Pen to Paper: Pent-up Prose.

Covid-19 landed me in my seat - my writing seat. I put my writing hat on and started writing.

There’s nothing like living alone during a quarantine to help you bleed pain onto a “page.”

Writing became my outlet, my only solace. And just like that, I got a “like” on my first post. I had written a piece for the April 2020 Challenge, sponsored by Prose. My first piece on Prose. in two years.

Ever since I was sixteen, I’ve been searching for writing contests online. I felt like I had a voice. Like my experiences needed validity. Like my mental illness needed some kind of retelling, like no one on the planet knew what depression felt like. Or what it meant to suffer.

But let’s flash forward to 2018.

On one particular afternoon in Boston, Massachusetts, a decade after I turned sixteen, on an afternoon that hit a hundred degrees - not only sweat poured out of me, but the desire to share what I had just experienced.

It’s not worth getting into, but I had just seriously scared the members of my group therapy session. I had done something because I felt I had no voice.

Then I found Prose. My first rodeo with the website, my first stab at recognition. At recognizing myself.

While I sat on my couch that afternoon in the summer of 2018, sticking to my couch, I thought, maybe if I write about my experiences, they will be real. Someone might hear me and understand. Because isn’t that what makes it real?

Maybe while my experiences are not unique, my voice just might be.

I thought at first that, with Prose, I needed to write an expose. Something splashy. So I started with what had happened at that group therapy session. I wrote probably five hundred words, seemingly endless words, endless awkwardness and forced sentences. I didn’t have a flow and I knew that. I didn’t have the practice. I also didn’t know who I was talking to.

I felt like I was talking to a wall. No one commented on or liked my post. I didn’t go on Prose again for another two years.

Cue Covid-19.

At that time, I wasn’t sure what the Prose community was, or meant. And I simply didn’t have any content I thought was worth sharing, really: until I got a “like” on the April Challenge, I thought I was alone.

My first “like” was the first voice I heard back from the void.

My April Challenge entry wasn’t something I am particularly proud of now, but it was the start. Of Covid-19, and my relationship with myself as a writer.