Jean Hatoum - Author

There are days when writing comes easily. There are days when I can turn pain into sentences, memories into poems, and silence into something another person can understand. Today isn't one of those days. Today, I am tired. Not the kind of tired that sleep fixes. I am exhausted in a way that makes even ordinary things feel enormous. And today, instead of hiding that exhaustion behind another poem, another essay, or another carefully constructed sentence, I want to be honest. I need help. I have spent a long time trying to keep going while living with serious mental-health difficulties. My medical documentation confirms diagnoses including Major Depressive Disorder with severe suicidal ideation, severe PTSD, and severe Panic Disorder, and notes that these conditions significantly affect my emotional well-being and ability to function on a daily basis. Since January, I was unable to work anymore, afford medications or doctor visits, or our daily needs. And my condition got wor...

There are poems we write intentionally. We know what they are about before the first word reaches the page. Then there are the other poems. The ones that seem to arrive from somewhere deeper. You write them. You read them. You put them away. And only much later do you realize: I was writing about myself. I have a few of those. Perhaps more than a few. When I wrote them, I thought I was writing about a person. A feeling. A memory. A fictional voice. Sometimes I thought I was simply trying to make something beautiful. I didn't always recognize the person hiding inside the poem. It took distance. It took time. It took becoming someone slightly different from the person who had written the words. Then I would return to the page and suddenly see myself staring back. That is one of the strange things about writing. The page can know things before we do. We think we are describing someone else, but our own fingerprints are everywhere. In the choice of a word. In the sadness we give a char...

I didn't write only about what hurt. I wrote about what I missed. For a long time, I didn't understand the difference. I thought writing about the past meant being trapped inside it. I thought that if I wanted to move forward, I had to stop looking backward. But memory doesn't work that way. Neither does grief. Neither does love. There are things we miss precisely because they mattered to us. People. Places. Possibilities. Versions of ourselves. Sometimes we miss a life we never even got to live. I wrote about those things because pretending I didn't miss them would have been another kind of dishonesty. There were things I wished had happened differently. Childhoods that should have felt safer. Moments that should have been ordinary. People who should have stayed. Versions of myself that I wonder about sometimes. I think about the person I might have become if I had not spent so much of my life learning how to survive. I don't know who that person would be. Maybe no...

 There are things I have never known how to say out loud. Not because I didn't know what they were. Because saying them aloud would have made them real in a way I wasn't always ready to face. So I wrote them down. That became my language. Before I knew how to call myself a writer, I was simply someone trying to find somewhere for his thoughts to go. The page never interrupted me. It never asked me to explain why I felt the way I did. It never looked at me with confusion when my sentences stopped making sense. It never told me that I was thinking too much. The page simply waited. And sometimes, waiting was exactly what I needed. There are things I could only say on paper because paper did not require me to be brave before I began. I could write while trembling. I could write while angry. I could write while exhausted. I could write things that I wasn't ready to say to another human being. I could admit that I was afraid. That I missed things. That I was angry about things I ...

One of the quietest lines in my book says: "Ruined rooms can still contain music." I wrote that line without realizing how much of my life was already hidden inside it. When people hear the word ruins , they often imagine abandoned buildings. Cracked walls. Broken windows. Places that once held life but have long since been forgotten. Trauma feels like that sometimes. Not because it destroys everything. Because it changes the way you walk through the rooms inside yourself. There are memories I still enter carefully. Conversations I still replay. Doors that, even years later, I still hesitate to open. For a long time, I believed healing meant rebuilding those rooms until they looked untouched. Until no one could tell they had ever been broken. I don't believe that anymore. Life has taught me something gentler. Perhaps healing is not the disappearance of the cracks. Perhaps it is learning that light still knows how to find them. When I was writing I Wrote So I Would Not Fad...

There is something about August that changes the way I listen. The air feels quieter. The light arrives more softly. Even grief seems to slow down enough for us to hear it breathing. For many people, August belongs to folklore . Not because of charts or awards. Because it became a place. A forest people entered carrying versions of themselves they rarely showed the world. Every year, when August returns, so do the memories attached to that album. The people we lost. The versions of ourselves we no longer recognize. The conversations we replay long after everyone else has forgotten them. I think that is why folklore has never felt like an album to me. It feels like remembering. When I first listened to my tears ricochet , I wasn't listening to a story about someone else. I was listening to what grief sounds like after it stops asking for permission. The song understands something that is difficult to explain. Sometimes what haunts us is not only what happened. It is what continues ...