Growing up, fantasizing and creating new stories for myself had been my refuge from the anarchy of my life. From as early as I can remember, I would perform little plays or look for ways to act the part of someone else. When my parents would take me out on their date nights, I would quickly flee our table in order to play the role of “adult friend” to the diners around us. Eight years old and pulsating with tenacity, I would compliment women, telling them, “You are very pretty!” I would ask men, “Are you a sexist, misogynist pig?” I had heard from my mom that this was a very big deal and I wanted to catch any “sexists” and “misogynists” in my midst. The adult couples would politely indulge me as I asked questions like “Do you have enough sex?” or “How do you keep your love life fresh?” The grown-ups would usually burst into surprised laughter before giving me a very PG answer (“Relationships are work”) and looking for my parents. As soon as I got home, I would write down the stories I had heard from the adult world and then perform them in front of my mirror.
I became so enamored with interrogating grown-ups and telling their stories that my mom briefly set up a cable-access television show for me. Girl Talk was filmed in an exam room of her medical office. A pink construction-paper mural covered in puffy paint designs of flowers and hearts hid a gynecological exam chair. On the show, I would interview such luminaries as my mom’s personal trainer, Kim, a bodybuilder with a short blond ponytail and greased-up, Day-Glo orange limbs. I would catch any patient in the hall and ask/demand that she be a guest on my “very important, very popular, very funny television show.”*1 A stunning number of people agreed. My mother canceled my show, not due to poor ratings (because we didn’t have any ratings) but because she needed her exam room back. That’s Hollywood, kiddo.
With my show canceled, I began keeping my own journal. It was full of the musings of a child prodigy: “Jamie Belsky-Briley is 11 out of 10 HOT”; “I would marry Luke Perry, eff Jason Priestley, and kill Ian Ziering (duh)”; “I’m scared to leave my room because my parents are screaming and I don’t want to see them but I ALSO really want to GET OUT OF MY ROOM because mom said the world is full of rapists and murderers who want to kidnap me and I think one is plotting to break in through my bedroom window! How do I escape?” My journal was a safe place where I could be vulnerable and write about how my world felt: violent, tumultuous, confusing, and dangerous.
My diary was something I kept only for me and hid in my candy stockpile under my bed. One day, a family friend walked into my room as I was writing in it. She was a self-described “Wiccan witch” who once “cursed” my father, but I, for some reason, trusted her as the only “normal” adult I knew. (Kind of shows you the lack of reasonable grown-ups I had to choose from, huh?) “What do you have there?” she asked. I confessed that I was keeping a journal where I was tracking everything going wrong around me. My parents were just beginning their divorce, and somehow, just by writing in my little purple-and-green-paisley-cloth-covered diary, I felt some relief. “That’s great you’re keeping a journal, honey, can I see it?” The request felt a little odd, but so was everything else going on in that house. I agreed. As she skimmed through the pages, reading my secrets, my lies, my truths, my whole body throbbed with one thought: NO, NO, NO, IT’S MINE.
She took my journal straight to my mother, who then told me she was going to ENTER IT INTO MY PARENTS’ DIVORCE PROCEEDINGS as evidence that I was a liar. Here, my mother insisted, was proof that I, a twelve-year-old, was not a credible witness, and that if I were to testify in the divorce, whatever I said should be discounted. My innermost thoughts had been used to shame me, and I still feel a sharp pang of grief and betrayal when I think about this. After that incident, even though I had loved making my own stories, even though I had found a respite in journaling, I decided it was too dangerous for me and I stopped writing altogether. What if someone exposed my thoughts again?
But after the night of my disgraceful twenty-fifth birthday, when I was attempting to pick up the pieces of my life, I went to drinks (Good call, right? Keep drinking? Oy) with my best friend*2 Isabelle to ask what she thought was wrong with me. She had been present for so much of my recent out-of-control behavior, had been by my side on so many nights as I bawled over glasses of wine in various bars, and so I thought maybe she would have some insights into what was going awry. “I’m not really sure; you never share what’s going on with you or your family. It’s almost like you’re hiding it.” “DUH, ISABELLE,” I wanted to shout. Didn’t she know it wasn’t safe to share anything about my past? I just smiled at her and replied, “Yeah, it’s boring to talk about old history.”
“Well, if you can’t talk to me about it, I think you should read The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. It’s like a twelve-step program toward recovering your inner child. You do exercises to uncover and heal your traumas and learn prayers toward a more abundant universe.”
“Recovering your inner child?” I scoffed. “Prayers toward the universe? Does it come with Tibetan prayer beads and my own guru too?” I snidely asked.
“I mean, yeah, it’s a little cheesy, but wouldn’t you rather be a little cheesy than crying and not sleeping and just feeling like shit all of the time?”
I reluctantly bought and then flipped through the pages of The Artist’s Way, and among the exercises, I came upon a tool for creativity called “The Morning Pages.” Every morning, before you’ve had time to think, before you hit up Instagram, before you check out how many likes your photo of a perfectly carved pumpkin has received on Facebook, you word-vomit your thoughts onto three pages of paper. Every morning. THREE pages. Single spaced. You simply scribble down whatever flows out of you, without editing, without thinking, without worrying. This seemed similar to journaling and therefore off-limits/dumb/dangerous to me, but it wasn’t journaling; it was “The Morning Pages.” Huge difference. The book explained how this practice was a way to get in touch with your core feelings by forcing you, in writing, to become aware of and engaged with the innermost self.
My first thought was Who has the time, every day, to write THREE pages? It seemed like a pretty overwhelming burden. But, again, I was at a point in my life where, on a good day, I was openly sobbing on the subway. Okay. I would try it, but I would keep the notebook hidden away in my nightstand, under magazines and my television remote control. No one would find it there.
In the beginning, my Morning Pages were unbearably boring. They mostly listed complaints: “Why can’t you get up half an hour earlier? If only you woke up at 8:30, then you wouldn’t be rushing to do these stupid pages before work!!” Or I listed errands I had to run: “YOU MUST BUY TOILET PAPER INSTEAD OF USING PAPER TOWELS FROM THE KITCHEN!!! YOU DESERVE TOILET PAPER.” As I continued to write, however, sharp fears began to emerge: “You will fail.” “You have no good ideas.” “If you aren’t professionally successful yet, you never will be.” It was as if some force within me was moving my pen across the page, exposing worries I hadn’t yet been aware of. “You will never find someone who loves you and you will be alone forever. You don’t deserve love.” Yikes. I hadn’t been writing in my journal for more than a week and I was already confronted with the deep-seated and inescapable dreads of that neglected little girl at my core. The one who grew up in a house where things came to die, the one who was never comforted or taught how to take care of herself. As I wrote, it felt like I was receiving DMs from my soul. Secret, semi-sneaky messages from my most vulnerable center, nudging me toward the places I needed to heal. This was my little survivor voice, a soft cry from deep within me, someone who knew exactly where I needed to comfort myself. I thought it was going to be difficult to unpack all of my trauma, but here were all of my scariest thoughts, top of mind and easy to excavate.