Carrying The Momentum Forward
TW: Trauma
When I was little, I was mesmerized by the book The Two Princesses of Bamarre by Gail Carson Levine.
The book featured an epic adventure, dragons, true love, action scenes, and plenty more - all presented through the eyes of a princess with anxiety.
The idea that a main character of a story could have anxiety blew my mind. I’d never seen anything like that before - a character like me who got to star in an amazing story in a fantastical world and do all the things I could only do in my dreams.
When I read The Two Princesses of Bamarre, I felt like instead of being someone with a problem, I was instead someone who was worthy of being the protagonist of a story. Someone whose story mattered. And someone who could conquer the obstacles in my way even if I did them differently than how some others dealt with theirs.
Now, many years later, I am writing a mental health-based story of my own for this year’s National Novel Writing Month (summer camp edition) - and I hope that one day, someone else will read it and feel validated.
I am well aware that there are a lot of books that tackle mental illness, but what really resonated with me as a child was that I recognized specific experiences of mine in the story. For example, I recognized a lot of my phobia responses, thought processes, and actions that might seem irrational to others but made perfect sense to me. It didn’t sound strange that this princess would be more scared of a spider than a dragon, and watching her find her courage and happy ending made me feel amazing.
With that in mind, I decided to try to replicate a specific fear of mine: ever since I had my blood clot, I’ve been afraid of experiencing one again. While some people have said that it would be easier for me since I would know what would happen instead of being confused like I was the first time, I actually think it would be a lot worse. I would know exactly how much everything would hurt, what it would feel like to wonder if I was going to live or die, and every moment would be familiar and unknown at once because I would always be afraid of things getting worse.
I decided to write a character doing what I saw as the ultimate act of bravery: choosing to do something absolutely horrifying and traumatic for a second time to help others. This turned into fighting demons - it wasn’t a huge step to go from fighting internal demons to imagining fighting a literal demon. Then, my creative side stepped in, and I came up with different kinds of demons and how exactly they would trigger a trauma response.
When I first presented a sample of this work to my writing class, I was nervous - but I was also excited when I got several responses from people saying that my main character’s trauma symptoms felt extremely real and familiar. They wrote me messages with things my character did that they’d done before. And in my favorite response, someone said that she hadn’t thought about someone having fresh trauma as a college freshman, but it got her thinking.
I’m looking forward to writing this book and sharing the story both with people who have similar experiences to me, and people who don’t. For the people who do, I hope it will feel good to know that they are not alone, and for people who this experience would be new to, I hope it inspires empathy and perhaps even a desire for learning more.
Writing this novel - my eleventh National Novel Writing Month project - today and for the next 29 days is going to be special for me in the way that the purely-fantastical novels aren’t. This one has just enough basis in fact that it feels real to me emotionally, even if I was not fighting actual demons. This basis in real emotions might help it have more of an emotional impact on readers, which could help me follow my dream of getting a book published. Plus, it’s fun to show the world that there are people like me who go through things and can still write a happy ending in our own lives!
Ellie, a writer in the Chicago area, was diagnosed with OCD at age 3. She hopes to educate others about her condition and end the stigma against mental illness.