Category: mental health in literature

The Language of Survival: On Mental Illness, Resilience, and First Love

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I’ve always believed that the most courageous stories are not about rescue, but about return—how we come back to ourselves after the mind has turned against us. When I write about mental illness, I don’t write from a distance. I write from the thin edge of it—from the quiet hours where thought unravels and the only lifeline is language. Each of my novels—Secret Whispers, Déjà Vu, and Of Laughter & Heartbreak—was born out of that liminal space between fear and faith, between survival and surrender.

These books aren’t companions by chronology, but by spirit. Each follows a young woman whose inner world threatens to eclipse the outer one, and each discovers that love—whether romantic, platonic, or self-forged—is the most powerful form of recovery we have.

1. The Mind as Haunted House: Secret Whispers

When I wrote Secret Whispers, I began with an image: a house stitched together by secrets, its silence louder than any scream. Inside it lives Adria—a painter, sister, caretaker, and reluctant witness to her own unraveling.

Schizophrenia shadows her family line, coiling like a whispered curse. Her brother’s breakdown has already split the household in half. Her mother holds everything together with brittle faith. And Adria, caught between caretaking and collapse, begins to hear the same whispers that once took him away.

I wanted to write honestly about what it means to live with a mind you can’t fully trust—the terror of not knowing whether what you see is symptom or sight. But I also wanted to write about love: the improbable, incandescent kind that dares to root itself in fractured soil.

In Secret Whispers, love doesn’t save Adria. It steadies her. The boy who sees her—awkward, hopeful, honest—doesn’t fix her illness; he becomes a mirror in which she can see more than diagnosis. Their love flickers like a candle in a draft, fragile yet real, proof that connection is possible even when perception splinters.

Adria’s resilience isn’t loud. It’s made of small gestures: washing a brush, opening a window, whispering not today when the shadows come. Recovery, I learned while writing her, is not a staircase but a spiral—you circle the same fears until you finally face them without flinching.

2. Déjà Vu: The Loops of the Bipolar Mind

If Secret Whispers was about hearing too much, Déjà Vu was about feeling too much—about living inside a mind where memory and mania blur.

Ivy Lancaster is eighteen, brilliant, impulsive, and newly diagnosed with bipolar disorder. She experiences life in echoes: every stranger’s face feels familiar, every nightmare seems rehearsed, every choice loops back like a record caught on its scratch.

The first time I wrote Ivy walking through the parking lot at dawn, barefoot and disoriented, I felt the pulse of the entire novel—this young woman spinning in the orbit of her own brain, terrified of herself yet desperate to be believed.

Déjà Vu is not just a psychological thriller; it’s an emotional x-ray of bipolarity. Mania is painted not as glamour but as velocity—the thrill that burns. Depression is written not as stillness but as suffocation. Yet in between, there’s the quiet miracle of awareness.

And there is love. Love arrives in Ivy’s world not as romance, but as recognition: people who refuse to define her by her disorder, who remind her that she exists beyond chemical imbalance. Love, in this book, is accountability—the friend who says take your meds, the parent who whispers you are more than your mind, the stranger who looks her in the eye when she feels invisible.

Resilience here is not recovery in the clinical sense. It’s survival as rebellion. It’s Ivy saying, I may live inside loops, but I can still choose where to step next.

When readers tell me Déjà Vu helped them feel seen—that it mirrored their manic spirals or the hollow aftermath—I’m reminded why I write these stories. To dismantle stigma. To remind us that living with mental illness is not a flaw in character, but a feat of endurance.

3. Of Laughter & Heartbreak: OCD and the Art of Staying

By the time I wrote Of Laughter & Heartbreak, I wanted to explore a different texture of the mind: the obsessive, ritualized patterns of control that masquerade as safety.

Stevie Matthews is almost sixteen. Her thoughts arrive like barbed wire; her rituals multiply like vines. When the summer’s order collapses, she’s hospitalized—a space she never asked for, but where, for the first time, she meets others who understand the language of compulsion.

OCD, for Stevie, is both prison and prayer. Her rituals aren’t about superstition; they’re about trying to keep the world from shattering. I wrote her story as both confession and communion—a letter to anyone who’s ever mistaken coping for control.

Behind those locked doors, Stevie meets her mirror selves: the anxious boy who collects facts like talismans, the quiet girl who hides notes to her future self, the nurse who knows that healing isn’t linear. Together they build something like family—a map stitched from shared fragments of hope.

This novel, like the others, carries the pulse of first love—not in grand gestures, but in small acts of belief. The hand that steadies hers during a panic spiral. The smile that says you are not too much. The love that grows not in spite of illness, but within it. Because love, at its truest, doesn’t demand wholeness—it meets you in the fragments and stays.

4. The Quiet Revolution of Survival

Each of these novels began with illness, but each ends with something larger: a reclamation of humanity.

In Secret Whispers, Adria learns that her art can hold what her mind cannot.
In Déjà Vu, Ivy redefines truth beyond the lens of mania.
In Of Laughter & Heartbreak, Stevie learns that control is not safety, and surrender is not defeat.

