Spoiler alert: This post discusses key scenes and personal revelations from Lukas Gage’s memoir I Wrote This for Attention.

To pull off a title like Lukas Gage’s memoir I Wrote This for Attention, one needs a voice, and Gage absolutely has that. His writing is edgy, clever, unapologetically witty, and brutally honest. His memoir is a testament that pain and self-discovery can coexist on the same page.

Childhood Chaos and Insecure Attachment

Gage grew up in a home shadowed by addiction, emotional volatility, and a lack of stability. His father’s absence and betrayal left him with a fragmented sense of self and a persistent fear of abandonment. His mother, a single parent trying to keep the family afloat, was exhausted and drained by worry over her older son’s addiction. She was loving but had little bandwidth left for her other children, leaving Lukas caught between understanding her struggle and aching for her attention.

At school, bullying deepened his sense of isolation and confirmed what he already feared, that love and safety were dangerous to rely on. When the source of love also becomes the source of pain, the body learns to brace for being let down and remains in a state of alert. These early experiences taught Lukas to become more attuned to other people than to his own sense of self-worth, a habit that would later shape his people-pleasing tendencies, trying to stay likable as a way to maintain a sense of self-worth.

Lying as Survival

One of the most moving parts of the book is Gage’s reflection on his childhood “lies.” He shares excerpts from his childhood diary, where as a boy he would invent stories, rewriting events to make unbearable experiences more tolerable. After his brother accidentally killed his pet rabbit while high, which led to an argument with his mother and his brother leaving home, Gage wrote that the rabbit was “boring,” that he had replaced it with a pony, and that his brother went “on vacation.”

Lying in children often functions as a survival mechanism. Trauma teaches children that truth can be dangerous, that honesty might bring punishment, ridicule, or abandonment. Telling the truth can lead to pain, so the nervous system learns to protect itself through distortion (Salters-Pedneault, 2025). If I say “it didn’t happen,” the body believes, “maybe it didn’t.”

Bending the truth can help a child reclaim a small sense of agency, to fabricate a version of events that feels safer to live with. It’s a way of emotional regulation, an attempt to manage unbearable feelings when reality feels too chaotic to hold. Gage’s diary entries were his way of regaining power in a powerless situation and his first attempt to rewrite his story.

The Double-Edged Sword of Diagnosis

Early trauma and attachment injuries can lead to the later development of borderline personality disorder. Childhood experiences of emotional, physical, or sexual abuse, neglect, and inconsistent caregiving can alter how a person perceives love and threat, leaving the nervous system constantly scanning for rejection or abandonment. Love becomes fused with danger, and relationships swing between idealization and fear of loss (Paris, 2020).

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Gage’s early environment set the stage for these patterns. As a child, his emotions were big and unrestrained, his tantrums often met with dismissal or mockery rather than comfort. Without a consistent emotional safety net, his feelings became too much to hold yet impossible to contain. What looked like impulsivity or daredevil behaviors in adulthood grew from those early moments of feeling overwhelmed and unseen. He describes taking risks, using drugs, being reckless and disobedient, and chasing the spotlight as a way to feel alive.

Splitting is the tendency to see people or experiences as entirely good or entirely bad, safe or unsafe. For someone whose earliest attachments were unpredictable, this black-and-white thinking becomes a way to manage emotional dysregulation (Cleveland Clinic, 2025). Gage’s need for attention was a way to prove he existed. His behavior was an attempt to manage the fear of vanishing when no one was looking.

Gage’s eventual diagnosis of borderline personality disorder becomes a turning point in his story. Diagnoses can be both clarifying and complicated. They can provide language for what once felt unexplainable and help a person recognize patterns that have been running the show for years. They can give someone a sense of agency and direction rather than being defined by chaos.

Healing doesn’t come from the label itself; it takes place in connection with someone else. For Gage, the therapeutic space became a place where old patterns met new ways of relating. Through his sessions, he begins to experience what it feels like to be witnessed in his pain. His people-pleasing tendencies slowly give way to vulnerability. In one scene, he comments on the therapist’s beaded headband, admitting he doesn’t like it, expecting rejection or ridicule. Instead, he’s met with curiosity and warmth. Rather than being scolded for breaking the rules, he’s thanked for taking the risk to be real.

Gage has described himself as a “tortured genius” or “an enigma,” words that feel truer to his complexity than any clinical label could. Yet the diagnosis offers him a measure of relief, a framework for understanding rather than defining him. The truth seems to live somewhere in between; he is both a survivor learning the language of his wounds and an artist translating them into meaning.

From Attention to Connection

The defining moment in I Wrote This for Attention comes when Gage realizes that what he craved wasn’t being seen by everyone; it was being seen by the people who mattered. His need for attention was really a longing to be seen and held with unconditional love. Writing became that act of being witnessed.

By recounting his experiences, Gage opens a space for readers who have felt the same shame and confusion to find language for their own pain, which is the core of meaning-making.

Gage’s story reminds us that healing begins when we are met with curiosity instead of judgment. Friends, partners, and therapists can become new attachment figures who provide consistency, acceptance, and care. Over time, these relationships allow the nervous system to learn trust and to move from insecure attachment toward secure attachment.

The goal is to reorganize the past and file it where it belongs, in the past, so that the present no longer feels dangerous. Incongruent reactions to triggers, when the current moment holds no real threat, are signs of the body remembering what the mind has tried to forget (van der Kolk, 2014). We can’t heal what we don’t allow ourselves to see. As we bring awareness to the parts of ourselves that we once had to hide, we can change how the past shapes the stories we tell about who we are, and our wounds lose power over us.

In the end, I Wrote This for Attention is a manifesto for healing. Lukas-with-a-k leaves us with this: “...In an age where anyone can get attention for anything, I want the kind that builds, not breaks, that connects, not isolates.”

References

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