Guest post written by author Rebecca Mahoney
Rebecca Mahoney is a young adult and middle grade writer, and the co-creator of audio drama serial The Bridge Podcast. She’s a strong believer in the cathartic power of all things fantastical and creepy in children’s literature–and she knows firsthand that ghosts, monsters, and the unknown can give you the language you need to understand yourself. She was raised in Windham, New Hampshire, currently resides in Somerville, Massachusetts, and spends her spare time watching horror movies, collecting cloche hats, and cursing sailors at sea. Her debut novel The Valley and the Flood releases on February 23rd 2021. She can be found on Twitter @cafecliche.
In the first few weeks of my Hell Year, I got the worst case of laryngitis of my life so far. Everything from my chest up felt raw, scraped, and bruised. Every time I tried to talk, all I could force out was a painful, squeaky whisper.
But unfortunately, I also have what I like to call Resting Friendly Face. I called a cab to take me home from the clinic so I could go home and crawl into bed. “I can’t really talk, sorry,” I managed to say. The driver laughed sympathetically—and then proceeded to ask me questions for the rest of the ride.
About a month before I got that cold, I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. And trying to talk about it, at that point, made that cab ride look cozy.
Almost exactly seven years later—it was late winter then, and it’s late winter now—I’ve gotten a little better at it. There is still a part of me, one that largely stays curled cat-content in the back of my head these days, that still reminds me we’ll be safer if we don’t say everything. I have to come at it sideways, indirectly. I have to give things apt but half-joking nicknames like Hell Year. And I have to describe that first month in the language of physical pain, because even now, I don’t quite have the language for how it felt.
But back then, I didn’t even have those little shortcuts that I do now. I was caught between a push and pull of wanting no one to know and feeling as if telling people was the only way I could get them to treat me gently. I remember fervently wishing I had a broken arm, because at least then you could look at me and immediately understand.
Or maybe, like that cab ride, you wouldn’t. There are things people expect to see from someone struggling that I wasn’t doing—and it felt like I couldn’t go a day without being reminded of that. When my coworker with an ailing parent described a planned self-care day, another coworker turned to me, grinning. “Doesn’t that sound nice?” she said. “Don’t you wish you had a trauma, too?”
Journaling wasn’t something I’d been able to keep up in the past. My childhood bedroom is a graveyard of beautiful notebooks with only the first few pages filled. But when my therapist suggested it, I thought it was worth a try. I was steadily getting better at talking through things with him, but there were things I was afraid to admit, and even more I didn’t have the language for. Maybe this was like writing. Maybe I needed to start with a first draft.
The entries started off as housekeeping. I rated the highs and lows of my anxiety each day, on a scale of 1 to 100. I wrote up a tiered list of my triggers, I wrote notes for therapy. Eventually, I started writing little reminders to myself: this is normal, you’re okay, you’re going to survive. When those reminders essentially spiraled into full entries, they kept that same direct, second person tone. They were not so much journal entries as notes to myself.
I wondered if I should be concerned, at first. My own head, the one place I could always be completely comfortable, already felt like an alien landscape to me. Was talking to myself like a different person just making it true?
Of course, I know now that I hadn’t lost myself. But I was split and scattered across time and space. Everywhere I moved, I bumped against the grooves of another moment I was caught in. It would be a while yet before the night I would walk home, wind-bitten and tired and content for some reason I can no longer remember – the night where I thought, for the first time and not the last, ah. All of me is right here.
I didn’t have that to hold onto yet. I just knew that when I tried to switch back to first person, it didn’t feel right. Second person just clicked. Like as long as my pen was moving, I was drawing every piece of myself home.
I didn’t go in looking to change the ways in which I spoke to myself. But it was impossible, writing like that, to not think of my therapist’s question, how would you talk to a friend who was going through this? There’s something about writing calm down or shut up that’s more jarring than thinking it. So I started shifting my language where I could. I settled on a rule of thumb, eventually. To think of the thing I most wanted to hear in that moment, that I’d most want to ask someone to tell me if I could. And then to write it down.
And that had a strange side effect I didn’t plan. I had seen my diagnosis, those first few months, as a virus, a haunting, something with harm in mind. But I could see the ways, over time, that it was a vestige of something that had protected me. Something that was only ever there to keep me alive. Something that I could honor even as I broke it down, piece by piece.
It was around then that my newest story idea latched on, about a girl, a strange little town, and a creature that reflected the parts of herself that scared her. But it wasn’t until the last journal entry I wrote during Hell Year, in which I wrote little notes to myself at different points in time, that the last piece of that story idea came together.
Note to self, that entry begins, these things have no sense of timing. These became the first words I would write of The Valley and the Flood. And I decided to structure the flashbacks to key moments of Rose’s trauma the same way I structured that last entry: as notes from Rose to her past selves. I don’t think you have to be that truthful if the only person you’re talking to is yourself, Rose narrates in the first chapter, at her most unreliable. And by the end, she’s proven herself wrong.
I’ve had a lot of questions for myself during this leadup to Valley’s release, this book that is and is not my experience, the story that I wrote before I learned to tell my own. Sitting here, a week out from the book being in the world, it’s hard not to remember that I once thought of this as my deadline to find the perfect words for absolutely everything. To talk about my own story as seamlessly as I can talk about Rose’s.
But like so many things I thought were true when I sat down to write Valley, I don’t feel that way anymore. A story is a living thing, not a tablet written in stone. There’s the one I tell to my friends, the one I tell to all of you, the one I tell on good days, and days I don’t want to tell anyone anything at all. Every story is the truth. It’s just the words that change, over time.
But the first story I learned to tell – the story in its messy entirety – that one might be just for me.