Together, they form a kind of triptych about resilience—the quiet kind that never makes headlines. They remind me that mental illness and first love often share the same vocabulary: vulnerability, risk, surrender, trust. Both require standing on the edge of the unknown and saying yes anyway.

To live with a brain that misfires is to live constantly between worlds—the real and the imagined, the lucid and the lost. Yet within that space, there’s beauty. There’s empathy. There’s art.

These are not stories about being cured. They’re stories about being human.

5. Why I Keep Writing

Sometimes readers ask why I return, again and again, to characters who struggle with their minds. My answer is simple: because I know what it means to stay.

Because the world still whispers that mental illness is weakness.
Because the stories that saved me were the ones that refused to flinch.
Because the young readers who see themselves in Adria, Ivy, and Stevie deserve to know they are not broken—they are becoming.

Writing these books has taught me that resilience isn’t the absence of relapse; it’s the decision to keep loving life anyway. It’s the courage to reach for connection even when your hands shake. It’s the soft defiance of building hope out of symptoms.

And maybe, at the center of it all, it’s first love—the thing that reminds us we’re still capable of wonder.

When I look back on Secret Whispers, Déjà Vu, and Of Laughter & Heartbreak, I see not a trilogy of illness, but a mosaic of endurance. Each girl walks through her own labyrinth and emerges carrying the same small flame: belief.

Belief that we are more than diagnosis.
Belief that love is still possible in the dark.
Belief that the quiet work of staying—of waking up again, and again—is itself a form of grace.

If these stories have a single message, it’s this:
Even when the mind fractures, the heart remembers how to reach for light.

Letters Never Sent: The Language of Almost-Love

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There are some stories that never make it into envelopes. They live instead in the folds of memory—creased, re-read, and worn thin by time. They’re the letters we write but never send, the words that hover just behind the heart, waiting for a quiet room to finally be heard.

When I think about my first love, I think about the hum of hospital machines, the antiseptic air that tried and failed to scrub out tenderness, and the boy named Timothy who sat across from me in a hospital dayroom in Bismarck, North Dakota, when I was fifteen years old. We met in a place where silence was its own kind of language. There were no dances, no declarations, only the small exchanges that happen when two people recognize in each other a kind of ache they can’t yet name.

Timothy had eyes the color of bright blue mornings. I remember that more than I remember his laugh. I remember the way we traded drawings on napkins, folded them like notes. I remember the way time slowed when we spoke, how the air seemed to listen. It wasn’t the kind of love that blooms; it was the kind that lingers—half-formed, half-forbidden, the kind that teaches you that connection doesn’t always need duration to matter. That’s what I’ve come to call almost-love: the love that teaches you what the real thing feels like, even if it never lasts.

1. Cartography of the Heart

When I wrote The Cartography of First Love, I didn’t know I was writing about Timothy until the story was finished. I thought I was writing about two fictional teens—Zibby and Nico—who meet in an adolescent psych unit and build a map of first love through sketches, letters, and whispered promises. But every line of that book carries a trace of that hospital dayroom in Bismarck—the smell of coffee, the soft buzz of fluorescent light, the way we used humor like a flashlight against fear. The way we bonded with each other and the other teens on the ward. The dreams we had of escaping our broken lives, along with another teen couple, to a dream life in California.

Zibby’s eating disorder, Nico’s depression—those were fictions, but the emotional terrain was real. Both of them were trying to survive themselves, and somehow, in doing so, they found each other. That’s what Timothy and I were doing too: surviving. Learning how to be human in a place built to monitor it.

There’s something profoundly sacred about the love that forms between the broken. It doesn’t need polish or promise; it exists simply because both hearts recognize that the other is still beating. When Zibby says, “I don’t know if this is forever, but it feels like oxygen,” I was really writing what I never said to Timothy. I never told him how, in that sterile, rule-bound space, he made the world feel possible again. That his presence was proof that tenderness can exist even in places designed to contain it.

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2. The Letters We Don’t Send

I’ve always believed that letters are a kind of spell—language meant not just to reach someone else, but to reveal the self. When I was fifteen, I started writing letters I never mailed. To therapists. To friends. To Timothy. They weren’t love letters in the romantic sense; they were survival letters. I wrote them to remember what feeling felt like. To tether myself to something human.

Years later, when I began The Cartography of First Love, I found those letters again—folded, smudged, and still breathing. I didn’t copy them verbatim, but their spirit is in every page. Letters, after all, are time machines. They preserve the version of us that dared to speak, even when no one was listening.

Maybe that’s what almost-love does—it leaves us with letters, not outcomes. It gives us language we can’t unlearn.

3. Whimsy’s Map of Wonder

In Whimsy and Bliss, I returned to the idea of unsent letters, though in a different form. Abigail Whimsy, the dreamer, writes postcards she never mails—notes to her best friend Lainey Bliss, to her late grandmother, to the lake itself. She believes that words can travel through time if you believe hard enough. Whimsy’s letters aren’t addressed to a boy; they’re addressed to memory, to childhood, to the version of herself that still believes in magic. But they, too, are love letters of a kind. Letters to what’s been lost.

