Category: social withdrawal

Every Recording Has a Ghost: When Trauma Changes What We Hear and Remember

There is something unsettling about an old recording. A photograph freezes what someone looked like. A recording does something different. It brings the person back into the room with their breathing, pauses, and hesitation before answering a question. Their voice hasn’t aged even though everyone who heard it the first time has.

That idea sits at the center of my forthcoming, soon-to-be-released novel, Every Recording Has a Ghost, which kept me up nights to complete because of the intensity and proximity the subject is for me. The ghosts in this book aren’t necessarily the kind that walk through walls. Some of them live in memory. Some live in trauma. And some were deliberately put there by other people.

The Real Mental Illness Beneath the Suspense

Every Recording Has a Ghost follows podcaster Remy Ireland as she becomes caught in a mystery involving old cassette recordings, a psychiatric hospital, missing information, manipulated memories, and a past she has never fully escaped.

Remy also lives with something much less mysterious: anxiety. For her, the telephone itself can be a source of dread. Calling a stranger, being transferred, waiting on hold, wondering whether she’s explaining herself correctly, and hearing the ringing continue while she waits for someone to answer. These aren’t supernatural experiences. They’re recognizable forms of anxiety. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, anxiety disorders involve more than ordinary temporary worry. They can persist, become difficult to control, and interfere with work, relationships, school, and everyday life. NIMH estimates that roughly 31% of American adults experience an anxiety disorder sometime during their lives.

And mental illness as a whole is far from rare. The latest available national survey from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration found that 23.4% of U.S. adults—about 61.5 million people—experienced a mental illness during 2024. About 14.6 million experienced a serious mental illness. That means mental illness isn’t some unusual condition belonging only to characters in frightening books. It is part of ordinary families, workplaces, marriages, and lives. That distinction matters to me when I write psychological suspense.

Trauma Doesn’t Always Stay in the Past

One of the ideas running through Every Recording Has a Ghost is that something can be over and still not be finished. Trauma works that way. Someone can leave a hospital, leave a relationship, survive an accident, grow older, move away, build an entirely different life, and still discover that the nervous system remembers things the conscious mind would rather forget.

People exposed to traumatic events can experience anxiety, anger, sleep problems, difficulty concentrating, intrusive thoughts, and heightened reactions afterward. Most people’s reactions lessen with time, but when symptoms persist and significantly interfere with daily functioning, they may become part of post-traumatic stress disorder. People with PTSD can experience frightening memories, emotional numbness or detachment, sleep disturbances, and an exaggerated startle response.

That exaggerated awareness of possible danger is especially important to Remy’s story. Because once someone has learned that something terrible can happen, the brain can become very good at watching for the next terrible thing. A ringing telephone can stop being merely a telephone. A hallway can stop being merely a hallway. A person’s tone of voice can become evidence. And a cassette tape can become something you are almost afraid to play.

When the Brain Starts Searching for Threat

One of the strangest things about anxiety is that it can make uncertainty feel dangerous. You don’t know what the person on the other end of the telephone will say, why someone hasn’t answered, what is hidden on a recording, or whether the pause you heard meant anything. The anxious brain often wants an explanation immediately. And when it doesn’t get one, it starts creating possibilities. What if something happened? What if I misunderstood? What if they are angry? What if I said the wrong thing? What if this means something worse?

That thought pattern can create an exhausting cycle in which uncertainty produces anxiety, anxiety increases vigilance, and vigilance discovers even more things to worry about. It’s one reason Remy’s phone anxiety matters so much to Every Recording Has a Ghost. Her fear isn’t simply a character quirk. It affects the way she investigates. The way she communicates. The way she interprets silence. And sometimes the hardest thing she does isn’t entering an abandoned place or listening to a frightening tape. Sometimes it is simply staying on the telephone.

Memory Is Not a Recording

There is another psychological idea underneath the novel that fascinates me even more. We like to imagine memory as a recording. Something happened. The brain saved it. Years later, we retrieve the file. But human memory doesn’t work exactly that way. Memories can be influenced by attention, emotion, later information, context, suggestion, and the circumstances in which we remember them. That doesn’t mean memory is meaningless. It means memory is human. And that creates frightening possibilities when another person holds authority over the environment in which those memories are being formed.

