“Dear Ashly,

Thank you for sharing this story. While opening up about traumatic life events is never required, I have found that personal essays can be a powerful tool for exploring them, with the space and time and safety that writing provides. Language choices have high stakes in this story, making the narrator’s careful analysis both darkly humorous (e.g., “the angries,” “talking nonsense with these teens”) and deeply felt.

I’m also struck by how, on a meta level, this essay engages with another linguistic aspect of mental health crises—how clinical names (e.g., severe depression, psych hospital) often fail to capture the experience, and so we speak around them, using figurative language, or code words, or silence.

In your final round of revision, I wonder if some of the poetry of the opening could be sacrificed for clarity. As a reader, I was imagining a real prison in the first sentence and a metaphorical prison in the second, until, on the 2nd page, the story’s real setting was revealed—not an actual prison, but not a metaphorical one, either. What if you started the story in the hospital, and provided the backstory through flashbacks? Just a suggestion, as there may be other ways of providing clarity.

Thank you again for sharing. I look forward to reading more of your writing.”

Grace Kearney