The older I get, the more I understand that love doesn’t always need a recipient. Sometimes it’s enough to write it down, to set it loose like a paper boat and trust the current to carry it where it needs to go.

Timothy never saw my letters, but I think, in some cosmic way, he received them. Maybe they reached him through dream or distance or the invisible threads that connect first loves across decades.

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4. The Language of Almost

Almost-love has its own dialect. It speaks in half-sentences, in glances, in small pauses before parting. It’s the love that never makes it to the altar but still shapes your sense of faith. It’s the song that stops mid-melody but leaves the tune in your head for years.

When I write about first love, I’m not writing about romance so much as recognition—the sacred shock of being seen. Zibby and Nico’s map in The Cartography of First Love isn’t geographic; it’s emotional. It charts the spaces between fear and desire, between what’s spoken and what’s withheld. It’s the same map I’ve been unconsciously drawing since fifteen—the topography of tenderness interrupted. In that way, Timothy is the first coordinate on all my maps. Every love that came after carries his imprint, faint but indelible.

5. What We Keep

I never saw Timothy again after that spring in Bismarck. We left the hospital on different days, back to different towns, different futures. I remember watching a late-spring snow swallow the parking lot as I waited for my mother’s car. I thought of how, in the snow, everything looks erased but is only hidden.

That’s how almost-love survives—not by continuation, but by concealment. It hides inside the art we make, the stories we tell, the way we hold someone’s name gently in the mind decades later.

When I look back now, I don’t feel regret. I feel gratitude. For the way that brief connection taught me how to pay attention. How to see the soul beneath the symptom. How to believe that love, in any form, is never wasted.

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6. The Cartography of Closure

Every writer has an origin story. Mine began in that hospital, where letters I couldn’t send became stories I eventually did.

The Cartography of First Love was, in many ways, my way of finally mailing them. Each page was an envelope addressed to the past. Each chapter a way of saying: I remember. I made it. I’m still here.

In Whimsy and Bliss, that same message echoes through Abigail’s summer adventure—her yearning to finish her grandmother’s “map of thin places,” where wonder seeps through the world. It’s the same impulse: to locate the sacred in the ordinary, to find beauty even in what’s unfinished.

Because that’s what almost-love is—it’s unfinished beauty. It’s a comma instead of a period. And yet, sometimes, the sentence feels complete anyway.

7. To Timothy, Across Time

If I could write one more letter now, it would be simple:

Dear Timothy,

We were just kids. But for a moment, the world stood still. You showed me that connection doesn’t need perfection—it only needs presence. I don’t know where you are now, but a part of me still sends light your way whenever I write a story about first love. Thank you for being the first mapmaker of my heart.

Maybe he’ll never read it. Maybe he’s long forgotten that spring. But the point isn’t whether the letter arrives—it’s that it was written. Because writing, like loving, is an act of faith. We send the words out anyway.

When readers tell me The Cartography of First Love or Whimsy and Bliss reminded them of someone they once loved and lost, I smile. That’s the quiet miracle of almost-love—it continues. Not in the way we expect, but in the way stories and letters do: across time, across silence, between worlds.

The language of almost-love is the language of becoming. It teaches us that some doors never close; they simply turn into windows through which light still enters. And if you listen closely enough—under the hum of memory, under the rhythm of your own pulse—you can still hear it:

The letter, written in the dreaming heart, whispering—I was here. You were too. That was enough.

Thresholds Between Worlds: Writing the Dreaming Mind

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There are nights when the mind becomes a borderland—not waking, not sleeping, but something tender and trembling between. That’s where my stories live. When I write, I’m less interested in plot than in passage—the subtle moment when reality begins to shimmer and something unseen breathes through. It’s the hum before a dream takes shape, the hush in a library where imagination crosses the threshold.

My novels Dreamcatcher, Ink & Ivy, and Whimsy and Bliss were each born from that in-between space: where dream logic and daylight ache overlap, where imagination is both refuge and revelation. I’ve come to think of them not as separate stories, but as three rooms in the same house—the House of the Dreaming Mind.

1. The Doorway in the Dark

The idea for Dreamcatcher began with an image: a girl climbing through a fire-escape window, brushing against her grandmother’s dreamcatcher, and falling into another world. For Dash, my protagonist, the dream realm of Baumwelt is not a fantasy world in the traditional sense—it’s a reflection of her inner life. Every creature she meets, every landscape she crosses, echoes her memories, fears, and ancestral lineage. The world outside her window dissolves, but what replaces it is not pure invention—it’s memory rearranged by sleep.

Dreams are the language of the unconscious, but they are also archives of ancestry. In Dakota tradition, dreams carry instruction; they are bridges to spirit, not mere illusion. Writing Dreamcatcher, I wanted to honor that worldview—to let dream be teacher, not escape.

