Writing saved my life

Growing up I didn’t have a voice. By my early teens I showed little emotion except anger, because inside I felt broken. For a long time, never being able to verbalise what I was going through, I used self-harm as a way to release the intense emotions I held deep inside.

At about twelve or thirteen years old, I remember being at one of my lowest points. One night, at home alone, I was sitting in my room stoned and bleeding out after a self-harming session. In a daze from the weed and possibly the blood loss, I glanced over for my spliff in the ashtray and noticed a blue biro within all the clutter and cannabis paraphernalia. I don’t know where the thought came from, but an inner voice told me to pick up the pen and find a scrap of paper…

It was mad, I literally can’t explain what gave me the idea to write that night – I wasn’t one for school and had already been kicked out of mainstream education by then – but nevertheless, I went with the thought and just started writing down the words that I was feeling at that moment… To my surprise it felt good, really good. It was another form of release!

So, this new writing thing became part of my self-harming ritual. After I would cut, I would write… I started off jotting down angry words, until eventually I began structuring poems. My poetry was pretty dark; the content varied from childhood trauma, the criminal activities I was involved in with my gang at the time, and drug taking. Yeah, I wrote a lot of poems about how I loved to get high. Years later, many of my party drug poems were peppered with humour and were a lot lighter in tone.

Anyway, writing those poems gave me a sense of empowerment, ownership over the things that had happened to me, and counterbalanced my self-loathing. It got to the point where I would come home after several nights out and the first thing I would do was lock myself away in my room and pick up my pen and pad and write. I’d even postpone cutting some nights because my desire to get words on the page became so strong.

At around fifteen I was done with men, my life experiences had shown me that, other than my Dad, no other man could be trusted! In my eyes, older men were creepy predators, and boys in their teens and twenties were violent potential rapists. I obviously do not feel like that today and have many wonderful male friends and family members in my life, but as I say, back then I was damaged and, to me, men weren’t shit!

This could possibly explain why I began to turn my attention to girls. Did my loathing for men turn me gay? Who knows? My wife believes people are born gay; I’m not so sure and question whether my early experiences moulded my sexuality. I always fancied girls even before I understood what that meant, so maybe I would’ve been bi? God knows! Regardless, I’m a fully-fledged lesbian these days and wave the flag with pride!

Before I was proud, I was ashamed. My mum is Jamaican and I knew back then she didn’t agree with homosexuality. Plus, the girls that I rolled with at the time were quite homophobic. I thought it best not to share the same-sex feelings I had, at least not until I understood what those feelings meant myself… So I wrote them down.

Poems and short stories, just for me. Poems about girls I’d seen, and maybe taken a liking to. Stories about happy lesbian characters I’d make up, living proud and in love… Those stories helped me feel hopeful and transported me to a happy place when I read them back. If my memory serves me correctly, this is the first time I began to think of plot and creating other characters in different worlds from my own.

Fast forward, seventeen years old and I finally came out in my world! It was a major turning point in my young life. As expected, my mum wasn’t overly impressed and many of the girls I hung around with didn’t take the news well, but by then I couldn’t care less. Ultimately, I distanced myself from the road life and entered the black London gay scene, and my god, ha! Those were some of the happiest years of my young gay life.

But no matter how much I had fallen in love with my new life, I couldn’t stop my other, negative vices, and not only did I find worse, more harmful ones, I fully committed myself for the next couple of years to a downward spiral. I won’t go into detailing the depravity of where my addictions took me, but I will say that through it all the only place I found solace was in my writing. Over time it became my therapy!

Fast forward again to twenty-one and I was fortunate enough to get a place in a rehab in the countryside. I moved away from London for the first time in my life and took steps to change… Ultimately, I grew up. I made it through the darkness and got my shit together, resulting in my re-educating myself as a mature student, enrolling in college and, years later, university.

Side note, I was diagnosed with dyslexia in my second year of university, which finally made my difficult early school years make sense to me. Nevertheless, I completed my degree with first-class honours – I’ve added that little nugget in because I’m super proud. Also, if someone like me can do it, anyone can!

Basically, I evolved, just like my writing – from poems to short stories, to character-driven monologues, plays and now, today, writing for film and TV, which I love and feel blessed to do as a job. I am grateful for my life experiences, good and bad, because they have given me a depth of emotional experience that I can put into the characters I create. In the past I wrote to escape; today I write because telling stories and being able to express human experience in words gives me a sense of purpose.

Isis Davis

Isis Davis is an actress and writer.