Category: writing about dreams

The Real Magic Is Survival: Reimagining Girlhood Through Myth

There is a kind of myth that begins not with a goddess or a monster, but with a girl—ordinary, fragile, luminous in her unknowing. She doesn’t lift a sword or command the seas. Her weapon is quieter: endurance. Her myth begins the moment she decides to live.

In my novels—Some Species of Outsider-ness, Whimsy and Bliss, Dreamcatcher, The Cartography of First Love, The Shadows We Carry, and Dancing Without Music—I return again and again to this quieter mythology of survival. These are stories where mental illness, trauma, and identity fracture are not narrative detours but sacred terrains. Where girls and boys on the edge of unraveling become the new myth-makers—reclaiming the right to define themselves, to choose love in the face of despair, to say: I am still here.

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Girlhood as Mythic Terrain

For too long, the myths told about girls—especially those living with mental illness—have been either tragic or ornamental. They are Ophelia, drowned; Persephone, abducted; the muse, never the maker. But the modern myth I want to tell is not one of passivity. It’s about the interior odyssey: what it means to fight through panic and self-doubt, through disordered thoughts and despair, and to still reach toward connection.

In Some Species of Outsider-ness, Piper and Slater—two teens navigating bullying, chronic illness, and a dark web of secrets—are outsiders not because they are weak, but because they see too much. Their sensitivity is not a flaw; it’s a kind of second sight. In a world obsessed with belonging, they learn that empathy can be both their wound and their weapon. Their survival is the magic.

Whimsy and Bliss reimagines the coming-of-age myth as a map of thin places—the unseen seams between childhood wonder and adult loss. Abigail Whimsy, ever the dreamer, and Lainey Bliss, her pragmatic counterpart, move through a lakeside summer like two halves of the same soul, searching for the portals where wonder still seeps through. It’s less about escaping reality than about expanding it—about realizing that the magic we’re looking for was always inside the friendship itself. Girlhood, here, is its own mythic realm: ordinary and holy, bruised and glittering.

Mental Illness as Modern Myth

To write about mental illness is to write about thresholds. Between the seen and unseen. Between the mind that betrays and the mind that longs to heal. In The Cartography of First Love, Zibby and Nico meet inside a psychiatric unit—a place both sterile and sacred. Their story isn’t about illness as spectacle, but about love as witness. Within those six weeks, they trace the coordinates of first love across therapy rooms, greenhouses, and whispered library exchanges.

There’s a map inside both of them, drawn in scars and tenderness. The miracle isn’t that they find each other—it’s that they find themselves. Years later, when they meet again by chance, the question isn’t whether love survives time, but whether healing does. The myth of recovery is rarely linear. It spirals, it falters, it returns. It asks us to keep choosing life, even when it hurts.

Mia and Milo, the central pair in Dancing Without Music, echo this theme in a rawer, more dangerous register. Two teens falling in love while their worlds are falling apart: Mia fighting an eating disorder, Milo hiding seizures and depression. Their story—threaded with bullying, trauma, addiction—pulls from the real language of survival. These aren’t heroes in shining armor. They’re kids clawing their way toward light through the rubble of social media cruelty, systemic failure, and internal chaos.

Their resilience is not romanticized. It’s messy, imperfect, human. Love doesn’t save them—but it steadies them long enough to seek help, to speak truth, to begin the slow choreography of recovery. The real dance, as the title suggests, happens in silence—in the small, defiant act of staying alive when everything tells you not to.

Dream as Ancestral Healing

If Dancing Without Music is rooted in realism, Dreamcatcher drifts through the luminous realm of allegory. Here, girlhood is not only psychological terrain but spiritual inheritance. Dash, a Dakota Sioux girl grieving her parents’ mysterious deaths, touches a dreamcatcher in her window and falls through clouds into Baumwelt—a world woven from collective memory and ancestral wisdom.

In Baumwelt, survival takes the form of mythic questing: dragons, shapeshifters, and lands that mirror trauma back as a test. But beneath its fantasy lies the same heartbeat as every other book I’ve written—the belief that facing one’s fears, honoring one’s lineage, and listening to the quiet voice within can heal what the world tries to silence. Dash learns that courage isn’t the absence of fear but the decision to keep walking through it.

In this way, Dreamcatcher becomes an Indigenous-inflected myth of reclamation: the sacred task of remembering who you are when the world forgets. The land itself participates in her recovery. It’s not an escape from pain—it’s a return to belonging.

The Inheritance of Shadows

The Shadows We Carry extends that mythic inheritance into adolescence and womanhood, where mental illness and memory intertwine. This novel asks: What do we carry that isn’t ours? Which stories, silences, and stigmas do we inherit from generations past?

The protagonist’s journey through grief and genetic mental illness becomes a reckoning with family ghosts—literal and figurative. The book suggests that recovery is never solitary. It’s ancestral, collective. Healing ripples backward as well as forward. When one girl chooses therapy, medication, art, or simply another sunrise, she’s rewriting the myth for everyone who came before her.

Survival as Sacred Art

Across these novels, I see a pattern—a constellation of wounded but luminous characters turning their pain into passage. Whether through art (Some Species of Outsider-ness), friendship (Whimsy and Bliss), heritage (Dreamcatcher), love (The Cartography of First Love), or sheer endurance (Dancing Without Music), they transform suffering into story. To survive, they create. To create, they must survive. The loop is sacred.

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In this sense, writing these books has always felt like both ritual and rebellion. Each story emerged during my own seasons of anxiety, loss, or recovery. Each one asked me to reimagine girlhood not as something fragile but as something feral and enduring—a myth of resilience hidden inside every nervous system, every heartbeat, every moment we choose to stay.

When Mia and Milo hold each other after the worst night of their lives, it’s not a fairytale ending. It’s a beginning. When Zibby and Nico meet again after a decade apart, it’s not closure—it’s continuation. When Dash stands at the edge of the dreamworld, deciding whether to return, it’s not escape—it’s integration. Survival, after all, isn’t static. It’s art in motion.

Toward a New Mythology

What would it mean to tell girls—not just in books but in life—that their feelings are not too much, their minds not too broken, their stories not too dark? That inside every panic attack, every relapse, every sleepless night, there’s still a pulse of mythic power saying go on?

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The old myths taught us that magic was external: fire, lightning, divine intervention. The new myths—those of mental health and recovery—teach us that magic is endurance, empathy, and the quiet work of staying.

In the end, the real magic is survival.
It’s the girl who keeps painting when her hands shake.
It’s the boy who takes his meds and still writes poems.
It’s the friendship that outlasts grief.
It’s the love that doesn’t cure you but holds you steady until you can begin to heal yourself. That, to me, is the truest myth—the one we’re all still writing.

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.

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.