The dreaming mind, after all, has its own geography. It’s where past and present fold into each other, where the living and the dead keep company. Dash’s journey through Baumwelt is really a journey into inheritance—into how memory, myth, and trauma shape the self. When she wakes, nothing around her has changed, but she has. That’s what every good story does—it sends you somewhere so that you can return with new eyes.

2. Ink as Spellwork

If Dreamcatcher is the dream entered through sleep, Ink & Ivy is the dream entered through creation. Marisol, the girl who runs a hidden bookshop, learns that the stories she writes can alter reality. What she pens becomes what she lives; language itself becomes a portal. But her gift carries risk: every act of creation has a cost. Words can heal, but they can also harm.

In that sense, Ink & Ivy is about authorship as alchemy—the idea that writing is both spell and surrender. As writers, we are always crossing thresholds between imagined and real. We live half in the world and half in language. The line between the two blurs until even we can’t tell which is which. When Marisol writes, she’s not escaping grief; she’s giving it shape. The ink becomes her ritual of remembrance.

Writing, too, is a dream you enter deliberately. When I’m deep in it, time dissolves, sound thickens, and the body becomes peripheral. That liminal state—the creative trance—is the same consciousness that dreams speak from. It’s what poets call flow and mystics call vision. I’ve come to believe that all art is a form of lucid dreaming: we are awake, but we allow the dream to guide our hand.

3. Between Wonder and Loss

Then there is Whimsy and Bliss—a story set not in another world, but in the precise moment before girlhood fades into adulthood. Abigail Whimsy is the dreamer; Lainey Bliss is the realist. Together, they chase “thin places,” secret corners of their lakeside town where the fabric between worlds wears thin. Their summer map becomes a pilgrimage of goodbye—to childhood, to friendship, to the certainty that magic is only for the young.

In Whimsy and Bliss, the dreaming mind is not only nocturnal—it’s emotional. The dream here is nostalgia: the ache for what can’t be returned to, the shimmering almost-memory of who we were. When Whimsy and Bliss explore abandoned libraries and climb water towers under moonlight, they’re searching for wonder before it vanishes. They are practicing a kind of everyday mysticism—the belief that the ordinary world is already enchanted, if only we pay attention.

This, to me, is the heart of the dreaming mind: it notices what others overlook. It lives in metaphor, in symbol, in atmosphere. It insists that even grief has its own radiance.

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4. Dream as Bridge, Not Escape

People sometimes ask why I write “fantasy.” I never quite know how to answer, because my worlds are not so much invented as revealed. Fantasy, for me, is not an exit door—it’s an entrance. Dreaming and writing share a purpose: they make the invisible visible. They bridge what logic can’t. When I write about portals, I don’t mean only magical doors. I mean threshold moments: the second before grief hits, the silence after someone says I love you, the pause between inhale and exhale. These are the real portals, the moments where transformation begins.

The dreaming mind knows this. It’s always translating feeling into image: a locked door becomes fear; a rising tide becomes memory; a missing key becomes forgiveness waiting to happen.

In Dreamcatcher, Baumwelt is Dash’s subconscious given form. In Ink & Ivy, imagination becomes tangible, able to wound or heal. In Whimsy and Bliss, dream takes the shape of longing. Each story moves through a different register of the same truth: that what we imagine is not separate from who we are.

Fantasy still matters because it reminds us that the world is layered. Beneath the surface of the ordinary lies a pulse of mystery, waiting to be remembered.

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5. The Craft of Crossing

Writing the dreaming mind requires a particular discipline of attention. It’s not about inventing strange worlds, but about listening for what already hums beneath language.

I’ve learned to approach each story like a lucid dreamer: half-awake, observant, unafraid. When a sentence feels too rational, I let it unravel. When logic tries to take over, I ask what image might speak instead.

A novel like Dreamcatcher grows through atmosphere before plot; it must be dreamed onto the page. Ink & Ivy demands reverence for language itself—every word carries spell-weight. Whimsy and Bliss thrives on emotional resonance—the threshold between childhood and adulthood is its own kind of magic realism.

To write the dreaming mind, one must accept unknowing. The story reveals itself only as you move through it, like a dream that solidifies upon waking. You can’t outline it entirely; you can only walk with it.

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6. Waking Gently

What I love most about dream-based writing is how it teaches you to wake differently. When you step out of a story like Dreamcatcher or Ink & Ivy, you don’t just return to life—you return to it changed. Readers often tell me they see their own dreams differently after finishing these books. That is the greatest compliment I could receive. It means the stories have done their work: not to distract, but to awaken.

The dreaming mind is not a place we visit only at night. It’s a consciousness we carry—a sensitivity to meaning, pattern, and possibility. It’s the part of us that still believes rivers can whisper, that trees remember, that words are alive.

Writing through that lens keeps me tethered to awe. And awe, I think, is a form of prayer.

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7. The Threshold Itself

I return often to that fire-escape window from Dreamcatcher. The girl climbing through it. The touch of feathers, the shift of air. The dreamcatcher trembling like a heartbeat.

That moment—between step and fall, between real and imagined—is the space I write from. It’s the threshold itself that matters, not what lies on either side.

