Category: resiliency approach

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

Photo by Tara Winstead on Pexels.com

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.

The Quiet Work of Staying: Healing in Fragments

Photo by Tara Winstead on Pexels.com

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.

Photo by AS Photography on Pexels.com

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.

Photo by Ann H on Pexels.com

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.

The Language of Healing: Finding Words for the Unspeakable

Photo by Markus Winkler on Pexels.com

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.

Things I Have Learned from My Mental Illness

It sometimes feels really unfair when coming out of psychosis (the depths of a mental illness). Why me? But in order put spin some positivity regarding it, I’d like to mention some things it has taught me about myself. Here are reasons I’m grateful for certain aspects of living with a mental illness.

  • Being grateful for the little or mundane things
  • Sense of achievement
  • A better sense of self
  • Empathy towards other
  • Learning strength of self

Especially when I’ve come out of psychosis, I’ve noticed things with better clarity. The trees are greener, the flowers more vivid, the laughter of a child or anyone for that matter is so musical. I’m grateful for life. Doing the dishes, laundry, swiffering, or cleaning the windows even doesn’t seem like a chore. I lived through the tough moments and treasure the ability to do them.

I’ve got an incredible sense of achievement for struggling through something terrifying and coming out on the other end. I pick myself up by my bootstraps and dust myself off and continue with my responsibilities with an air of accomplishment. That’s because I did something not everyone can say they muddled through and won for the time being.

I have this enhance sense of self that realizes while I have limitations, I can challenge them. My confidence is earned, and I set the bar for future endeavors higher. It makes me more in tune with my personality.

Photo by Andres Ayrton on Pexels.com

My empathy towards others fighting similar battles is more attuned. It’s heartening to learn of others mightily fighting MS or cancer and appreciating their strength to get through each day. I even see the anger or rage in strangers and wonder who or what hurt them so badly that they need to have such a sour demeanor.

While I feel pathetic and weak when I’m coming out of psychosis, I gradually learn how strong and confident I am to tackle the little things to the big things. I’m resilient. Heart palpitations, sweaty hands, trembling body, and nauseousness are merely bumps in the road. I’ve been to the depths of madness and inched my way back. And I’m grateful for the experience to be more attuned to the world around me and have the strength to help others who make mountains out of molehills see the other side of things.

Depression vs. Expression

I attended a class at Pathways Mental Health Crisis Center in uptown Minneapolis about healing the body from trauma, judgment, guilt, pain, anger, or resentments. I learned many things like you need to liberate yourself from guilt and shame by embracing the pain because you battled it and won. For example, if you were abused, acknowledge the vulnerable remains within your body and move forward. According to one of the many texts we delved into was The Secret by Rhonda Byrne who says something to the effect of what you pay attention to grows stronger so acknowledge the guilt and shame but don’t drown yourself in pain. If its grief holding you back, acknowledge that life is for the living and the spirit of those that have passed stays with you. So, they are never far away; they bathe you in strength.

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.com

If there’s a project, illness, or relationship that makes you feel confined address it then return with the attitude of awareness and cooperation even if it isn’t the case. You can’t make “them” or “it” liberate you; you must do it yourself. That doesn’t mean quit, ignore your body, or leave the other person, just be aware and mentally cooperate with the tension. If it leaves you frustrated, imagine your utmost self thriving and evolving. Refuse to be stunted, welcome growth and new change.

Photo by Liza Summer on Pexels.com

Don’t live in distress because it causes the body to remain in a state of depression or regression and it can cause or agitate illness. If it’s stress, embrace the experience and grow from it. If it’s an irrational, obnoxious, or arrogant person, step back and think about what has their presence in your life sought to teach you. Refuse to judge negatively whether it be a person, thing, or experience. Confront any suffering and liberate yourself from the pain afterward.

Photo by Ann H on Pexels.com

Use resilience to avoid being stuck in denial and delusion because it’s temporary and you’re strong enough to see that truth. Think about how far you’ve come and refuse to be discouraged with what you accomplished. Greet the future you with hopeful curiosity. Imagine any anger as if it’s standing before you and battle it until it disappears then forgive it, whether it’s a person, an illness, or an experience. Just because you forgive doesn’t mean that you have to subject yourself to any further drama or pain by keeping them or the pain in your life. If you were abused or harmed in any way, forgive the abuser then forget the judgment. Don’t be a victim because what happened is in the past. Write it down succinctly then tear it up. It’s not you anymore. Let your resilience express gratitude for what the person, illness, or experience has taught you, built you up, made you the best self that you are despite their effect on your life.