That possibility becomes much darker inside the psychiatric institution Remy investigates. The hospital archive contains thousands of recordings. Patients were observed, conversations were preserved, identities were manipulated, recordings were edited, and the deeper Remy goes into the archive, the more she begins to understand that the supposedly supernatural story surrounding the hospital may have provided perfect camouflage for something much more human: control.

The Hospital Is Frightening Because People Had Power

I deliberately didn’t want the psychiatric hospital in Every Recording Has a Ghost to be frightening simply because mentally ill people had once lived there. Mental illness isn’t the horror. Vulnerability being exploited is. There is an important difference. The frightening part of the hospital’s history is what can happen when vulnerable people are placed in an environment where someone else controls information, medication, observation, access, interpretation, and authority.

In the novel, sedation, repetition, recorded material, surveillance, and psychological pressure are used together in ways they never should be. It isn’t magic or a supernatural machine capable of instantly controlling someone’s mind; instead, it’s coercion. And that is more disturbing to me. Because human beings don’t need supernatural powers to damage one another. Sometimes they only need access, authority, and someone who isn’t being believed.

What About Hearing Voices?

Because Every Recording Has a Ghost deals so heavily with voices and recordings, there’s another real-world distinction worth making. Hearing a voice that no one else hears can occur as an auditory hallucination. Hallucinations are one possible symptom of psychosis, a group of symptoms involving disrupted perception and thinking and, at times, difficulty distinguishing what is real from what is not. But hearing voices does not automatically mean schizophrenia.

Psychosis can occur in several mental illnesses, and NIMH notes that psychotic symptoms can also be associated with neurological conditions, severe sleep deprivation, some medications, and substance use. A person can also experience psychosis without ultimately being diagnosed with schizophrenia. That distinction is important. Mental illness is far more complicated than the shorthand often used in thrillers and horror stories. And a person experiencing hallucinations is still a person—not a plot device, a threat, or a monster.

In Every Recording Has a Ghost, that uncertainty becomes part of the suspense. When Remy hears something disturbing, the question isn’t automatically: Is she losing her mind? The better questions are: What did she actually hear? Who recorded it? Was it altered? Who wants her to doubt herself? And perhaps most importantly: Who benefits if nobody believes her?

When Other People Define Your Reality

That may be the mental-health theme of this novel that affects me most. There’s something terrifying about being told that your own perception can’t be trusted. Maybe you’re overreacting, misunderstood, remembering it incorrectly. Maybe anxiety is making you imagine things or the recording never said what you thought it said. Sometimes those statements can be true. Anxiety can distort perception. Memory can be imperfect. Mental illness can affect the way someone experiences reality. But those facts can also be weaponized. A person’s diagnosis should never mean that everything they say can automatically be dismissed.

That distinction becomes increasingly important for Remy as she uncovers what happened inside the hospital. Because once people know you’re frightened, anxious, traumatized, or psychologically vulnerable, it becomes very easy for someone acting in bad faith to say: See? That’s why she thinks this happened. And suddenly the illness becomes more believable than the witness.

Why Recordings?

I keep coming back to recordings because they seem permanent. You can doubt a memory, question a witness, and argue about what somebody thought they heard twenty years ago. But then someone presses PLAY. There’s the voice, breath, room noise, interruption, and sentence that shouldn’t be there. And suddenly the past has evidence. At least, we want to believe it does. But recordings can be edited too. They can be taken out of context. Someone can decide when to begin recording and when to stop. A person asking the questions can influence the answers. A tape can preserve the truth. It can also preserve someone’s version of it. That ambiguity is where Every Recording Has a Ghost lives.

The Ghost May Be the Person You Used to Be

There’s another kind of ghost in the novel: the earlier version of ourselves, the nineteen-year-old who was terrified, the person who didn’t know what was happening yet, who believed an authority figure, who kept quiet, and who survived something and then spent years trying to make it smaller. Trauma can create a strange relationship with time. Something that happened decades earlier can suddenly feel emotionally close when a reminder brings it forward. A voice can do that, as can music, a smell, a room, a telephone ringing, or an old cassette with your name written across it.

That is the part of Every Recording Has a Ghost that feels most real to me. We carry earlier versions of ourselves everywhere. Most days they remain quiet. Then something presses PLAY.