Because the dreaming mind isn’t about choosing one world over another. It’s about learning to live in both at once. To walk through daylight with a trace of starlight still on your skin. To carry the dream with you, awake.

Every story I’ve written is, in its own way, a map back to that place.

Dreamcatcher taught me to honor ancestral dream as truth.
Ink & Ivy taught me that language is alive.
Whimsy and Bliss taught me that growing up doesn’t mean losing wonder.

All three remind me that imagination is not an indulgence—it’s a responsibility.

The dreaming mind keeps us human. It holds the world together, one dream, one story, one word at a time.

The Quiet Work of Staying: Healing in Fragments

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Before I learned how to write, I learned how to stay. Not the cinematic kind of staying—the triumphant recovery arc, the sudden sunrise after years of darkness—but the quiet, ordinary kind. The kind that happens in fragments: brushing your teeth after days of forgetting due to deep depression, answering one text message, writing a single word. The kind of staying that doesn’t look heroic, but is.

For a long time, I thought healing would feel like a song. Now I know it’s more like static—broken, uneven, but still carrying sound.

Both The Alphabet of Almosts and Some Species of Outsider-ness were born from that static—from the ache of trying to make coherence out of chaos, from the question that threads through all mental-health narratives: how do you keep living when the story doesn’t make sense anymore?

1. Fragments as Language

When I began writing The Alphabet of Almosts, I didn’t set out to create a story about illness. I set out to alphabetize survival—to give shape to the words that hovered between diagnosis and hope.

The book unfolds through small vignettes, each one a lettered fragment—A for Admission, B for Breakthrough, C for Control—and together they build something resembling a life. I was living in that in-between place: between recovery and relapse, clarity and confusion. Each fragment became a way of saying, I’m still here, even if I can’t say it all at once.

There’s something deeply honest about fragments. They don’t pretend to be whole. They allow contradiction, misstep, mess. They remind us that language, like healing, doesn’t have to be linear to be true.

For me, fragmentary writing became both mirror and medicine. When the mind fractures, linearity can feel dishonest. The world arrives in flashes—images, memories, unfinished thoughts. Writing in fragments wasn’t an aesthetic choice; it was survival. It was how I could stay.

2. The Work of Staying

Staying is not glamorous. It doesn’t get book deals or film adaptations. It doesn’t even feel like progress most days. Staying is brushing your hair. It’s making a list you may never finish. It’s finding small reasons not to disappear.

In Some Species of Outsider-ness, I wanted to explore that kind of endurance through two characters—Piper and Slater—whose internal battles are as invisible as they are immense. Piper lives with bipolar disorder, Slater with the lingering paralysis of Guillain-Barré Syndrome. Both are marked by difference in a world that worships sameness.

Their story begins not with love, but with survival: two teens learning that belonging doesn’t mean being fixed, but being seen. The novel’s title comes from the idea that being an outsider is not a condition to be cured—it’s a species to be studied, honored, understood.

The quiet work of staying runs through both their lives. For Piper, it’s managing the cycle of mania and depression without letting either define her. For Slater, it’s learning to move again—physically, emotionally, relationally—after trauma. Neither of them is “better” by the end. But they are still here. And sometimes that’s enough.

Staying is not stagnation; it’s an act of devotion. It’s choosing to keep breathing even when the air feels heavy. It’s sitting in your own skin, even when it doesn’t feel like home.

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3. Healing in Fragments

The culture of wellness often sells us a singular image of healing: bright mornings, clear journaling pages, the triumphant “after.” But true healing—especially after mental illness, grief, or trauma—is far less symmetrical.

Healing happens in fragments. In partial sentences. In moments you forget to count as progress: the laugh you didn’t expect, the walk you took without dread, the meal you actually tasted.

In The Alphabet of Almosts, the narrator describes healing as “collecting the scattered glass of myself and learning not to bleed every time I touch it.” I think of that often. Healing is not about gluing the shards back together into what once was; it’s about learning to live among them, to see beauty even in the breakage.

The Japanese art of kintsugi—mending broken pottery with gold—has become almost cliché in self-help spaces, but there’s a reason it endures. It acknowledges fracture as part of the story. The break becomes the illumination.

That’s what I wanted for Some Species of Outsider-ness too: a kind of emotional kintsugi, where characters mend not by erasing their scars but by tracing them in gold.

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4. The Myth of Wholeness

Wholeness is overrated. I don’t mean that cynically. I mean that wholeness, as it’s often sold to us, is a myth that keeps us ashamed of our incompleteness. It suggests there’s an endpoint to becoming human. But what if our task isn’t to be whole, but to be honest?

Fragments allow for honesty. They let contradiction breathe. You can be healing and hurting, hopeful and hopeless, all at once. You can love your life and still want to leave it some days. You can laugh and cry within the same minute, and both are true.

When readers tell me they saw themselves in The Alphabet of Almosts, it’s rarely because they relate to every word. It’s because they recognized a single line that felt like their own breath. That’s the gift of fragmentation—it leaves room for others to enter.

