Member-only story
Chronic Illness Stole My Writer’s Brain
Years into recovery, I’m finally regaining the mental clarity I lost
I used to write with a compulsion something like mental illness or addiction — I needed to write because my body made me. I couldn’t stop myself. My body was controlled by an Otherly force, guiding my obedient hands as I typed on my laptop or scribbled in a notebook.
It started when I was a small child. I filled one spiral-bound notebook after another with stories, and then drew covers for them with crayon on printer paper I taped to the cardboard front of the book. As a teenager with access to a family computer, I typed my books into Word documents with clever names and filed them away in a digital folder titled “Sarah’s Writing”. Sometimes I would print and bind them for friends and family to read and tell me what they thought.
In my early twenties, I started writing personal essays and articles on Medium and for small magazines. For a time my writing was popular and I had many followers on Twitter who enjoyed reading my work. Being struck by an idea was like being possessed — I couldn’t stop once I started. I was sometimes late for work, missed appointments, or generally neglected household chores and other responsibilities.