Every Recording Has a Ghost

The title began as something eerie. The longer I worked on the book, the more literal it became in a completely different way. Every recording contains someone who no longer exists exactly as they did when it was made. The person has aged, changed, recovered, forgotten, remembered differently, disappeared, or died, but the recording hasn’t moved. It waits. And when someone listens again, the past and present occupy the same room.

That is where Remy Ireland finds herself in Every Recording Has a Ghost. She begins by investigating recordings. Eventually, she realizes the recordings are investigating her past too. The novel contains mystery, cold cases, an abandoned institutional history, manipulated audio, hidden surveillance, phone anxiety, trauma, memory, and voices that seem impossible to explain. But beneath all of that is something much more ordinary. The human need to understand what happened to us. And the fear that once we finally know the truth, we may never be able to put it back where we found it. Because sometimes a ghost isn’t a dead person. Sometimes it is a memory that finally found its voice.

Now Available: Where Voices Go to Hide

 

A Haunting New Phone-Anxiety Thriller by Angela Grey


What happens when every telephone call reveals more than the person on the other end intends to say? Where Voices Go to Hide, the first novel in Angela Grey’s new Phone Anxiety Thriller series, is now available.

Elena Sterling has always dreaded answering the phone. The ringing triggers an immediate surge of fear—the racing heart, tightened chest, shallow breathing, and overwhelming urge to let the call go unanswered. But Elena’s fear is not simply ordinary phone anxiety. When she finally answers, she hears two voices. One belongs to the person speaking. The other reveals what they are trying desperately to conceal. Buried beneath polite greetings and carefully chosen words, Elena hears fragments of terror, guilt, resentment, and violence. She hears thoughts that were never meant to leave the safety of another person’s mind.

Then an unknown woman calls Elena’s fiancé. The woman’s voice sounds controlled, but beneath it Elena hears panic. She also hears a thought belonging to her fiancé, Theo Lockhart: Not again. Those two words open the door to a pattern of missing women, carefully protected secrets, and a past Theo refuses to explain. As Elena begins questioning everything she believed about the man she loves, the telephone becomes both her greatest source of evidence and the instrument of her deepest fear. Every call brings her closer to the truth. Every voice gives her another reason not to trust anyone. And someone already knows what Elena can hear.

A Thriller Born from a Real Fear 

Where Voices Go to Hide was inspired in part by my own experience with phone anxiety, sometimes called telephobia. For people who experience it, an incoming call can cause genuine emotional and physical distress. The sound of a ringing telephone may trigger dread, racing thoughts, nausea, trembling, difficulty breathing, or an intense fear of saying the wrong thing. Even listening to a voicemail or returning a routine call can feel overwhelming.

I wanted to explore what might happen if someone already terrified of telephone conversations suddenly had an even greater reason to fear answering. What if every caller carried a hidden voice? What if silence felt safer—but answering was the only way to stop something terrible?

About the Novel

Blending psychological suspense, relationship secrets, missing-person mystery, and the claustrophobic fear of unwanted communication, Where Voices Go to Hide follows a woman whose unusual ability forces her to confront truths that others have spent years concealing. The novel explores:

Phone anxiety and the fear of unexpected communication
Secrets hidden within intimate relationships
The difference between spoken words and private intentions
Manipulation, obsession, and buried guilt
The dangerous consequences of believing you alone can hear the truth

This is a dark, atmospheric thriller for readers who enjoy morally complicated characters, unsettling domestic secrets, psychological tension, and stories in which the person uncovering the mystery may be hiding something too.

The Beginning of a New Series

Where Voices Go to Hide introduces the Phone Anxiety Thriller series, a collection of suspense novels centered on telephone calls, concealed voices, private fears, and the terrible things people reveal when they believe no one can hear what they are truly thinking.

The next installment, A Frequency of Secrets, is currently in development. The telephone may stop ringing. The voices do not.

Get Your Copy

Where Voices Go to Hide by Angela Grey is now available in paperback and ebook formats. Step into Elena Sterling’s world—but think carefully before answering the next call. Some voices speak aloud. Others wait beneath the words. And some truths should never be heard.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.

Regarding Letters to the Author

There’ve been a few letters from young adults that I’ve put on the back burner over the last six months, but the similarities between them don’t seem to decrease, as with the latest of this week. With this latest one, I wanted to strongly encourage anyone going through similar situations to talk to an adult or call a helpline and speak to anyone who will listen. The National Sexual Assault Hotline has confidential (anonymous) help 24/7 and can be reached at 1.800.656.4673 or find them at online.rainn.org.