And maybe that’s what healing really is: not the restoration of self, but the reconnection to others. To community. To language. To the small rituals that keep us tethered to the living.

5. What the Outsiders Teach Us

The title Some Species of Outsider-ness came to me during a sleepless night. I was thinking about how often we label difference as deficiency. How quick the world is to exile those whose rhythms don’t match its pace.

But outsiders—those who live at the edge of ordinary—often see what others cannot. They notice the fissures, the unspoken rules, the small violences of normalcy. They remind us that empathy is not a theory but a practice.

Piper and Slater’s story is, in a sense, a love letter to outsiders: to those who feel too much, too loud, too strange. It’s also a call to stay—to resist disappearance. Their survival is not cinematic. It’s quiet. But quiet doesn’t mean small.

The quiet work of staying is the foundation of every great act of love. Because staying—whether in a body, a relationship, or the world itself—requires belief in something beyond the immediate pain. It’s faith in tomorrow’s breath.

6. The Shape of Hope

Both books taught me that hope doesn’t always look like light. Sometimes it looks like a shadow. Sometimes it’s the pause between two heartbeats, the whisper between words. Hope, for me, is found in the act of making: writing, painting, collaging. In taking fragments and saying, You still matter. In creating beauty that refuses to be perfect.

When I wrote The Alphabet of Almosts, I kept a note above my desk that said, Stay in the room. That was my whole goal—not to write a masterpiece, not to heal overnight, but simply to stay. To stay long enough to turn a feeling into a line, a line into a page, a page into something that could keep another person company in their own darkness.

Art doesn’t fix us. It doesn’t erase pain. But it translates it. It gives it a place to rest. It lets others know they’re not alone in the fragments.

7. The Quiet Ending

When people ask me what The Alphabet of Almosts is “about,” I tell them it’s about learning to live inside unfinished sentences. When they ask about Some Species of Outsider-ness, I say it’s about the kind of courage that doesn’t get applause—the courage to stay.

Healing will never be tidy. It will never be final. But maybe that’s its beauty. Maybe the work of being alive is to keep stitching the fragments together, one breath at a time. There’s a line near the end of The Alphabet of Almosts that still feels like a compass to me:

“Maybe we don’t need to be whole. Maybe we just need to stay long enough to see what else becomes possible.”

Fantasy has its dragons. Romance has its declarations. But healing—real, quiet, ordinary healing—has this: the act of staying. So if you find yourself in pieces, remember this: every fragment is proof that you have not disappeared. You are still here. You are still writing. And that, too, is a kind of wholeness.

Writing the Nightmare: How Long Since Buried Became My Way Back to Light

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When I was twelve, I began dreaming of being hunted.

It wasn’t the kind of nightmare that dissolves with morning light. These dreams followed me—in hallways, in car rides, in the spaces between waking and sleep. In them, I was always running. Sometimes, I saw who chased me; in others, there were only the shadows gathering at the edges, the sound of breath too close behind.

Therapists would later call it trauma’s echo, the body remembering what the mind couldn’t articulate. But at the time, I just called it fear. It clung to my ribs for decades, shapeshifting—into insomnia, perfectionism, silence. When I finally began therapy as an adult, my sessions became less about remembering events and more about re-entering the emotional rooms I’d locked shut. Those rooms were crowded with ghosts, but also with stories waiting to be told.

That’s where Long Since Buried was born—not as a thriller at first, but as a reckoning.

The Fiction That Remembered Me

I didn’t sit down to write a murder mystery. I sat down to write about a feeling I couldn’t escape—the sense of being watched, pursued, never quite safe in my own skin.

In Long Since Buried, twelve-year-old Sydney dies during what should have been an ordinary spring day in South Dakota. Thirty years later, her newly discovered twin, Laci, returns to the same town to unravel what happened. Two women, two timelines—one silenced, one searching.

When I began, I didn’t realize how closely those sisters mirrored the split inside me. Sydney became the self that never got to speak, the child frozen in that recurring nightmare. Laci became the adult voice, trying to rewrite what the dream refused to release.

I remember writing late into the night, hands trembling, feeling the same chill I had as a child. The words felt like digging—not for a plot twist, but for buried truth. I didn’t outline the story. It unfolded the way memory does—fragmented, looping, unreliable. Each chapter was a séance, calling forth pieces of the past I’d long since buried under survival instinct.

When Therapy Meets the Page

Over the years, therapy taught me how to sit with the body’s reactions—the quickened pulse, the tightening throat—without letting them drown me. Writing taught me how to translate those sensations into language. Between the two, I found a strange kind of balance: psychology as scaffold, story as sanctuary.

The sessions and the drafts often overlapped. One week, I’d describe the recurring dream to my therapist—the smell of dirt and spent ammo with its sulfurous, metallic odor, the sound of footsteps, the desperate wish to turn and face what chased me. The next week, I’d find that same image emerging in the manuscript—but this time, under my control. I could decide what happened when I turned around.

