Sometimes, reentry is rebirth, rediscovery, reclaiming. It’s seeking out what used to make us happy, or what made us feel at peace. It’s tracing back the maze and finding the garden just as we left it, albeit weeds and vines growing over the fountain. From within the bush, small flowers wink up at you. Sometimes, our hearts know what we want before we do.
I hadn’t written in my private diary for nearly three years when I decided to pick up the pen again this summer. I had been writing since childhood, but had never taken a single creative writing class. I never went to a workshop. I didn’t enter for competitions, or prompt challenges, or scholarships. I performed a poem twice in high school my junior and senior year, and that was because the words were bursting out of my chest. In college, too, I treated my campus poetry club like a free group therapy session — sitting quietly in the back until it was my turn to speak, modernizing my words so things wouldn’t seem as bad as it was, leaving the evening feeling still unsolved, but lighter, comfortable in my anonymity. Writing wasn’t a channel for my muse. It was my medicine.
No matter what I did throughout my academic career, I always returned to stories. When I was convincing myself I wanted to do medicine, I told myself I loved listening and talking to patients, learning about their life. When I clung to public health as an “acceptable” alternative profession, I told myself I would concentrate in social and behavioral research, because I wanted to know how a group or individual’s personal circumstances contributed to the public health barriers they faced. Throughout my anthropology major, I wrote all my papers on the intersections between culture, family, identity, and mental health. The seeds were trying to grow through the concrete I’d layered in my heart.
The need to write began manifesting outside the cavity of my chest. This last summer, I published my first article on Medium. I also took on a remote internship with an indie publishing company by telling myself I had spent 20 years setting myself up for STEM only to deviate it from it, so spending 3 months to see if I liked writing wouldn’t hurt. When I heard our boss give a short lecture on the mechanics of writing during one of our meetings, I nearly cried afterwards. It was the first time I had taken anything where someone was not only telling me to write, but how to write. Writing itself was a given — a necessity. A must, even. I closed my eyes so my brain wouldn’t see the flowers in my chest, lest they kill them before they bloom.
I am now 21 years old, a rising senior in college. I have still not admitted it fully to myself, I think — that I want to pursue writing as my full-time career. The flowers run incognito inside me, sneakily looking up journalism programs, or MFA’s for graduate school. Sometimes, when I’m not looking, they grab a study-abroad-internship seed from the top shelf and pop back down underneath the ground before I can catch them. On the outside, I am stoic. Yes, I’m going to graduate school for public health. Yes, my internship at university is for healthcare, no it’s not for the school magazine. Don’t be silly. Still trying to distinguish between all these layers within myself.
Reentry is not always beautiful. It’s not always a sudden understanding, a burst of clarity, a moment of euphoria where it all clicks into place. Reentry can be gradual, painful. Sometimes, it’s digging up the stones with your bare hands. Cutting the vines and moving each heavy piece of concrete aside to reveal the soft dirt underneath. Digging up the diary you buried in the time capsule, reading old words about who you used to be. Perhaps who you’ve been all along.
Dear little me, I write. I hear you. I see you. I’m coming, just wait for me. Just a little while longer.
