to put whatever the past is; behind us and open a new door, it truly feels like hmm…
what do they call it? healing.
thank you for reading
for the only person who has ever made me smile during tough times, will