That was yet another time I realized that fiction could be a survival tool—not a means of escape, but a way to return to the site of the wound with agency. In writing, I was both hunted and hunter, both lost girl and adult author mapping the terrain of her own memory.

In this way, Long Since Buried became an act of reclamation disguised as suspense.

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The Town as Mirror

The fictionalized setting—Watertown, South Dakota—is more than a backdrop. It’s a possible mirror of containment and repression. On the surface, it’s idyllic: lakeside weddings, small-town gossip, the scent of lilacs after rain. But underneath, everyone knows something they won’t say out loud. Everyone carries their own secret version of the truth.

That, too, came from life. The unspoken rules of small communities. The polite silences that can hide harm. The way a family can appear whole from the outside while cracking beneath the weight of what’s unsaid.

When I described the town, I was also describing the psychological landscape of trauma—beautiful, familiar, and haunted. The serenity of the lake juxtaposed against the violence beneath its reflection. The wedding festivities standing as fragile rituals of denial.

Readers often tell me the book feels cinematic—as if the town itself were breathing. I think that’s because every building, every echo, every whispered conversation was built from memory’s architecture.

The Child Who Was Hunted

During therapy, I realized that the nightmares of being hunted were never about literal pursuit. They were metaphors for the feeling of being unsafe in my own story. The faceless hunter was every force—societal, familial, internal—that told me to stay small, quiet, compliant.

When I wrote Sydney, I gave that hunted girl a name, a world, and eventually, a voice that transcended death. Her chapters are written from the past, but they hum with an afterlife’s awareness. Through her, I could finally face the forest—not as prey, but as witness.

The process wasn’t easy. Writing Long Since Buried often meant reliving the old panic. I’d have to step away, breathe, ground myself in the present—feeling my feet, naming five blue things in the room. But each time I returned to the keyboard, I felt a little stronger. The page became a threshold: on one side, fear; on the other, creation.

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The Adult Who Returns

Laci’s sections—the modern-day timeline—are my love letter to persistence. She’s not fearless; she’s relentless. Her investigation isn’t just about uncovering who killed her twin. It’s about confronting the emotional debris that lingers when truth has been buried too long.

Writing her reminded me that healing is never about erasing what happened; it’s about learning to carry it differently.

I gave Laci my own instincts—her tendency to overanalyze, her compulsion to observe, her need to understand why. I also gave her what I wish I’d had sooner: a sense of permission to look, even when others warned her not to.

Through her, I could finally answer the question the nightmare always posed: What happens if I stop running?

The Silence After the Gunshot

There’s a moment in the first draft—quiet, almost imperceptible—where time seems to stop. A gunshot echoes. The scene goes still. My first readers describe it as eerie, cinematic. For me, it was cathartic.

That silence after the shot became symbolic: the stillness that follows a trauma before the mind rushes to fill in the blanks. In that pause, the reader and I share the same breath—both of us listening for what comes next.

And what comes next, in fiction and in life, is always the same: choice. Do we remain buried in the narrative others wrote for us, or do we dig our way toward our own version of truth?

Writing as Resurrection

I used to think writing about pain would make it permanent. But I’ve learned it can do the opposite. When we give shape to what haunts us, we reclaim it. We define it before it defines us.

In that way, Long Since Buried became both elegy and resurrection. It honored the frightened twelve-year-old who couldn’t wake herself from the dream, while allowing the adult me to finish the story on her own terms.

The nightmares still visit sometimes, though less frequently now. When they do, I no longer wake in panic. I reach for a notebook. I listen. I write. Because I’ve learned that every dream, even the terrifying ones, contains a fragment of language waiting to be set free.

Why I Still Write the Dark

Readers often ask why I continue to write thrillers—why I linger in the dark when I’ve already survived it. The answer is simple: because the dark is where I found my voice.

The shadows aren’t just where fear lives; they’re also where empathy grows. In exploring human darkness—greed, guilt, survival, grief—I’ve learned to honor the complexity of being alive.

For me, Long Since Buried isn’t just a story of murder or revenge. It’s a story of reclamation—of what happens when a girl who once dreamed of being hunted becomes the woman who writes the ending.

That’s the true closure fiction gives us: not a perfect resolution, but a language for what once felt unspeakable.

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Sometimes the stories that terrify us are the ones that most need to be written.
Sometimes the only way out of a nightmare is through the page.

And when we finally reach the end—when the words fall quiet and the ghosts rest easy—we realize we were never being hunted by monsters.
We were being pursued by our own courage, waiting for us to stop running and turn toward it.

The Language of Healing: Finding Words for the Unspeakable

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There are wounds that refuse to speak in complete sentences. They hum beneath the skin, pulsing with memory, waiting for a language tender enough to hold them. For years, I mistook my silence for strength. I believed that if I didn’t name the pain, it couldn’t touch me. But silence, I learned, is its own kind of bruise—one that deepens in the dark.

Writing became my way of translating ache into alphabet. In Nostalgic Tendencies, Idyllic Endeavors & Current Inclinations, I began experimenting with what healing might sound like if given voice. I wasn’t trying to craft perfection; I was trying to survive. Each essay attempted to name something that had long lived without language—the complicated inheritance of womanhood, the confusion of growing up inside both trauma and tenderness, the way love and loss often share the same room.

