Heartbreak has a way of splitting us open and with it a raw vulnerability surfaces. It is the kind of vulnerability that does not wait for permission to be felt or seen. It is the kind of vulnerability that when the local waitress at the café I frequented asked, “How are you, Pippa?” in her usual cheery tone, I burst into tears. Most days I could not even spend fifteen minutes outside without tears rolling down my cheeks.
My fear of abandonment traces back to my childhood and has faithfully followed me into each and every one of my adult relationships. In the past, the fear has been so intense it has led to some extreme maladaptive behaviours, which I discuss in my book. But this heartbreak was different. There was a transformative quality I could feel even in the depth of my despair; years of continuous, and ongoing therapy, was starting to bear fruit. I was determined to show up as the forty-one-year-old woman I was and to no longer be at the mercy of the frightened child within, too familiar with holding me hostage and calling all the shots.
I needed somewhere for the pain to go, an outlet for my thoughts and a way to process the transformation brewing inside. So, I began by setting a timer and writing for twenty minutes a day. I had no specific intentions other than to simply write.
Soon, the twenty minutes of writing turned into an hour until I was eventually writing for up to twelve hours a day. At times the story felt like it was writing me and not the other way around. There was a flow to it. Nothing forced. It felt like the book needed to be told and so it wrote itself.
The interesting thing about writing your story from the very start up until current day is that you provide yourself an overview you might not be used to seeing. From this zoomed out perceptive, I was able to clearly recognize patterns in my life that have repeatedly shown up. From these repetitions, I started to see the lessons behind them.
In telling the story of Paper Girls Burn, I was able to reconnect with myself at each stage of life. Even after 41 years I could still palpably feel how frightened my younger self felt—a churning, sick feeling that came from being entirely overwhelmed with my emotions but with nowhere to turn. Those feelings were too large for my little body and ate a way at me until a persistent void remained. As I aged, I could feel the naivety and hopefulness of looking for love in all the wrong places as I desperately searched for a way to fill the gaping hole. There was so much shame. And I was afraid to even write it on the page, expose it, make it realer somehow. Yet in my writing, I held my behaviours to the light and refused to sugarcoat them. I recall an interview I heard awhile back in which a writer talked about how you must not write for your audience but only for yourself. It may seem selfish, but it is the only way your readers will get the most honest and real version of your writing. With this book I rarely thought about how someone would react or how it made me sound. That was a radical shift because up to that point I was constantly considering how people viewed me. But it was freeing to not have those thoughts with this book.
Thinking back to the artistic expressions that have meant the most to me—whether they are TV shows or books or songs—they all have one thing in common. They dare to say out loud what most of us hold inside. Paper Girls Burn is the messy reality of being human without the polish that makes it acceptable. It was born of the deep desire to not allow our discomfort with messy female protagonists to get in the way of the truth of the story. Falling apart does not look sexy. Nor should it. It need not be packaged with a pretty bow. Yet in the ugliness there is a rarer beauty that is profoundly human and serves to connect us to others. It is a place where we feel less alone. Ironically shame tells us that we are the only ones behaving the way we do, but that is simply not true. Shame also tells us that the more honest we are the less people will love us but again that could not be further from the truth. When you can learn to stand in discomfort, be accountable to it, and learn to grow from it, you become magnetic. I think we are all searching for others to give us permission to lower our masks, and as a neurodivergent woman who has held many masks over her lifetime, I am very familiar with how exhausting it is to attempt to hold them all up. There is peace in learning to put them down.
Writing Paper Girls Burn has felt incredibly healing at times; at other times it has felt relentless. Constantly revisiting some of the most devastating times in my life over and over again throughout the editing process sometimes felt the opposite of healing. And yet usually when I was being pushed by my incredible editors, I would discover another layer—a place I was too afraid to go but the story demanded.
When I finally finished the book, I teased to a friend, “Well, I guess there goes my dating life. No one is going to want to be with me after I publish my diary.” And as he so often does, he responded with a pearl of wisdom: “No, this is a completely new dating life for you, Pippa. One filled with accountability, maturity and the chance to be loved for who you are.” And isn’t that what we all strive for? The chance to be loved for who we really are. This book has allowed me to get closer to that place.
Equally it was important for me to not end the story in a neat way. There is no “and then she rode off into the sunset and all her problems vanished and she was forever fixed” ending. Life will continue to be challenging. Healing is not a fixed state. Some days, weeks or months are harder than others. But I think there is hope in acknowledging that. I used to think if I read this book or did that exercise, I would be cured of all my problems, but this sets us up to fail and to not realize where the real, lasting change happens. Real change often looks like fifteen steps forward and fourteen back. It can be painfully gradual, and it does not equal a life free of struggle, but it does offer a healthier mindset from which to navigate. More than anything I hope this book helps someone feel less alone. In my humble opinion that is what the arts is all about, for it has been my anchor in the storm.
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Pippa Scott is a writer and an award-winning photographer. As a singer, she has performed on BBC TV’s Star for a Night, trained on Broadway, and studied opera under a renowned contralto. She spent over a decade working in the film industry in London, New York City, and Los Angeles for agents, directors, casting executives, and talent. She lives in Canada with her two children. Find her at pippaleighscott.com.
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