23 Narrative: “An Inanimate Object”
Kara Sprabary
Instructor Laura Casey
ENG 1013.70
12 September 2021
An Inanimate Object
The year of 2020 was a rolling snowball of one traumatic event on top of another. I moved to public school, and then my life was thrown into chaos as the Coronavirus took over. Later that year, my grandfather was diagnosed with Lewy Body Dementia, and my family members became his caretakers. He then succumbed to the disease during my first week of sophomore year. By the end of the year, I was left with too much trauma to bear, but I pushed it away because there was nothing else I knew to do.
One Wednesday night in February of 2021, I sat silent in a group discussion at church. My best friends and my leader were there. However, there were also twenty other girls whose names I can hardly remember. The topics in focus were trauma, anxiety, and depression. I felt too burdened to speak; there was no way I was sharing what I had gone through with people I scarcely knew. Besides, everyone was sharing small inconveniences in their lives. I decided zoning out and nodding along was better than comparing what I considered trauma to their experiences.
But when Miranda, my leader, asked the group, “How can you process these feelings and trauma you have?” I was released from my stupor. It was an excellent question; one I had never really considered. My strategy was to forget the entire year of 2020, though I was never successful.
“It’s always good to tell someone what you’re going through.” prompted a girl whose name I didn’t know.
Nope, not going to happen, I thought.
“What if you create affirmations for yourself?” my friend Mady suggested.
Doesn’t even apply to me. I had already lost hope that there was going to be a solution for myself.
Everyone began to chat amongst themselves, an unofficial announcement that the question was sufficiently answered. Then the other leader, Kendall, said, “Something that has always helped me is writing what I feel down.” Even though only half the room was paying her any attention, I made a mental note to remember the idea for later. We then transitioned on from depressing trauma talk to discussing a random girl’s issue with a random boy.
At home that night, I closed my bedroom door and sat on my bed. I grabbed a notebook nearly full of Latin derivatives from the disorganized pile of miscellaneous items that lay beside me. I opened up to a blank page and stared. I contemplated if this idea was foolish. “What’s the harm?” I reasoned with myself, and I proceeded onward. I described how my new year started with a new school, listing every anxiety and insecurity I had felt. My pen trembled slightly as I relived my past worries.
Once I finished dumping every moment and emotion I could recall from the beginning of 2020, I reread the words carefully. I could clearly see every bad experience written down, but I focused my mind on the little patches of good I could remember also. I left behind the negative thoughts of the beginning, and I reconciled with myself. It was a dramatic shift in my life, but it wasn’t all bad. I knew that despite the difficult days and endless worries, this transition in my life had been to my benefit.
I no longer felt silly writing down everything, so I continued. I journaled my introduction to Covid-19 and the impact of being isolated from everything. My hand flew across the page fiercely, for I was full of resentment for what I had lost. The paper wasn’t able to criticize me for being negative or harsh, so I felt free to write how I felt. I described how angry I was for having missed so much of my freshman year. Then I lamented how much fear overtook me as one of the first people quarantined in March. Tears streamed down my face as I was torn between the fear and anger that I released onto the page. My mind felt raw from the outflow of everything I held back; however, I kept writing.
“I don’t want to remember this.” I thought as I proceeded to recall the summer of 2020. I tried to avoid this traumatic summer as much as possible by refusing to talk to anyone about it because I didn’t want to burden anyone. I didn’t want pity either, and most of all, I didn’t want to remember the tremendous pain it caused. I struggled with the choice to keep writing. It was painful to remember the little traumas of 2020, so it would be agonizing to relive the worst memories I had. However, I knew there would be a time I couldn’t hold it in anymore. I didn’t want to be a volcano anticipating an explosion, so I resolved to continue no matter how difficult.
I wrote down every memory of my grandfather forgetting the little things; I journaled the time he yelled at people who weren’t in the room. Not only did I record what occurred, I described the sadness and exhaustion I noticed in my mother’s eyes as she saw her father disappear. Watching my mother sacrifice so much to care for him broke me then and continued to crush me as I scribbled the words on paper.
Finally, I wrote about the worst day of my life: the day my grandfather died. My body was racked with sobs, but I was able to let the story escape my mind. I closed the notebook, and I fell asleep without the memories swarming my thoughts for the first time in a while.
I awoke the next day with a groggy mind and puffy eyes. The notebook laid beside me on the bed, radiating everything I wrote last night. I was still exhausted from dumping everything out, but I couldn’t help but feel grateful because I had finally released everything. I didn’t feel like sunshine and rainbows, but I could say I felt better. The paper was nothing but paper, an inanimate object. However, it had been a listener who could neither judge nor pity me. It was my sounding board, and I was so thankful for the writing I’d done the night before. The paper saved me from the weight I had kept to myself. It was my catharsis.