The alphabetic structure of that book—A to Z—was more than a creative choice. It was a lifeline. Some days, I could only manage a single word: Ache. Anger. Acceptance. Other days, I could stretch into sentences. By giving shape to the unspeakable, I was teaching myself how to live with it. Naming became an act of reclamation; description became a prayer.

Later, in Bedridden & Gutted to Mindful, I found that healing sometimes requires fewer words, not more. Depression dismantled grammar; mindfulness rebuilt it one breath at a time. When I was too exhausted to write paragraphs, I wrote sensations instead: the hum of the refrigerator, the pulse in my wrists, the sparrow outside the window refusing to give up its song. I learned that attention itself is a language—one that says, I see you. I’m still here.

That book explored the intersection between narrative and neurobiology — how the act of observing, naming, and breathing can rewire a weary mind. Where Nostalgic Tendencies dissected the emotional architecture of becoming, Bedridden & Gutted to Mindful was about learning to dwell inside the body again, to replace self-critique with curiosity.

Words, I realized, are not cures. They’re companions. They sit beside the wound, whispering, You are not alone. The act of writing them—or reading them—becomes a ceremony of recognition. There’s something almost sacred about saying the truth out loud, even if it trembles. Because once a story is spoken, it stops being a secret.

Healing, I’ve learned, has its own dialect—part ink, part silence. It’s the pause between paragraphs, the tremor before truth, the deep exhale after naming something that once terrified you. And when we find that dialect—when we learn to speak our pain without fear of breaking the room—something miraculous happens: the language begins to speak us back into being.

Maybe this is why we keep writing, even when it hurts. Because language is how we build a bridge from what was unbearable to what might be beautiful again.

Writing From the Tremor: The Art of Surviving on the Page

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When Healing Becomes Art: Writing Through Mental Health

Before I ever wrote a word about healing, I was simply trying to survive.
The blank page was the only space where the noise quieted—where I could make sense of panic, obsession, grief, and that endless hum of almost okay. What began as journaling at the edge of exhaustion slowly became its own language. Somewhere between the chaos of thought and the order of sentences, I started to understand that writing wasn’t just an expression. It was survival.

The Alphabet of Almosts: Naming the Unnamable

In The Alphabet of Almosts, I began with a single rule: tell the truth, even if it trembles. Each chapter began as a letter—A for Admission, B for Breakthrough, C for Control—not because I had answers, but because I needed order when everything else felt unstructured. I was writing through paranoia, disorganization, and recovery. Through language, I found a map. Not out of illness, but deeper into self-compassion.

When readers write to say they saw themselves in those pages—not in the illness, but in the effort—I am reminded that we are all composing alphabets of survival, each in our own handwriting.

Dancing Without Music: The Sound of Staying

Later, in Dancing Without Music, I followed two teens—Mia and Milo—who fall in love in the middle of everything falling apart. Their seizures, eating disorders, and depression are not plot points. They’re part of the ecosystem of being alive, of trying to love while the mind betrays the body.

To write them honestly, I had to sit with discomfort—not romanticize it, not simplify it. Their story isn’t about illness being “overcome.” It’s about learning to dance anyway, to create rhythm in silence, to choose tomorrow again and again. Healing, I’ve learned, is not a straight line. It’s a pulse.

Some Species of Outsider-ness: The Art of Being Seen

With Some Species of Outsider-ness, I turned to adolescence—that fragile threshold where identity and illness often collide. Piper and Slater aren’t defined by bipolar disorder or Guillain-Barré Syndrome. They are artists, friends, detectives of their own souls.

Writing them reminded me that mental illness doesn’t erase humanity; it reframes it. Sometimes the most radical act is to let a character (or ourselves) be messy, brilliant, contradictory—to live beyond diagnosis and still belong to the story.

Why We Write About Pain

There’s a quiet fear that writing about mental health will label you forever: as fragile, unstable, confessional. But the truth is, these stories expand what we mean by human. To tell them with nuance, empathy, and artistic integrity is an act of resistance—against stigma, silence, and the myth that suffering must be hidden to be healed.

Art doesn’t fix us. But it listens when nothing else will.

The Work Beyond the Page

Healing is collaborative. It happens in therapy rooms, hospital corridors, family kitchens, and art studios. I’ve found it in the layered textures of mixed-media collage—the way torn paper, thread, and pigment remind me that wholeness is made of fragments. My visual art, like my writing, speaks the same truth: repair is not about erasing the seams. It’s about learning to love their pattern.

So when I write, I try to honor the body and the mind as storytellers in equal measure—both fallible, both sacred.

For Anyone Writing Through It

If you are writing through mental illness or recovery, know this: your story matters, even if it never becomes a book. You don’t have to be healed to make art. You only have to be honest. Write from the tremor, not despite it.
Make beauty from the static. And let your words remind someone—maybe even yourself—that being alive is still an art form.