I forgot how to write for fun

Since joining the site Royal Road, which is a place for writers to share their novels and ongoing stories, I had to delve back into my writing folder for some old gems. The website has some very strict rules about not allowing stories centered around real-life heavy topics, so that eliminated almost every book I've written from 2020-2022. A common theme has been focusing on mental health awareness trauma, and to be honest, it's all I've been able to write since 2020.

I discovered some old things I'd nearly forgotten about, and they hit differently when I skimmed through them. One in particular was still a bit dark in subject matter, but it centered around dark and adult comedy while having a very happy ending. It was much more light-hearted than my other books, which is saying a lot considering the underlying topics.

I remember a time when I wrote to have an adventure and to solely create. I've always enjoyed writing things that make me cry, but I equally loved writing things that made me laugh my ass off. The people and otherworldly beings in my stories actually went places. Action happened. There were multiple main characters and a few storylines that worked in tandem with each other, and it was for fun. It was all for fun. And I didn't write those stories for anyone but myself.

When PTSD symptoms finally hit me for the first time, full-on, during the pandemic, all I could write about was trauma. Of course, my way of coping is to write, and I found out quickly that writing about trauma, when not done in the right way, can cause harm where it wasn't intended. Things aren't clarified where they should be. Everything is raw.

I started writing about my trauma in a book in 2019 called STIGMA. I paused to write a light-hearted sequel featuring the villain because I fell in love with him, but in 2020 just when I thought I was truly on the path to starting my journey as a querying author, the pandemic hit. I'd planned to go out more since I'd just gotten over a few years of severe chronic illness and agoraphobia, and it was all upended. I was back inside again and it brought on the depression.

I then wrote Everything Is Wonderful Now, which is a creative memoir — emphasis on the creative license. It still had some light-hearted elements and I cried way too many times while writing it. The sweet and heartfelt moments of my childhood self and my spirit guide Byleth, a relationship I wish I'd had back then, caused me to fall into the narrative in a bittersweet way. After I ran it by my editor and found that it lacked a lot of plot elements to make it a good, fleshed out novel, I returned to it to add several more chapters and a second part. It ended up being 74,000 words, and I was told it was much better and good to go.

It became darker and darker, and by the time of the rewrite, my PTSD had been triggered heavily in October of 2020. The second part of the story shifted to horror elements, and it delved into the few years I spent with chronic illness, anorexia, and frequent nightmares and sleep paralysis episodes. It ended well, and I recently went back to change it to fit in with the follow-up novel, Open Wound, which is even darker.

By the beginning of 2021, my brain had basically rewired itself. I'd experienced some new trauma I won't get into, but it made me regress not only with my mental health but in mental age, I suffered from extreme bouts of psychotic symptoms, saw vivid hallucinations, had trauma nightmares, and at one point I didn't eat for two days as self-punishment.

I was regularly suicidal and depressed, and some afternoons were spent sitting in a chair and staring at the wall while silently catatonic.

I started a blog to write about darker things because, at that point in my life, everything was dark. Not only did I live in an apartment that had a lack of natural light, but I lived around toxic people, as well as an abuser who triggered me daily. He was someone who reminded me of my ex in high school who gave me PTSD as a teenager.

All I could do was write about my feelings. I often wrote about the visions I saw, the nightmares I had, and I explored the waking nightmares too. I mused about what my shadow man — the hallucination I saw regularly — was, and I met an alter who had been around since I was a child who made my head miserable. They'd been the Voice I'd written about years before that verbally abused me and pushed me to hurt myself. Thankfully, we've since come to an agreement of cooperation, and things have gotten much better.

When I go back to read the entries in my side blog, they frighten me. Not just the stuff about dissociating and explaining what my head and world felt like during my worst moments of psychosis, but seeing how disconnected with reality I was.

The world I saw then was not the world everyone else saw. Social media became a trigger because I read into every little thing in the most negative way possible, and I saw my loneliness and the reality that often, I felt like a ghost in society. What I failed to realize, however, was that all I had to do was reach out to my friends, and they'd likely respond.

When you're in that kind of headspace that rewrites reality and it fools you into thinking everything has an ulterior motive or meaning — a trauma response that is very harmful to others as well as yourself — you don't realize it. You're not aware of the fact that your mind is lying to you. All you can see are the connections it makes that lead to the deepest of your scars.

Writing became my way to dissect all of that. I became obsessed with diving further and further into scary places, and I found the Otherworlds of PTSD I experienced to be eerily comforting. When you've been through years of repeated trauma, it becomes familiar. So, in that sense, like listening to sad music when you're depressed, you find a familiar comfort in what you already know. Happiness and a healthy mind is the unknown, and the unknown is scary as hell.

I poured all of the things into my writing that I couldn't say before. I wanted to be heard. I wanted my trauma and my story to matter because I'd spent so many years keeping it inside or convincing myself, due to external gaslighting from my parents, that I deserved the abuse. Maybe I'd done something to deserve it. Maybe they'd had a bad day.

The worst thing of all, I think, is being told in your formative years that no one really cares about you. My abusive ex, as well as another person in my life that I should have been able to trust with everything, who'd known me since birth, told me those things. Hearing my father call me a failure while he praised others in the family did so much damage. Now, at 33, when someone tells me they believe in me or are proud of me, it just doesn't stick. I still feel like a failure because the trauma is still speaking to me and telling me lies.

These are things that are good to explore in writing, but when it becomes the only thing you can write about, you lose sight of the good things in life. Things might not be ideal for me, and I may have been through hell throughout the years, but I've become locked in a trauma loop even when things are fine. I've developed such a strong sense of rejection dysphoria that the smallest thing, even if not personal, sends me into a spiral of self-destruction and doubt about myself.

When I found that story tonight, the light urban fantasy romance with my favorite villain I've written yet, and I smiled at the punchlines and humor, I realized I forgot how to write stories like that. I'd become a prisoner in my own mind for so long that I just seemed to lose the ability.

I knew I wanted to revive the story more than anything, and I'm going to make an honest effort to fix it up and finally do the rewrite it needs, but it feels foreign. A block went up in my head and I worried the tone would change too much, or I wouldn't be able to do it. Had I lost the understanding of who my favorite villain was, and would I be able to write for him again and keep him true to who he was when I was happier?

I want to learn to write for fun again. I've stopped submitting my creative memoir novel for now because rejection from agents and publishers is too painful. I know it isn't personal, but I can't lie. It feels like my story and my trauma isn't enough. It's too much or it's repulsive, or it isn't as darkly beautiful as others' traumatic stories I've seen published since.

Sometimes I worry I will never find closure by getting my story out there, and in the process, I will never be able to reach out to people who have been through what I have and help them find hope. If I can be even more honest, I'm desperate to reach out through my stories to find others who understand me, too. To find others so I don't feel so alone with the particular things I kept inside for years.

It's entirely possible I don't write good novels as well, but maybe one day someone will read through my story.

For now, I have to find a love for adventure again. I've explored the darkest depths of my mind, my trauma, my nightmares, and my worst fears, and while I draw a blank when I try to write about magic and fantasy beings, and adventures through medieval fantasy lands, I have to break through that wall that wants to stop me.

I'm tired of trauma ruling my life, and I know it will continue to despite writing all of this. It's determined how I see the world, myself, and it's bled into my creative ventures for too long, and it's changed me into someone I don't recognize. It was necessary to explore, yes, but sometimes you just need to leave the real world behind and find happiness and bravery in someone else for a while.