The Shape of Memory
A story about meth, memory, and the moment I realized the life I came from wasn’t okay—published in The Rumpus
I’m honored to share that The Shape of Memory has been published in The Rumpus as part of their Voices on Addiction column.
Two days after this essay hit the front page of The Rumpus, my mom went into a coma after a cardiac arrest. Same thing that happened six years ago, caused by meth. Only this time, we’re hoping it wasn’t.
It’s a strange feeling when your writing finds its way into the world while your real life unravels behind the scenes.
Most of my work has centered on my mom. Her addiction, her absence, the wreckage she left behind. But this one tells the other side. This one is about Dad. The dad who stayed. The dad who cooked meth in our garage. The dad who made me feel like I was safe and loved, even while the house was burning down around us.
I wrote this piece a couple of years ago. It racked up rejection after rejection, and eventually, I tucked it away, thinking, Maybe I’ll come back to it when I’m a better writer. I never submitted it to The Rumpus. I didn’t think I was good enough.
Then they reached out to me. (What is this life?!)
, editor of the Voices on Addiction column, found me through Substack—through this post I wrote introducing my memoir. I hadn’t pitched her. I hadn’t submitted the piece. I’d convinced myself I wasn’t ready. But she saw something in it anyway.Kelly is the kind of person who sees people. She runs her own Substack,
—a place for the misfits and the ones in recovery from anything and everything. She’s a cult survivor. A truth-teller. A lighthouse.Substack has cracked something open for me. Especially since I began serializing my memoir here. Writing the hardest story of my life, one piece at a time, hasn’t just brought readers, it’s brought me community. The people who say, “Me too,” in the places you were sure no one else would understand. The ones who start to untangle their own stories while walking through yours.
To be invited as a Voice on Addiction feels surreal. And deeply sacred. This grief has lived in me my whole life. To shape it into something that might speak to someone else’s pain is the most meaningful kind of alchemy I know.
This essay is for the kids who never knew their childhood wasn’t normal until someone else said so. For the ones who loved their parent with their whole heart, even when their addiction kept breaking it. For those who clung to the story that they did the best they could because the alternative was too much to bear.
It’s for those still trying to untangle love from survival. Who were praised for being resilient, but never asked if they were okay. Who learned to shrink their needs so someone else’s chaos could take up all the air in the room.
It’s for the ones still rewriting what family means.
For all of us still unraveling the stories we were handed. Still holding the grief and the love in the same hand, and daring to call it what it is: memory.
Thank you to
and The Rumpus for seeing the light in this story. For giving it a home.
This story is one of many that once felt too heavy to hold, let alone write. But putting it on the page gave me something unexpected. It helped me breathe. It helped me move forward.
If you're carrying a story like that, one you haven’t known how to begin, I made the Fear to Flow framework for you.
It’s a body-based, emotionally supportive writing framework for the stories that live in your bones. The ones you’ve been holding onto quietly. The ones that feel too tangled to speak out loud.
Fear to Flow is not about pushing yourself into visibility before you're ready. It's about helping you feel grounded enough to begin. Through somatic support, writing prompts, and a structure that honors your pace, it creates space for your truth to take shape.
It’s not about getting it perfect.
It’s about getting it out.
Congratulations! Your writing is so powerful. Of course, it's being noticed. Thanks for sharing your story.
Thank you for this, Jessy. So connected to and grateful for your writing.