Here Lies the Evidence
I reduced my life to ninety minutes and found the part that hurt.
I was sitting across from my husband, late night in my office, the room full of plumes of smoke from my candles, my incense, a glowing cherry in my bong, trying to compress my entire life into a ninety-minute story arc, and I kept adding scenes. The childhood abuse, the military as escape, the marriage for protection, the postpartum collapse, the years of performing competence in rooms that rewarded suppression, and he kept saying no, you don’t need that, you don’t need that either, until what remained was so small I could hold it in one hand.
A girl walking around a block with a boy and a dog on a summer afternoon in 2002. A golden sunset at the Delta that she would spend the next seventeen years trying to return to. And in the year that followed, how heartbreak left her open enough for someone entrusted with her safety to become the thing she needed protection from. Something she would not recognize for what it was until she found herself back where she started, two decades later. Everything that happened between that light and the moment she felt it go dark. Everything she did to chase it back. Everything it cost her before she finally stood still long enough to feel it again.
That was it. That was the whole story. I could tell you my entire life, forward and back, through the lens of that one year, because of one afternoon when a boy rode his bike 4.9 miles to apologize and I mistook the effort for proof that I would not be abandoned again.
I sat there with my chest caving in because I have spent my entire adult life building a case for why my pain is legible, layering evidence upon evidence, context upon context, and when I stripped it down to the thing itself, it fit inside one season of one year of one girl’s life, and I did not know whether that made it more devastating or less, only that my body recognized the shape of it the way you recognize a room you once lived in even after the furniture has been replaced.
I have been feeling this pull lately to just be fucking real for the first time in my life and even writing that sentence makes my chest tighten because I am thirty-eight years old and still negotiating whether I am allowed to exist without translation. How did I make it this far without ever saying the whole truth out loud? Who exactly was I protecting all this time? And what happens now that I’ve realized the truth is smaller and more unbearable than any of the elaborate scaffolding I built around it?
I see now that it’s never been for lack of awareness, I was writing myself into existence in handwritten journals long before I knew how to say aloud the truth of what happened, but lack of integration of the truth within the life I built. Entering into relationships where my inner world had to remain hidden, where I would be asked, “What are you thinking about?” And I’d have to make up some story because if I said what was actually on my mind, the person asking would be crushed. Not because I was withholding something intentionally to harm them, but because I didn’t know how to tell them the truth so that it would make sense enough they wouldn’t turn to hate me.
I used to believe I was protecting myself, that my silence, my editing, my restraint were forms of strength, but the longer I sit with it the more I understand that it was never me I was protecting. It was the feelings of other people. It was my mother’s fragility, the men’s reputations, the institutions that required loyalty, the version of my family that needed to look intact from the outside. Truth hurts, and I learned early that if I told it plainly someone would pay for it, so I absorbed the cost instead.
My body of work, How the Fuck Did I Get Here? alternates between my unedited journals I wrote trying to survive a life I knew was broken but I had no way of changing, autofiction chapters where I compress how my traumas compounded and exploded with real consequences as an adult and present day reflections where I write about my life now living in peace on a farm with my daughters, husband, parents, in reverence for a journey that broke me to pieces but didn’t allow them to be buried. And I share them like an addict, not really understanding why or what I’m looking for.
I sacrifice my time, my daily brainpower, my presence, to make due with the past that I still feel trapped in because the experience only exists within my nervous system and yet I have been constantly reprimanded externally without the full context that would make it all make sense. If only they knew, they wouldn’t be so angry. If only they understood, they would have more patience. If only they related, then maybe we could survive this together.
Sharing journal entries from when I was twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, and I can feel the impulse rising in me to justify why they matter, to explain why the musings of a heartbroken teenage girl deserve space in the world. I’ve always been an exhibitionist, and in fact, I wouldn’t have remembered that if it hadn’t been for words I wrote at fifteen.
I can hear the imaginary skepticism already forming, the quiet dismissal that teenage angst is indulgent, that we all wrote dramatic things in spiral notebooks and survived them, that there is nothing particularly profound about a girl who felt too much and did not know what to do with it. I catch myself trying to build a case, trying to persuade you before you have even objected.
But the journals are not arguments. They are evidence.
