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...

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 ...

There are two versions of me. The one people met. And the one who learned, very early in life, that survival sometimes means becoming someone else. No child should have to learn how to disappear while remaining visible. Yet that was the lesson I carried for years. I became quiet because speaking felt dangerous. I became observant because noticing every change in a room sometimes meant protecting myself before anyone else realized something was wrong. I learned how to smile when I wanted to cry, how to answer "I'm fine" without believing it, and how to continue moving through ordinary days while carrying extraordinary pain. People often call these strengths. Resilience. Composure. Maturity beyond one's years. I understand why they say those things. From the outside, survival can look admirable. From the inside, it often feels exhausting. There is a difference between living and surviving. Living allows you to imagine tomorrow. Survivin...

 I started asking for help in July 2025. I had already spent years carrying things I had never properly spoken about. Experiences that began when I was three years old. Sexual abuse. Sexual harassment. Sexual assault. Domestic violence. Trauma that stayed inside me long after the moments themselves had ended. For years, I kept quiet. I became very good at pretending. I learned how to continue functioning while carrying things that were slowly destroying me. I learned how to smile, work, answer people, and behave as though I was still a normal person moving through a normal life. But eventually, I could no longer pretend that I was managing. So, I asked for help. When I first began reaching out to people and organizations, I genuinely believed someone would respond. I did not expect the world to save me. I was not asking for someone to magically erase my past or fix my life. I thought someone might simply give me the chance to be heard. Maybe someone would read what ...