Working Through Personal Change With Personal Essay

For F.A. Battle, the grand-prize winner of the Writer's Digest 5th Annual Personal Essay Awards, writing “Ground Zero” was a way to work through a change within herself—or perhaps truer, to come to terms with who she always was.

- BY MICHAEL WOODSON

“I started this essay many years ago, when I was coming to terms with my sexuality,” she says. “I used writing as a way to work through the confusing and scary feelings around this huge shift in my identity. Back then, I didn't have access to an LGBT community to support me. Being someone who was still married to a man, I had a lot of shame and fear around these changes. I didn't know what to do with all those feelings. This essay came out of that very cathartic work.”

That work toward self-acceptance, while necessary, at times felt catastrophic. “I realized that what I was going through damn near felt like the end of the world,” she says. “Realizing how it would impact not only me, but my entire family, was absolutely apocalyptic.” It's a feeling LGBTQIA+ people know all too well, that to be our truest selves means willfully blowing up the lives we've had. That juxtaposition of a fresh start with the end of what she has always known brought to mind a favorite uncle and his ideas about the end of the world.

Her essay opens with: