About Me — Scarlett Jess Perrodin

I am everything that my pen name allows me to be

Though introducing myself under a nom de plume feels awkward at best and deceptive at worst, I can confidently say that my written work is more honest than what comes out of my mouth in person.

Scarlett Jess Perrodin is not my real name, but it holds great meaning to me.

I have spent much of my life uncertain of who I am, existing as an anxious energy, confused by traumas, struggling to be authentic, and lacking the freedom to express any of this.

Writing has given me that chance.

Scarlett Jess Perrodin is my voice after being silenced for years. She allows me to write safely, with reckless abandon. She is not so much my alter ego as she is my central, candid identity.

My writing is focused on mental health, healing from traumas, and self-discovery.

It is often therapeutic, which can be painful. When I write personal essays, it is a deep tissue massage that digs at my nerves, making me gasp for air at first but then brings relief when I release my work. Because that is when I feel like my experiences no longer own me.

With the power of writing, I can own my experiences, with descriptions that make sense of nonsense and explain the unexplainable.

With writing, I can detail a way out from where I lost myself. Each word is another step out of the pit.

Although I would be content to write all of this on paper and toss it into a fire, I value the possibility that someone else out there may relate and benefit from my stories. This compels me to throw these pieces out onto the table into full view, instead of into a flame.

In my past, I never felt like I had a voice. I felt trapped, muted, silenced. Being heard, at least by myself, has given me an invaluable freedom.

I am grateful to be heard, even if it is only by a single reader, such as yourself. I hope readers can tread on my words to get to higher ground.

I have always been a writer and storyteller.

At my earliest memories, I was a pastor’s daughter in a cultish, evangelical church, prompted to act like a prophet at age 5. To keep up with the magical beliefs with this assigned role, I elaborated the most beautiful stories of visions of angels and attempted to predict the future. My narratives were exquisite.

In my little pink journal at age 7, my lumpy handwriting expressed big thoughts on family and religion. I composed lyrics to sing while riding my bike.

It was raw, it was passionate. I was already a writer.

Later on when my mother abandoned me as a young teen girl after my enmeshed family disintegrated, I wrote feverishly in numerous journals. It kept me in company (of my own) when I found myself fully alone.

I had no answers, and all the feelings. My pages painted them all.

In a reputable high school, I began failing out of history and math. My father was perplexed that I became his only child to nearly flunk out. What happened to that 4.0?

My history teacher intervened to salvage my high school career. She was the first person to ever ask me what was happening in my life. Her dark authoritative eyes softened with squishy tears when I said, and minimized, that my mother recently left us. I didn’t have time to study when I was busy with laundry, cooking dinner, giving my sister rides to track meets and myself to dance class, then trying to write my way through my grief late at night.

Despite my near failures, I simultaneously excelled in English, never losing the prestige of being an English Honors student. I was complimented on my essays and published by my school’s almanac.

My fervor for writing began rising when everything else began falling apart.

When I sat down to write, I felt like I could function, I could think, and I could control something. And so that passion became central to who I am.

With anxiety, writing was my only comfortable method of communication, giving me tools to be clear and powerful when in person I felt incapable.

My journals were as thick as novels. Scattered throughout the pages I sketched pictures, mainly illustrations of trees because only in my private world of writing did I feel rooted and strong.

By age 18, I became tangled in a psychotic, abusive relationship. After I escaped a decade later, I was overwhelmed to realize my relationship was terribly sick, wrecking me with septic shock. Any time I opened those journals, I was horrified to see that his gaslighting, brainwashing phrases had been stuck on repeat. It infuriated me that my thoughts were exclusively reduced to reciting the thoughts of my abusive ex. I could hardly find traces of the real me in there.

So I burned them all to a crisp.

Only now as a mental health writer do I wish to peek at those pages that scream of abuse and Stockholm Syndrome to use it as the study of a brainwashed woman. Yet those memories are stored vividly enough, without proof in old memoirs.

The experiences that resurface are more than enough material than I know what to do with.

In my “real” life, I am a wife, a mother, and a healthcare worker with an advanced practice degree. I am the daughter of an ex-pastor and the daughter of an absent mother who calls herself a gypsy. I am a survivor of a decade of domestic abuse with a severely mentally ill man whom I trusted. He controlled my every step, and even my career by choosing the medical field for me. I sweat and studied my way through multiple degrees to make a secure life for myself, though my path was prompted by a monstrous mind.

I know now that I am not just a healthcare professional.

Who I am is more in line with being a writer, and I am more than a career choice.

I am many things. A creative, spirited energy. A passionate dancer, an emotional painter, a steady runner, a musician who plays hammer dulcimer, a harmonious singer, a covert comedian, and a deeply honest pen-named writer.

In my daily career, I compassionately manage patients with new cancer diagnoses, defining plans and hope for each individual, empowering them with every bit of knowledge I can offer.

My greatest error is that I have never directed this confident, nurturing woman internally, towards my own life.

I was diagnosed with complex-PTSD and anxiety. No medical degree or analytical thinking has enabled me to treat or reverse these conditions. My avenue to help myself has been a creative journey through writing.

Acting the role of a perfect professional was not authentically and fully who I am, in my own skin. I needed to find a way back to my authentic core.

So I set aside my makeup and lab coat, slipped into my nom de plume, and began pounding at my keyboard.

Choosing a pen name was not just for safety and freedom as a writer, but also because it represents my story.

My mother vanished from my life because of untreated mental illness, and being motherless deeply affected me. As I became an adult, I wanted the chance to become a mother, and I did, to three boys.

Though they warmed my heart, I felt sad I would never have a daughter. I mistakenly thought that if I had my own daughter, my “mother wound” could be healed in caring for her in healthy ways, in the ways I needed. But life didn’t give me a daughter. That finality came when my uterus was removed because it grew a massive tumor a year ago.

Suddenly I felt empty, not because I was missing an organ, but because I thought she was my missing puzzle piece. Yet in my therapeutic work to heal my mother wound, I learned that my inner child is the daughter that I won’t ever have, and I must mother her as I will always be void of my own.

The little girl I dreamt of can exist, only through me. I had chosen her name.

Her name was Scarlett Jess Perrodin. And so, I am her.

Although you may not know my real name, you will know my heart. I have more of a voice here than I ever have before.

Whoever I am, is sincerely grateful to have your company along the way, whoever you are. Thank you for reading.

“Under the surface trying to break through. Deciphering the codes in you.

I need a compass, draw me a map. I’m on the top, I can’t get back.

The first line on the first page, to the end of the last page,

you were looking from the start in your own way.

You just want… somebody listening to what you say.

It doesn’t matter who you are.”

-“Square One” by Coldplay