Abstract
This is short creative work I wrote in Spanish for a creative writing workshop at UT Austin. Written in small fragments that intermingle scenes from childhood with present-day reflections about life and literature, this piece details my experience with anxiety and trauma as a young girl; it addresses the difficulties that children often face when articulating emotional distress, particularly in relation to anxiety disorders. This piece also explores the power of literature as an affective space that can articulate our own emotional pain in a way that can provide solace; I speak of my experience reading Swann's Way for the first time, describing how, in the first few chapters of this novel, Proust gave words to my emotional trauma and vulnerability; reading about Marcel's struggles to fall asleep without his mother's kiss allowed me to better face and understand my own past.