Prompt Expansions

01. My process for my first draft was incredibly slapdash, and I’m not proud of the product that came from it – so I scrapped it entirely and started over. I worked on my bed as I often do, which I’ve been meaning to stop doing. It’s hard to focus when I’m somewhere super cozy, and I often fail to resist the urge to just lie down. I worked on it in short bursts, as I had trouble consistently thinking of what to write next. I’d put something down, second guess myself, delete it, and repeat. It defeated the purpose of a shitty first draft, and I need to learn to just let things be bad before they’re good.

02. Writing did not come easy to me for this draft. This is mostly because I picked topics that are hard for me to write about; it’s a struggle to write about my struggles with writing. Who knew! I overcame the challenges I faced by just continuing to write and rewrite, but also by taking frequent breaks. Thinking too hard about my topics made my head hurt, so distance from the project was necessary on occasion.

03. To be honest, I didn’t find it enjoyable to write. I’m more of a fiction writer, and while I find narrative writing fun, I don’t tend to write about myself. I just don’t find myself to be a very interesting subject! If I write about myself in my free time for introspection purposes, it’s usually through the lens of a fictional character I relate to to provide a layer of abstraction, or a buffer of sorts. I obviously can’t do that for an assignment, so it was less enjoyable.

04. I only had two ideas, and they were both very similar. I was originally going to write about my struggles with writing due to brain fog and cognitive decline caused by physical illness, but it ended up shifting to my struggles of writing due to my dissociative disorder. This is mostly because it’s easier to explain my dissociative symptoms, and writing about it was less of a headache than my first topic choice.

Personal Narrative Final Draft

Can anyone ever be truly sure of what they know? Language, reasoning, and memory are things most take for granted — believed to be something we will always possess. They feel inherent, a set of skills that, once honed, will be ever-present in our lives. After all, who loses control of these faculties unless something is very wrong?

Something was very wrong with me.

I barely even knew it.

The human brain, especially that of a child, is remarkably resilient. It will do just about anything to survive. The situation I was in was unbearable and inescapable, leaving my mind grasping at straws to cope. My still-pliant mind fractured, compartmentalizing my experiences until I was completely unaware of most of my life. I don't have any solid memories before the age of 17.

My mind did a decent job of filling in the blanks — I didn't know there were things I didn't know. The sinkholes were paved over, unaddressed, yet growing ever wider beneath the surface. The cover would only last so long. A reckoning was surely incoming.

In late 2022, I was in college for the first time. I was struggling badly, but I couldn't quite pinpoint why. I was 18 years old, meant to be in my mental prime; why couldn't I just think? Why was I spiraling? Why was I waking up in strange places, unable to remember the previous days or weeks? The people around me were noticing my behavior and were put off by it.

"Are you finally acting like yourself again, Will?" my roommate asked one day, after I awoke from a particularly long bout of time loss. I didn't know what he meant. I couldn't tell who "myself" even was. All I knew was that I was afraid.

I was eventually hospitalized out of fear for my safety, which I saw as a great injustice at the time. In retrospect, it was the best thing anyone could have done for me. I was diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder, and my world came crashing down around me. Knowing what was happening was both a victory and a defeat — I could move forward and heal, but I couldn't continue to ignore the issue and pretend everything was alright. They say ignorance is bliss, but ignorance is often violence. I still can't tell if I'd rather not know.

The extreme compartmentalization my condition entails leads to a rocky relationship with writing and literacy. There are parts of me with no access to the knowledge I have, who can't write at the level that's expected of me — or can't even write at all. My ability to express myself and convey my points is often at the whim of my circumstances and what my brain decides is necessary. It's maddening, needing to be consistent with my work but having it just out of reach. I can’t even guarantee that it will be “me” showing up to class.

Success and failure can look vastly different for me depending on the day and which part of me is fronting (“fronting” being a colloquial term for a dissociated part being conscious or present). I’ve had to redefine success for myself, if only to keep myself going on my worst days – having something to be proud of can be a powerful motivator. Some days my successes look typical and I achieve things similar to my peers, but some days my biggest successes are along the lines of “not getting lost on the way to class”, “remembering that I need to eat”, or even just “recognizing that I’m not Will and it’s okay to not live up to his standard of functioning today”.