My story revealed in the above two books only ended after intervention with kindhearted first responders and social workers. There is a way out of that dysfunction, and it might not be the way those involved in your situation may be suggesting, so please call the National Sexual Assault Hotline.

Regarding the recurring theme of forgiveness, I believe I’ve forgiven my stepfather(s) and my mother for choosing him and turning her back on her daughter. As it was pointed out in two of the letters from you readers that I received earlier this year, if I genuinely forgave them, then I should be able to reconnect with my birth family. I’ve heard that before, too. That’s not always the case. I wish all of them the best and that the light of God/Creator shines down on them abundantly. I just don’t have the mental fortitude to put myself in their presence or that environment. Each person in similar situations will be able to handle things better or worse to varying degrees. Just because they tell you to forgive them and get over it doesn’t mean you can or should without outside intervention in the form of the National Sexual Assault Hotline, teachers, therapists, or social workers, especially not if you’re underage. And yes, seventeen is still a minor. Don’t listen to anyone that tells you that you’re an adult and should buck up.

I appreciate the letters and emails I receive about the wide variety of topics and apologize for not addressing this subject matter sooner. Mental fortitude affected my lack of words to tackle the weight of this matter until this most recent connection made it a necessity.

Some Reasons Why There Is Such a Stigma Around Mental Health Problems

Fear of being hurt by the sufferer is one such reason there is stigma about mental health issues. Most people with mental illness aren’t dangerous. And if they are, it’s a danger to themselves. My psychiatrist once said that mental illness doesn’t cause a person to be violent if they didn’t already have that trait.

Contagiousness is another aspect of stigma. People don’t want to catch the mental illness. Sure, they know they can’t catch it, but they worry something similar or lesser may happen to them if they have to think about it. That’s not how a chemical imbalance in the brain works. It’s nature and part nurture that determine if you’ll have mental illness issues. If you see someone with severe depression or mania and then come down with it yourself, it’s because of genetics and/or your environment that brough it on.

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News stories are another trigger of stigma. When there is a shooting or other major crime, the first person the public point fingers at is the people with mental illness such as schizophrenia. That’s farthest from the truth that the mentally ill are inclined to do such damage to others. Those with schizophrenia seek to hide their condition from others and go out of their way to distance themselves from scrutiny so it does not shine the light on their illness. Like I said above, if a person with mental illness is violent, that trait was already there before they were diagnosed which means that shooting or other major crime could’ve been committed by non-sufferers just as likely.

What is social anxiety?

Social anxiety disorder (social phobia) is a chronic mental health condition in which social interactions cause irrational anxiety and fear. Social anxiety disorder typically begins in the teenage years, though it can sometimes start in younger children or in adults.

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If we consider the statistics, according to the National Institute of Mental Health social anxiety is more common among women than men, and approximately 12.1% of U.S. adults experience a social anxiety disorder at some time in their lives. That means that 12 adults in every hundred, struggle with social anxiety, and these numbers are growing every year.

So how can you tell if you’ve got social anxiety? Some of the symptoms are:

  1. avoiding social situations
  2. cancelling plans abruptly
  3. immense guilt when you cancel plans
  4. needing alcohol to face social situations
  5. feeling like you can’t participate
  6. dreading social situations
  7. dreading being outside your safe space (home)
  8. missing school or work due to anxiety
  9. worrying about perceptions of you
  10. overthinking things to say or do
  11. blushing or reddened face
  12. excessive sweating
  13. fast heartbeat when in social situations
  14. talking to strangers
  15. going on dates
  16. meeting new people
  17. making phone calls
  18. making eye contact
  19. using public restrooms
  20. isolating yourself
  21. dizziness in public
  22. muscle tension or twitches when social
  23. stomach trouble when social
  24. dry mouth or throat

At one time or another I’ve experienced many of these. Why? I believe it’s a combination of genetic and environmental factors at play.

The good news is that social anxiety responds very well to medication management; at least for me it has.

If you experience these symptoms for a prolonged period of time, do yourself a favor and seek therapy. No one should have to suffer when there are treatments available to at least alleviate some of the symptoms.