Every morning for the past four months has started the same way: me alone in my bed, typing my deepest traumas on a laptop—then starting work, hunched over another screen, feeling like a brick is sitting in my stomach.
Two screens mirroring tragedies: one from the past, and one that still rises every time I log in to work and realize I’m living a double life.
My life plays backward like a horror movie — blood on my hands, toes curling. I’ve seen this scene before. I try to warn the girl before she’s bludgeoned to death. Then I realize: the girl is me.
Before I started this book-writing process, I imagined myself typing in cute coffee shops. Sometimes that happens. More often, writing looks like the morning after a night of partying— only I have no fun stories of dancing on tabletops to explain my disheveled look. I stumble to the kitchen, make coffee, write in my pajamas, hair uncombed.
Writing and I are in a torturous love affair. We get it on, anywhere: five minutes between work projects, the gym parking lot, a supermarket aisle, if I’m feeling adventurous. Nothing about this life feels glamorous.
I am a woman on an island. Equal parts liberated and maddened.
But the beauty of this solitude is that without the noise, I’m slowly returning to myself. Once you’ve seen what you’ve survived and named the harm, you’re not so easily shaken. You will claw at anything that invades your path because this time, you see pain’s footprints coming.
You become the pretty monster.
This writing island is lonely. These past few months, I have cut off friends and ghosted dates who tried to overstep my boundaries.
Nice girls don’t survive here.
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