Write About a Version of Yourself That No Longer Exists

Julia Fox's ROSEBUDS WRITING PROMPT #1

“This topic feels vulnerable. Nobody wants to talk about the journey, only the destination. We want to skip to the triumphant ending, the moment where we wave our flag and announce that we survived ourselves! But most transformations don’t feel triumphant while they’re happening.”

I was working on an entirely different topic, then I came across this piece by ROSEBUDS READING COLLECTIVE, written by Julia Fox. The prompt: write about a version of yourself that no longer exists.

The collective is Fox’s newest project: A nonprofit that brings book clubs and writer’s workshops to incarcerated women in NYC. In her piece, she talks about the stark reality of no longer being a “celebrity.” Whether that is entirely true or not, it’s more about whether she’s interested in bothering to maintain it. It seems she isn’t (good for her).

With that, comes a new, far more meaningful venture. One that, with a single prompt, immediately got my wheels turning: write about a version of yourself that no longer exists. Though we are both mothers who are close in age, her story is, not surprisingly, nothing like mine. Yet we are both bending toward the same conclusion.

Abolition is something I think about a lot now, though it’s a word I probably didn’t know before I became a mother in 2017. Of course I believe in it, but when I get really honest, I wonder how it truly squares with my current worldview. A world where men – sometimes of the highest power – are allowed to brazenly harm women and children. And why not? We live in a world where violence penetrates the very foundation of our system: the underlying threat of capitalism is, after all, “or else.” Where is justice in this?

When I saw that article pop up on my feed, read Fox’s prompt response and saw what she is building, I felt something deeply resonate about her (and her partner’s) mission. At the risk of sounding like someone much younger, more naive and horribly cliched as a writer, I saw that the version of me that no longer exists is the one that didn’t understand we are all in a prison.

That realization truly hit me after having a panic attack so intense I thought I might die. Or maybe I wanted to die. No, I just didn’t want the world to be this. I had just seen my first graphic image of dead children in Gaza. It took my body about ten minutes to register that what I had seen is real – real, beautiful, innocent children – burned to a crisp and wrapped in kafan. I spent the weekend unable to sleep, in what I thought might be a psychotic break, praying that I could speak to my therapist on Monday morning. Surely she would have some answers. But all she had for me was a meditation and a suggestion to go for a walk, though her calming and gentle presence did help.

Truth is, this world isn’t built for anyone who is willing to see it for what it is. I have never spoken about this before, in fact, I have never written or said these words aloud, but here goes. My dad killed himself. I’ll save you, dear reader, the details, but it was complicated, long and drawn out. It happened, kind of, when I was in high school. It defined me as the kind of person who spent her 20s in denial, leaning into the systems of abuse that define our world. But as I become this new person, this person who sees what atrocity we allow as commonplace in our lives, I begin to understand him more.

He was the kind of person who would take the shirt off his back to help someone. Sometimes he was embarrassing. He would tell strangers in the mall the story of his beloved 19-year-old dog shitting in the corner as a sign that the time for euthanasia had come… Mind you, nearly in tears each time. I would smolder in shame as a teenager. He also loved me in a way that I now understand again because it is how I love my own children: innately, obsessively, fiercely. He was flawed, of course. Very flawed. But I think he ultimately couldn’t survive this world. Yes, maybe his whiteness and his maleness caused him to draw the wrong conclusions sometimes, but I also think he sensed something was deeply incongruent about our reality.

The world may have given him a few privileged handouts, but ultimately it struck down upon him pretty hard, too. It’s a hard pill to swallow, to think about being an eight-years-old, watching the cops destroy our Vancouver special over a couple marijuana plans in the basement – only to now have every other store be a weed shop in 2026. He had his ways of coping, and they were, I suppose, counter-cultural. I designed mine to align with every system that made me measure myself against an impossible metric.

That’s the person I was, who I can no longer be again. When I have conversations with friends about new cars, or pricey but sensible rugs, or vacations, I feel like I’m cosplaying. I’m cosplaying the kind of person for whom these material things, measured up against the immense global toll they require and the suffering they rely on, could bring meaning. It’s hard to feel whole in this world.

Mercifully, that’s not entirely true. Tonight I took my children to a bonafide Hollywood film about talking sheep detectives, which for a long time I couldn’t have even stomached, and we laughed. What an absolute joy to hear my child say “I thought evaporation caused clouds” when the storyline insisted sheep make rain happen. Good god, don’t we all deserve to retreat away from this horrible reality into art?