I Wrote Through Pain to tell a Story that would Empower my Children

October 18, 2022 | By Women Writers Women Books | Reply More

“I wrote through pain to tell a story that would empower my children”

I had a secret—a dark truth tucked deep in my brain that I held on to for years. Twenty, in fact. The secret was this: I was sexually assaulted as a young woman, and subsequently diagnosed with PTSD and bipolar.

These are all areas of taboo in our society. I encountered fear of engaging with a bipolar or mentally ill person through conversations with others, and that fear made me tuck my secret that much more deeply away, safe from discovery. The victim blaming I heard all too often in conversation engulfed me in shame and guilt over having been a sexual assault victim myself. I contemplated my place in a world that seemed to be so unforgiving of my sins. How could I have the audacity to be assaulted and to have a mental illness?

I was trapped in this locus for years. But several years ago, as my children began to grow older and witness the effects of my trauma and bipolar, I made a decision to be more transparent with them. I began to explain my episodes, acknowledge how it affected them, and assure them that we would get through it all together, as a family. My oldest daughter, then six, offered me comfort: “Don’t worry, Mommy, the episode will pass and we can play again.” My tears welled up at her empathy, but I worried about what would happen if someone outside our home found out. Would I be seen as an unfit mother? Would I be cast as a pariah? Could someone take my children away?

It was then that I realized how much I had bought into the stigma surrounding mental health—how afraid I was of what people might say. A rage simmered to a boil as I thought of the nightmare that had held me captive for the last twenty years. I looked into my daughters’ eyes and realized I had to do right by them, had to model a healthy way to be a young woman in the world for them. In that moment, I was done with my silence. I was done with the chains that bogged me down. My daughters saw me as a wonderful mother, the strongest woman they knew, who just happened to also be struggling with an illness—and that was who I was, free of the whispers that had muzzled me for all those years. I could no longer be a shell of a woman hiding in fear, shame, and guilt. My daughters would see a woman liberated by truth.

I decided to document the pain and horrors I lived through in reclaiming my life. I started writing my memoir.

Celtic music in my ears, I wrote the chapters as the memories came to me. The hardest ones hit the pages first. In a rage, I wrote about the heinous act committed against my body, my sense of self. All the thoughts, smells, sounds, feelings on my skin, and textures I had touched came to mind—and just like that, without invitation, I was enveloped in depression. An episode I had knowingly triggered by digging at a decaying wound and bringing the sting to my core. I had to take a step back from the writing.

I cursed myself for being unable to function like “normal” people. My pillow was drenched in tears of defeat and disappointment in myself. I was feeling all the guilt and shame from being sexually assaulted, blaming myself again. Luckily, my therapist was there to help me redirect my thoughts. She reminded me that I was drawing a limit for myself, and that it was acceptable and even recommended that I remove myself from the trauma when it was overwhelming. Most of all, she reminded me that these episodes generally end. I tried to hold on to her words that I was doing the right thing as I holed myself up for a few days.

It didn’t take long for hypomania to take over and catapult me into prolific creativity. The words poured from my mind to the screen; my thoughts expanded in my mind like a growing tree. I wrote descriptively, to a tee, about my bipolar episodes, capturing what I was going through in that minute and recounting how it had been in the past. I didn’t sleep for days; I just wrote and wrote and wrote, believing I had more in me, more in me, more . . . until I triggered another episode of depression and withdrew once again.

I yo-yoed in this way throughout the writing of my entire first draft. When it was done, I sought out a writing coach, believing I had a manuscript ready for editing. Together, we redrafted and reorganized. This meant revisiting the horrendous and difficult chapters. The second time around, the effect on me seemed to be softer; though it still sent me back and forth between depression and hypomania, the peaks and troughs were less intense.

Still, the subsequent editing and copyediting and proofreading and proofreading and proofreading was a repeated jab in the gut. Whenever I read my own account of being defiled by a stranger, my stomach churned, my hair stood on end, and cold sweat drenched my shirt. Yet as I processed my trauma on the page and with my therapist simultaneously, I found lucidity regarding what had happened and even started to believe that there was nothing I could have done to deserve being raped. I hadn’t made peace with the violation, but I was finding more and more clarity as I adjusted and changed and refined the words to describe my assault in my memoir.

As my coach and I worked to shape my narrative, my focus shifted from pure storytelling to writing with a formulated purpose. I wanted others with bipolar to feel less alone and I wanted those living with loved ones going through the things I’d been through to understand the challenges and intricacies of the disorder and gain empathy for their loved ones. I found purpose in my work. I toiled through the bipolar episodes because I was empowered realizing that my work would be a part of greater conversations about normalizing mental health issues and working toward dismantling rape culture. The descriptive prose and reflections now mirrored my growth.

What began as a recounting of events dragged into it the emotions to process. Healing was imperative on those pages. Stigma blown away in my declaration. It wasn’t in the horizon when I started to grow this mission beyond self-healing and modeling for my children. Could there ever be suture to wounds decayed? Could there be meaning of the resilience in my conviction? The answer is in every page I have written, every prose, punctuation, euphemism. They are there, witness to my growth and presence feet stomping the same ground as the words fly finding purpose. In that way, writing my memoir led me to a larger calling—to a mission that extended beyond me and my family.

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Amelia Zachry was born and raised in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. After graduating from Curtin University with a degree in marketing, she worked in public relations and marketing until she met her American husband, Daniel, when he was traveling through Malaysia. Since then, they have lived together in Japan, Canada (where Amelia obtained a second degree in human ecology from the University of Western Ontario), and Kentucky, and had two daughters together. Now a full-time writer, Amelia is also an advocate for sexual assault survivors and those who suffer from mental illness. She was recently published on HuffPost and Moms Don’t Have Time to Write, and blogs weekly at https://ameliazachry.com.

Enough: A Memoir of Mistakes, Mania, and Motherhood

A bicultural child of a Malay mother and an Indian father, Amelia Zachry was different from the get-go, never quite fitting in. In this raw, inspiring memoir, she chronicles the long, winding journey that brought her from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Kentucky, USA—the place she and her family now call home.

Amelia was nineteen years old, her future wide open, when a fellow student from her Kuala Lumpur university sexually assaulted her. After that night, she felt sullied—and convinced that what had happened was her fault. In the months and years that followed, she spiraled, first into isolation and then into promiscuity, as she attempted to try to take back some of the power that had been stripped from her that night. Eventually, she met the man who would become her husband and greatest advocate, Daniel, and began to emerge from that dark place—but even he couldn’t fight her demons for her. In her late twenties, Amelia was diagnosed with PTSD and bipolar II disorder, both of which would go on to shape her adult life as an individual, a wife, and a mother.

A memoir of trauma and healing, mental illness and resilience, culture shock and new beginnings, devastation and triumph, Enough is one woman’s story of learning to make peace with the fact that things are as they should be, even if she sometimes wishes they were different—and of discovering that however far away it may seem, there is always a light at the end of the tunnel.

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