Writing as Survival

"You are quite active on LinkedIn," a senior staff member said to me once. The way it was said made clear it was not a compliment. I answered: almost as active as on your floor.

I have been writing since I was ten.

It started with stories about witches and heroines, written for school assignments that asked for something safe and small. I did not write safe and small. I wrote women who had power. Women who took up space. I did not have the language then for why I needed them to exist. I just knew that the stories I was being handed did not contain anyone who looked like me, lived like me, came from what I came from. So I made them myself.

Then life happened. Not a life I chose.

A working-class life means you inherit things no one lists on a curriculum. You inherit exhaustion as a baseline. You inherit the knowledge that your body is an instrument of someone else's economy. You inherit religion that tells you your suffering is purposeful, which is a very efficient way of making sure you do not ask who benefits from your silence. You inherit trauma that has no name in your household because naming it would require time and safety, and both of those were scarce.

I kept writing. I did not call it poetry. I did not call it anything. To call it something would have meant claiming a status I had not been granted. Writers had degrees. Writers had rooms of their own. Writers had afternoons. I had breaks between washing dishes in a care home, and I had the meal cards coming back from elderly residents, and I had napkins, and I used all of them.

I wrote because I was afraid of disappearing.

Not in a dramatic sense. In a very ordinary sense. The ordinary disappearance of a working-class girl with a brain that worked differently than expected, with a body carrying more than it should, with a history that institutions do not know how to hold and so quietly set aside. I understood very early that if I did not write it down, it would be as if it had not happened. That the world had a way of smoothing over lives like mine. Of absorbing them into statistics or silence.

So I wrote to leave a record. To prove I was here. To prove that what happened to me was real, even when the people and structures around me found it more convenient to suggest otherwise.

Language was never handed to me. It was not offered in the schools that were not built for how my mind worked, or in the institutions I could not afford, or in the literary world that mistakes a certain kind of education for intelligence and a certain kind of accent for authority. I took language anyway. I took it in the margins of a working life, on the back of things that were being thrown away, in the minutes between one form of labor and another.

I have a neurodivergent brain. I carry acquired brain injury. I know chronic stress not as a concept but as a state my body learned to function inside of. These are not disclaimers. They are part of the same education. They taught me things about endurance and perception and the gap between how things are presented and how they actually feel that no seminar has ever replicated.

Writing did not save me in the way that phrase usually means. It did not lift me out of anything. The factory floors were still there. The religion was still there. The institutions that did not want me were still there. Writing did not remove a single obstacle.

What it did was keep me continuous. It made sure that the person who went through something remained connected to the person who came out the other side. It was the thread. When everything else was trying to fragment me, to reduce me to a function or a problem or a statistic, writing insisted on a self that persisted. That noticed. That refused to let experience dissolve into mere endurance.

I still write. I founded a publishing house called Sunday Mornings at the River because I eventually understood that waiting for institutional permission is a way of letting institutions decide whose experience deserves to exist in the world. I was not willing to keep waiting. I published my own work and the work of others who had been told, in various explicit and implicit ways, that the door did not open for them.

The door does not open from the outside. I stopped knocking.

I write essays and poems. I write on my phone at 4am after a night shift. I write in the notes app while waiting for the tram. I write because the alternative is to let the version of events that powerful people prefer become the only version that survives.

That is what writing as survival means to me. Not that it kept me alive, though sometimes it did that too. But that it kept the record intact. That it refused erasure. That somewhere in all the napkins and meal cards and margins and notes apps there is an account of a life that was real, that was mine, that no institution validated and no institution can take away.

I was here. I wrote it down.