Words of Disaster

An Epilogue (End)

- Anonymous (2020-2025)
 

The first time I attempted suicide, I knew I was going to be a writer. Through that radical act of self-harm, a chasm opened up in me. Like a hard stone above a spring, I cracked open and words poured out in a stream. After my release from the asylum, I rode a wave of voluptuous energy and stayed up all night, typing furiously, smoking nicotine that gagged and choked out an exsanguinating creativity. Writing eternal stream-of-consciousness poetry and psychological prose, I would tape them on the walls, desperately scribbling cryptic edits and sketches. Writing helped me learn how to live after chasing death. Commanding language became the ribbon that holds me together. 

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Sometimes I recognize the suffocating mist of desperation, the gnawing of uncertainty. Cloistered in my memories, my body recalls pacing too many antiseptic halls before manic depression was revealed to me by doctors in white monogrammed coats. A crisis regurgitates the personal state of emergency that defined my life. Some things have the monumental capacity to throw you back to your old haunts. Disaster stirs up disaster. Now, like back then, the words churn.  

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With my introduction to psychiatry, I learned how to discipline my writing, to reign in the voluble habits and hone the impulses to develop the practice of a writer. With mood stabilizers, I left behind the unreigned sleepless nights, the hyperbolic dips and surges in mood, and the unrelenting death drive. But the urge to produce has never left me.

 

There is always a voice that needs to vibrate; it just has to tear through me first—in chatter, in song, and in concretized speech on paper. Even now, feeling the acoustic clicks beneath my stained fingernails recalls the warm embrace of the blinking cursor that wiggled its fingers at me when I was in a devastating solitude. As I write with urgency, I am paralyzed and energized by the shock of disaster. I am wired. The sense of urgency, the breathlessness, the pounding anxiety of trying to escape a deadline revs my adrenaline. Writing isn’t a distraction from the natural disaster; it’s my sidekick.

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Now, I surreptitiously inhale smoke in dark corners when I work late. But at 2 am, I discover again the chatty energy from those fledgling days of my writing. The things that accompanied me through recovery — heavy early dawns, the flow of words, the frenetic interior dialogue — whisper a familiar hello to me now as I break down to write. 

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I can only comprehend crisis through the clicks of the keyboard, the inscrutable scribbles on the thin pages of a notebook, shameful letters to trusted friends sent desperately in the dead of night. The more incapacitated, despairing, and exhausted I am, the more the words come, dripping off my lips, my fingers, my temples. I don’t write to forget the feeling of fear. Writing opens my mouth to consume the fear in full and take it in. Ingesting trauma while dancing with words makes me a holy martyr in control, more ready than ever to be laid out beautiful, naked on grotesque display in the crescendo of blinding light. In times of catastrophe, writing is the only way through.