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SECOND PLACE - NO ENTRY FEE DIVISION - $20 PRIZE - 2009 FFW ANNUAL ESSAY CONTEST

Scars

by Kirsty Logan

I wrote about everyone I had ever met and I did not change their names.
I wrote what I really thought about them. I wrote things I would never
say to their faces; I showed them the cruelty of the truth. I was
fearless: filling the page from the bottom of my lungs, the tips of my
toes. I wrote about how other people had eaten my heart, and the hearts
I ate in revenge. It was uncomfortable to write and even more
uncomfortable to read. It was my soft underbelly tilted up to the
light; my dark heart made into words. But it was not exactly true.

I did not write about my alcoholic father. I did not write about my
years of self-harm. I did not write about the things I hoped everyone
had forgotten.

Last month, after carrying these things with me for years, I wrote
them. I wrote about being a teenage nude model; about how I had always
been attracted to women but was scared to have sex with them; about
what that boy did to me when he thought I was asleep. And when I did,
nothing changed. The girls I'd dissected in my stories did not call me
at midnight to curse my name. The police didn't come knocking and I was
not blackmailed with my naked photos in a brown paper package. Life
tripped along as it always had.

I know I can write about anything. I know the world will not implode,
my family will not disown me; I will not end up crumpled in the gutter
with smashed bottles in my feet. But I still do not write about the
scars on my arms. I do not write about the way my father's hands shake.
These things are like the horizon: always there, but too vast to see
all at once, too much to fit onto a page.

My writing may appear fearless; I may seem shameless. But I am scared.
We are all scared – we think some things are too raw, too grubby, too
shameful to put into words. But what is the point of doing something
easy? What good is comfortable writing? Think about the most memorable
thing you ever read: was it pretty and safe, or was it intense and
exposed? Did it describe a truth you did not dare to say? We need to
thrust our hands into our guts and throw them onto the page. Writing
should be disquieting, throbbing; so honest we can hardly bear to look
at the page – and yet so true that we must look.

Go. Now. Write what hurts.
 

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