You Need Someone

I have been trying to write an essay for a friend.

That sentence should not carry this much weight, and yet it does.

It is a simple essay. The kind of thing sixteen-year-old me could have written in an afternoon, maybe while half-distracted, maybe while listening to music, maybe while doing three other things at once. Back then, words came when I called them. They lined up. They obeyed. They arrived with a kind of loyalty I never had to question.

Now I am nearly finished with this favor, and still it has felt like dragging something holy through mud.

For the past few weeks, I have been telling my brother that I have been struggling with it. Not because the essay itself is impossible, but because I have been overwhelming myself, tangling the task until it feels bigger than it is. Then he sent me one of those harmless little links people send without thinking much of it, something about the birth months that supposedly produce the best writers. June. November. February. Another month I cannot remember. Not May.

I was born in May.

It is almost embarrassing to admit how deeply that stupid detail cut me. It was such a small thing. Such a silly thing. A joke, really. But something in me gave way. It became the cherry on top of a magnificently horrible Sunday. Because it was never really about the list. It was about what the list touched.

It touched the bruise.

It touched the fact that I used to be the person people came to when they needed help writing. The person who edited essays, wrote essays, sometimes got paid to write essays. The person who could write stories at the drop of a dime. The person who could look at someone and make a poem out of them. The person who had language on speed dial.

And now here I was, unable to finish one simple thing.

That is when the joke turned on me.

I texted my brother something playful, something like good for you and Mom, the best writers in the house, because he is November and my mother is February. I was trying to keep it light. But beneath the text, beneath the laugh, something uglier was already waking up. The voice that waits for moments like that. The one that loves a crack in the door.

Guess who is not the best writer. Guess who cannot finish a damn essay. Guess who cannot finish writing their book. Guess who cannot finish a poem. Guess who cannot seem to do any of the things that once came so naturally. Guess who cannot make the art, cannot crochet, cannot sing, cannot pull the thing from the soul and bring it into the world.

It kept going.

Cruelty always knows how to build momentum.

And beneath all of that, the real question began to rise, the one that frightens me most:

Where are you?

Where is the woman who could make things happen? Where is the one with force in their spirit? The one who could create, heal, move, speak, write, become? Where is that version of me that felt not invincible, but deeply, undeniably alive?

Because I know they are still in there.

That is what makes it hurt the way it does. If they were gone, maybe this would be grief with a clean edge. But they are not gone. They feel buried. Locked somewhere inside me, behind fear, behind exhaustion, behind the strange paralysis that trauma leaves in the body long after the danger has passed. Or maybe after some dangers have not quite passed at all.

The truth is that this does not begin and end with writing.

It only looked like writing because that was where the wound surfaced.

For the last few years, and especially these past months, I have felt deeply stuck. Not in the romantic way people talk about being blocked. Not in the neat, temporary way creative droughts are often described. I mean stuck in a way that feels physical, painful, almost surreal. As if the words exist, but snag somewhere between thought and form. As if I can feel them pressing against me from the inside, asking to be let out, and still I cannot free them.

And that kind of stuckness begins to infect everything.

I have been dealing with the weight of CPTSD, for the past few months, with fear that has learned how to make a home in the body. I have been trying to progress while feeling unsafe. Trying to move while feeling watched. Trying to build while still carrying the psychic architecture of being manipulated, frightened, and worn down. There are things that happened to me that made me disconnect from myself for survival, and now survival is no longer enough. Now I want my life back, and I am realizing how difficult it is to return to yourself after you have spent so long being taught to abandon yourself.

That is the terror of it, I think.

Not blood. Not ghosts. Not monsters.

To stand at the threshold of your own life and not fully know how to enter it.

To remember yourself in flashes but not in permanence.

To know the voice is yours and still struggle to speak in it.

The cruelest part is that the things I love most begin to feel like proof of failure when I cannot access them. Writing. Art. Healing. Learning. Teaching. All the things that once made me feel most like myself become tender to the touch, almost threatened, as if losing access to them means losing access to me.

And I do not want that.

I do not want a life where I am severed from my own passions. I do not want to be so afraid, so exhausted, so destabilized that I cannot reach the parts of myself that make living feel meaningful. I want to be awake. Entirely present. I want to do my work well. I want to create without terror sitting beside me. I want to flourish, not merely recover. I want to know who I am outside of fear, outside of projection, outside of survival. I want to know what is truly mine.

Recently, in the middle of an argument with someone I care about, he said something that lodged itself in me: You need someone.

And I remember the immediate offense that rose in my body, because the answer came just as quickly, sharp and certain as a struck match:

No.

I do not need someone.

I need me.

That was the truth sitting beneath all of this grief.

I need me. I didn’t say it out loud, and parts of me felt I should have, but not for him, for me. I need my voice. I need my safety. I need my center of gravity returned to me. I need the self I have been grieving while still carrying them. I need to feel that I belong to myself again. Not to fear. Not to confusion. Not to the aftermath of what other people did to my mind. Me.

Because I do love myself. Fiercely, even now. Enough to know when I have gone missing. Enough to feel the rage of that absence. Enough to keep searching through the dark for the shape of my own hand.

And I think that when I find myself again, I will not only be able to hold myself better, I will be able to stand inside the kind of love that can meet me there. Love that is reciprocal. Safe. Mutual. Love that does not ask me to abandon myself in order to keep it. Love that does not leave me starving and call it devotion. Because I think finding myself also means knowing I am finally well enough to receive what answers me back. Not a love that says I need someone, but a love that recognizes I am the someone, and meets me there whole.

That is what this is, maybe.

Not failure.

Not the death of talent.

Not proof that I have lost whatever gift once lived in me.

Maybe it is the sound of me reaching for myself again, clumsily, angrily, honestly. Maybe it is ugly because return is ugly. Maybe it shakes because I am still shaking. Maybe it comes out in fragments because fragments are what I have had to work with.

But buried is not gone.

Silenced is not emptied.

Blocked is not barren.

They are still here.

A little frightened. A little fractured. A little harder to find than they once were. But here.

And if I need anyone now, it is not another savior, not another witness, not another pair of hands telling me who I am.

It is me.

It has always been me.