Photo by Yan Krukov on Pexels.com

Heal the bad feelings by meditating, doing yoga, or by doing a body scan which is where you lie down and focus on one part of the body and acknowledge how it feels. Start with your head and go to toes and really feel the tension, sadness, or anger and release it. Move onward and upward and refuse to neglect yourself anymore, instead express yourself. Sit with dignity!

Examine doubts and ease them.

Photo by Polina Zimmerman on Pexels.comupset woman looking in mirror

Doubt is a natural response like fear and joy. We shouldn’t try to beat it as if it were our enemy. Like fear, doubt can sometimes save our life. Some self-doubt is reasonable: I doubt I can jump from this building to the next or I doubt my legs would handle jumping from this roof. These doubts have in common their scientific fact or what we’ve learned about the strength and durability of human leg bones.

Where we get into trouble with self-doubt is when it’s based on assumptions or on limiting beliefs that have no basis in fact. Those assumptions and beliefs have us to avoid new challenges that confront us with the possibility of failure. But they also prevent us from learning the truth of who we are and what we’re capable of. We can’t believe in ourselves and hold onto these assumptions that others have passed down about the world and our place in it.

So, we need to start facing those doubts with some pointed questions like is this really true, do I believe it only because someone else has said this, is there any fact-based reason to believe it, or what could I do to put this belief to the test?

Mental illness can play havoc with our doubts. Sometimes we can confront them on our own if we have the insight available. Other times it’s helpful to go over these questions to poke at assumptions or limiting beliefs.

We must take baby steps.

babe steps

Instead of telling ourselves, “This could never happen for me,” we must ask ourselves, “What can I do to bring this closer to me?”

It doesn’t have to be a huge step. We don’t have to make it happen all at once. But we need to do something — at least one small thing — every day to get closer to the life we want. We need to do one small thing to get closer to being the person we want to be.

To do this, we need to get clear on the end goal.

So, let’s make a list of why we want something, get committed to the end goal, and then get transparent on what small steps are needed to take each day to get closer to it.

  • What do I want?
  • Why do I want it?
  • Why do those reasons matter to me?
  • What is the end goal? How do I want to see myself a year (or more) from now?
  • What can I do today to get closer to that?

Every day that we make a small step is a success! We’re proving to ourselves that we can do it when we want the end result badly enough to commit to it.

And in so doing, we build up our self-confidence. Other people’s limiting opinions on what we’re capable of no longer have any power over us. And neither do the limiting thoughts we used to have.

baby steps

Believing in ourselves doesn’t mean saying, “I’m 100% finished with my self-growth, and I don’t need to change anything or learn anything more.”

When we know the truth about ourselves, we know that we’re born to keep growing, keep learning, and keep contributing.

When we believe in ourselves, we know we’re worth the investments we need to make in our personal growth.

We know we’re smart enough, strong enough, and capable enough to do what is needed to do to become the person we want to be.

It doesn’t mean we’re not enough as we are. Being enough doesn’t mean we have permission to stop growing; it means we have what it takes to keep growing.

Because we do. We need to believe in that, first of all. Then build on it.

And may our courage and unshakable belief in ourselves influence everything else we do today.

Giving Ourselves Permission Fail at Something

failure

Self-doubt is essentially about the fear of failure, and when we practice self-confidence and move forward anyway, we build on that confidence — just as we build courage the more we step up in the presence of fear.

The most successful people have failed more times than most people even try. The danger is mostly to the ego, but that can recover.

Giving ourselves permission to fail in an endeavor could lead to something great; if we don’t make it the first time, we get to learn from what we did wrong. Then we can try again at that same challenge or pivot and apply what we’ve learned to another similar task or something altogether different.

When we fail — and if we’re actually trying and taking risks, we probably will — but can’t focus on the failure itself but on what led to it and what we can learn from the experience.

Those who become the people they want to be, choose to focus on what they can learn from their failures instead of getting stuck in a failure is inevitable mentality.

What this mentality says is “maybe other people could succeed at this, but not me…whatever I do, I’m bound to fail.” But again this isn’t based on fact but on a fear-based assumption.

The fact is that if we survived this failure, we can learn from it and do better next time – at the same challenge or a different one.

And we owe it to ourselves to keep moving in a growth-oriented direction.

You-make-mistakes.-Mistakes-dont__quotes-by-Maxwell-Maltz-43

We are not our mistakes. What determines our outcome and the person we become is how we handle those mistakes.