Running Away from My Broken Self by Getting Married

 When I graduated from City Polytechnic with an upper‑second degree, my paintings carried me over the finish line. My dissertation nearly sank me, but I left with a degree and the hope of a future. Instead, I returned home, signed on the dole, and became housebound. The cottage was ablaze with rows, Dad was unwell again, and months of painting for a local exhibition left me exhausted and blocked. Something inside me snapped.

The catalyst was a slighting remark over my life plans, but the real cause had been building for years. That night, when I went to bed, I shivered. I shivered and shivered. I pulled the covers over myself and felt my personality disintegrate. I fell into a black chasm. The black‑blame surged like a vortex, dragging me back to childhood: intrusive thoughts, terror of the dark, the feeling of being swallowed by something nameless.

I spurned the characters of my stories that had lived inside me for years, how real they seemed, more so than people in my life. My novel felt laughable, stupid. My degree felt worthless. I imagined everyone seeing me as a pathetic sad‑case stuck at home with letters after my name. How laughable. The disintegration frightened me so much I couldn’t sleep. I prayed — despite no longer being an active Christian. I lay awake all night.

Climactic scene in my novel The Lessons when a psychopath assaults Aidan

For a few seconds, I had lost my identity. The black feeling punched a hole straight through my life, just as it had done many times before.

How to Become Someone Else

I got up early. I scrambled out of that bottomless pit and made a decision: I would become someone else, anyone but me. I would leave the cottage, leave the shaky foundations of my childhood, leave the fear of becoming a nobody, and start again.

I contacted Mark, an old boyfriend from college. He had once been infatuated with me, and I knew — subconsciously — that he would take me back. During our courtship, the cottage had sunk into shabbiness: threadbare carpets, stale furnishings. Mum’s lack of sentiment had turned the place rotten.

Worse, she had taken in Steve, a young ex‑con using an alias to hide his prison record. He had free reign of the house and Dad’s car, driving without a licence. Mum saw herself as his reformer. When Steve returned to prison, she grew woeful and took him back a year later.

I didn’t understand her. What about her grandchildren, toddlers who visited the cottage? What about Dad’s stolen tools, the shady characters Steve brought home, the men who pitched tents in the garden for weeks? My relationship with Mum sank to new depths. I visited Nan (her mother) instead, at her sheltered housing complex. Her death in May 1987 devastated me to the core.

My longing for Mum — the old Mum — never stopped. But neither did the black‑blame. Leaving home seemed the only choice I could see to emotionally survive.

Getting Marriage to Escape the Past

Mark was the first person outside my family that I felt I could be myself with, but our relationship had problems. I moved into a grotty bedsit and proposed to him on our first holiday together. My motive was simple: escape. To escape myself. A wedding ring meant I was no longer a single twenty‑something consumed by the cottage. It meant I was “unavailable,” protected from flirty men at pubs, the Post Office where I briefly worked, and the persistent weirdo near my bedsit. No one would notice the “thing” I carried.

Our wedding day was wet and cloudy. The reception was held in a club next to a fairground. Guests went on rides; I couldn’t in my dress. Secretly, I wanted my secret fantasy world to materialise, and one of my characters, Aidan to take me on the dodgems where my wedding dress would get wet in the rain.

My fantasy world hijacked my wedding day: railway bridges, derelict houses, woods, psychopaths, Aidan. The day before, I had stuffed my unfinished novel (I had called The Lessons) draft into the attic space of my bedsit.

My secret identities and the black‑blame has followed me into marriage. I hadn’t escaped myself at all.

Unrealised Flashbacks from Complex PTSD

My compulsion to write took a toll on married life. I spent hours in the flat trying to eke out sentences for The Lessons while Mark went drinking. The storyline burned in my head, but nothing transmitted to paper. I wrote and rewrote scenes until my pencils wore to nibs. When Mark returned home, I had to hide my work. I feared fire, flood, burglary — anything that might destroy my manuscript. I felt paranoid, delusional.

During my marriage, I suffered some of the worst intrusive thoughts of my life. Horrific images tore through my head: a fleshy stalactite lodged down a victim’s throat; an alien lifeform feeding from human stomachs; a girl in a rockpool repeatedly gouged by a jagged protrusion. These visions bore no relation to my life. What do they mean? I shook them off again and again, unable to speak of them to anyone.

I buried myself in my secret world, my novel. I took casual jobs so I could write. I consumed typewriter ribbons and reams of paper. I planned my time so no one would catch me writing. My obsession blinded me to the driving force.

Lost Innocence at a Young Age

By 1988, I got stuck on a scene in my novel. Aidan, the main character and my imaginary boyfriend, finally yields to the psychopath and seeks shelter in the derelict house. His teacher, Laura, tries to get him out, but he insists he belongs there. In the climax, the psychopath tells Aidan: “You have lost your innocence too long ago to chase after it, pal.”

Lost your innocence? What did that mean?

I tried crime, betrayal, family feud — nothing fit. One day, Mark found my jottings under the armchair. Mortified, I laughed it off as a failed short story. He never knew about my novel. He knew nothing about Aidan. For thirty years, I didn’t know the driving force behind my writing.

But long ago, I had ‘lost my innocence’. I have lost it too long ago to go chase after it. The fleshy stalactite of my intrusive thoughts symbolises the reason my innocence has been destroyed. In toddlerhood.

Other Articles about my Writing Episodes

How my childhood trauma split my psyche in two
How my writing turned ugly in my teens
How a man in my head took over my inner life

Key Articles

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My true story about my parasitical novel, The Lessons. Click to buy.