Content warning: childhood sexual abuse & trafficking.

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my creativity. I don’t do a lot of original work – Ice Dancer was my first poem in… way too long, maybe a YEAR? – I’ve only been focusing on fanworks. I do have ideas for original works! Many, in fact! But every time I sit down to write, there’s a block. I don’t really know why.

Maybe it’s that I feel like my original writing is futile.

I’ve been published before. But because I was suicidal for so long and genuinely didn’t plan on being alive for it to matter, I never really learned how to separate my fandom persona from my professional writing self. And that was a bad idea. When I started to finally heal – around the time I started using dark fiction to cope with past trauma – I realized that the people I surrounded myself with would try to ruin my career and life if they could tie me to that pen name. So I had to rebuild, and none of my previously published works could be tied to my current pen name. I had to remake everything – my author site, my itch.io, etc. Some of my favorite creations can no longer be tied to me because of this, including a piece of interactive art that means… well… just about everything to me. I had about 2k followers on those accounts; now I barely have 200. It all just feels utterly useless.

I also feel like a lot of my original work is just horribly repetitive these days. I use the same metaphors and the same pains and the same words and the same events, over and over and over again.

I’m stuck. And not just creatively.

I’m chained to these things. I’m living a time loop where I’m forced to re-experience them over and over again every day of my pitiful damn existence. I’m being buried alive and when I suffocate I’ll wake up in a television show but for me I really have run out of time!!! Or at least it feels that way. I try not to let fiction write my story for me but it is a little bit easier that way.

Even my fanworks, honestly, to a lesser extent. I find myself hyperfixated on portrayals of childhood sexual abuse in fiction, and finding ways to project my experiences with it onto characters who haven’t explicitly been through it but also have backstories that would realistically involve it. Take Caleb Mir from Star Trek: SFA for example; he’s been on his own, on the run, and in and out of prison since age six. You don’t escape that unmolested.

I find myself projecting onto him deeply. I find myself getting unhealthily attached to him. I think about this stuff way way too much. I see myself in him, even if I shouldn’t, even if my life has been paradise compared to his. Thinking about characters having the same pain I have, and overcoming it, gives me some illusion of hope’s tangibility. Illusion, delusion? I don’t know. It just makes me feel like healing can be in reach for me if I try really hard enough – like maybe if I squint really hard and believe and click my heels together I can imagine up a portal into a world where I’m not in this much agony.

I love SFA because it’s the first time I’ve seen a show with a cast of characters that I feel like would genuinely accept me as a person if they knew me. I relate to SAM so deeply; to see her accepted by everyone – loved by everyone – makes me soar. Caleb comforts fat anxious cadets (even if I have beef with Pickford now.) People are given space to deal with their traumas, given empathy. I’ve never wanted to live in a show more than this (except maybe Doom Patrol, for ficto reasons.)

But as I go deeper and deeper into escapism here, I find myself just ouroborosing my trauma. Like I just keep throwing it up and then eating the vomit and then throwing it back up and eating it again and so on and so forth, like my dog did when my dad died. The projection helps me cope, but it also keeps me trapped there, in a way.

And then I wonder if there is a key to release the trap anywhere when you’re a trafficking survivor, or if it’s sort of like how sometimes when people get shot they have to leave bullet fragments in the body because it’s too dangerous to try and remove them. You know? Like, maybe it’s just something you have to carry inside of you as you try to move forward, because going back through it would just make things worse. Maybe coping with fiction is as far as I’m going to get.

I am in therapy. I see two therapists! I do ketamine therapy twice a week. I literally have appointments 4/5 days a week. Yet here I remain, just barely hanging on, handcuffed to the pole.

Sometimes I find myself getting confused. I forget that Star Trek technology – and Star Trek peace – isn’t real. I forget that it isn’t that easy. I forget that the peace in Star Trek is just as precarious and blood-soaked as it would be in real life. But it’s easier to live somewhere I feel accepted than live in this universe where the only hobby I’m truly capable of having is retraumatizing myself.

I want to write about something else now.