One of my favourite things about writing is the way it creates, whether you mean it to or not, a sort of time capsule of you and your anxieties at the time. Like, you know the old joke about "my god, the whole book's actually about my mother"? You think you're above it. You're definitely not.
The reason I'm thinking about this is because I recently reread a piece I wrote this past autumn, right at the end of April, that's basically about a character living alone for the first time in years and finding it hard to deal with. It's an outline that makes sense in the... wider context (yes, okay, I may as well admit it now, the piece was fanfiction), and that I think makes sense for the character. But it is - and I can't believe it took me so long to properly see it - actually about a weird depressive episode I had last winter.
See, what happened last winter is that my parents came into a bit of cash and decided to finally take the trip to Japan they'd been promising each other for years and years (they lived there for a while before I was born), and since the kids are finally old enough to be home alone, why not do it now? May's a lovely time of year in Japan, apparently. All the usual jokes were made about crazy teen-movie-style housewrecking parties, but in the end, my brother and I are both so boring that they decided we didn't even need a babysitter, just some family friends' numbers and the neighbours keeping an eye out, and we'd be on our own for a whole fortnight. I was thrilled, quite frankly. Senior year of high school, with a part-time job, various extracurriculars, finally something resembling a social life - and now the ultimate test of adultness, a whole household to run myself for two weeks. I felt like a right proper grownup.
But the thing that nobody tells you about running all your own shit, especially as a seventeen-year-old girl with a family history of brains that default to the Bad Place in times of hardship, is that it's goddamn exhausting. That first week my parents were out of the country, I worked sixteen hours and had two rehearsals that required me to leave the house while it was still dark, a lacrosse game, several assignments due, and a minor heart attack when my parents called me saying that the school had called them saying that my brother wasn't in class and that's how I found out he'd gotten sick and decided to stay home without telling anyone. I was so, so tired. To be fair, that would have been a pretty rough week anyway, but having to get home and think about cooking and cleaning and all that stuff definitely compounded the problem.
What's weirdest is that while it was all happening, I actually thought I was doing okay. Sure, I'm crawling by on five hours of sleep a night and keep catching myself dreaming about a quick break from existing altogether and I nearly had a crying breakdown in class the other day, but I'm still, like, upright, yeah? I'm still making it to class every day and turning up to all my shifts. None of this can be that bad, right?
Whereas now if I so much as listen to some of the music I had on repeat that fortnight (music has a similar but distinct time-capsule effect on me to writing) I'm knocked flat by this overwhelming sense-memory of just being too cold and lonely and exhausted to function, of thinking that if I fell asleep and didn't wake back up, that wouldn't be so bad, would it? It got a little better once my parents returned and I didn't have to think about everything all the time, but really, I didn't make it out of the Bad Place those two weeks knocked me into until graduation was in sight.
It was never going to have a satisfying that's that ending, though, because the thing about seasons is that they keep coming back around. And the thing about this winter, the one that's just now ending where I live, was that I was going solo travelling, which involved - who'da thunk - being alone all the time and having to take responsibility for all your own shit. What was to say, I asked myself this past autumn, that I wouldn't fall back into an identical Bad Place, and this time without the structure of school and work or the support of my friends, let alone a cushy two-week finish line? How was I going to survive that?
And at the same time I was writing this piece, about this character separated from her team after a horrible knock-down-drag-out traumatic event and having to readjust to life alone and not coping all too well with the whole thing but, crucially, never actually having a proper breakdown - this piece whose last two hundred words or so I forced out of myself the night before I left, as though I'd never be able to write again after this - and it's taken me six whole months to read through it again and go: huh. I was goddamn terrified of what my own brain would do to me this past winter, wasn't I.
I don't think it's a terror that's going to go away, either. I just accepted an offer of study from a university in a different city, halls of residence and everything, which means I'm going to be spending next winter - you guessed it! - largely alone, with study and probably work to take care of, and nobody to lean on but myself. (I'm still pretty thrilled about it, though, so if history wants to repeat itself it can go suck on a beehive honestly.)
I don't know. I don't think there's a point to this other than that author's intent, contrary to what many English teachers will tell you, is often bewilderingly accidental, and that I can't wait to read over the stuff I'm working on right now in six months' time and go my god, the whole book's actually about -
