I have been telling and writing stories from a very young age. My teenage years were filled with adventures that existed only in my mind and my favourite pastime was to meet my characters and get to know them really well. When I was fifteen going sixteen I started writing a Harry Potter fanfiction that became a forty-six-chapter, eight-hundred-page book that I am very proud of. However, during the majority of the past decade, I could feel my brain too busy to write, and I never liked it.

I believe that by now it is crystal clear that Healing Arrow is not a work of fiction. Yes, I have barely translated my own name and made cheap alterations for all the others involved in my story. However, everything that has happened so far and is bound to happen within the pages to come have indeed happened to me and those are the real effects and opinions and growth they have caused me.

I decided to do that for some simple reasons that all work around the same idea. I was longing to return to writing, but my current state of depression didn’t make room for any story or character to captivate me. The years started to pass and the feeling grew ever stronger, until I realised that, if I wanted to tell anyone’s story, I would have to tell mine first.

Everything felt easy and simple and I knew I would have to gather the grit required to revisit some places my mind had been blocking me from. Although that part was never easy, it was a sacrifice I was willing to make.

And it was a huge one.

Writing Episode 7, the one when I talk about a brief yet scarring-for-life moment from the first days of my adulthood put me in a position that drove everyone in my support group insane. I had decided to write it while a group of students was sitting their final tests. That would force me to keep a calm and strict exterior, driving part of my focus to the job I was doing. It felt and was a good plan. People said it was crazy, that I knew how I was going to feel and that I should have done it at home. Well, like a Biology teacher once said, no one knows you better than you know yourself. Not being at home, not being comfortable, not being surrounded by supporting people, not being able to even look weak, that was my salvation.

I did feel awful for a few days after writing it and it was revisiting happier moments as the story progressed that made me feel better. I do remember once talking to my biggest friend in my support group that I didn’t know anymore what was my Healing Arrow, if it were the story I was telling with Oliver, or if it were the fact that I was telling it. Exposing my wounds like that made me look at them as if I were also a reader. Suddenly I was looking at my pain also with the eyes I have today, not only with the ones from within.

And probably that’s what has caused me so much trouble now.

The other thing that felt really easy about writing this story is that I felt, and still feel, totally free of writer’s block, after all, there is nothing to create; I just need to sit down and pour my heart out.

There are a few things I would like to say about me before I move on:

1. I don’t hold grudges. If you have done something so terrible to me that will force us to live our lives apart, I will just teach myself how to live this new life. I might miss you sometimes, but I won’t hold any grudges against you;

2. My favourite asset, actually the only one I like, is my intelligence. Above anything else, I like to understand things around me. However, understanding them won’t necessarily make me have an opinion about things that happen. They just happen. It’s just life, until it’s over;

3. Normally people mix those two above and think I am holding a grudge. I’m not. I’m just trying to understand it;

4. I praise honesty and fairness above anything else in life.

Another thing, not a characteristic, but a decision. I had decided that, as big as my profession was, I wouldn’t insert it in Healing Arrow. Surely, there have been and there still will be mentions every now and then, but it was my personal story, not my professional one.

Taint.

Taint is the word.

Mid-December, 2018. I had been working for seven semesters at the most bittersweet job I have ever had. On one hand no one had paid me as well as them, on the other they thought it granted them the right to play with your needs. I was called into my boss’s office and heard the following:

‘Between you or me losing their jobs, you’re younger and you can get yourself another easier than me.’

And I was fired. Five days before Christmas. The day I was supposed to get a pay check that would literally pay for my holiday. Following my country’s working laws, a fired employee gets paid ten days after the date. You can do the math.

The worst thing was having to quit my therapy after only one appointment. A couple of days ago I felt the medicine had thoroughly left my system. Now I have to find another place and another medicine and hope it works.

And that is why I haven’t been writing Healing Arrow. It all happened before the episode when Oliver and I adopted our dog and it was the enormous amount of love I feel for him that gave me strength to still write. The next one is our first Christmas together and I should have written it two days before this year’s Christmas. I just couldn’t.

I couldn’t taint the memories I have of that Christmas eve five years ago with the pain and acid realisations that shrouded last Christmas. The funny thing is that I couldn’t stop comparing those two occasions. Back in 2013 I was facing the unknown with a feeling of confidence that I should have already known only led to bad moments. This time I was left facing a lack of comprehension that struggled to form in my brains. What was the point of trying to fully understand those words if they couldn’t change anything, if I myself didn’t want to change anything and most important, if I didn’t want to change the opinions I had of those people?

There was one thing though that I was certain I wanted to change, and that is my profession. I don’t know what the future holds and I don’t know if Healing Arrow will allow me time to enter the details, but I do know I am done entering classrooms in the role of the teacher.

I know I created some myself. Let them take the classrooms now. Let them take the challenge to improve other people’s lives. I am resting the marker. But I am not resting my writing. Life will continue. Healing Arrow will continue. I just need some time to finally digest it all.