Tag: writing for mental health

Letters Never Sent: The Language of Almost-Love

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

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

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

1. Cartography of the Heart

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

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

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

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2. The Letters We Don’t Send

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

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

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

3. Whimsy’s Map of Wonder

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

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

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

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4. The Language of Almost

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

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

5. What We Keep

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

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

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

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6. The Cartography of Closure

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

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

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

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

7. To Timothy, Across Time

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

Dear Timothy,

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

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

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

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

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

When Fiction Heals the Dreamer: Writing Trauma as Art

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There’s a quiet moment that comes after finishing a dark book—that first deep inhale, the feeling that the air has changed somehow. That’s what writing Long Since Buried felt like for me. I’d exhaled years of unspoken fear, and when the final chapter ended, the silence that followed wasn’t emptiness. It was relief.

But the story didn’t stop on the page. Healing never does.

What I learned in therapy—and later through mindfulness—is that creative survival isn’t about mastering pain; it’s about making room for it to transform. Long Since Buried gave the nightmare form. Bedridden & Gutted to Mindful taught me how to live beyond it.

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The Two Languages of Survival

In therapy, I discovered that trauma speaks two dialects: chaos and control. Fiction became my translation of chaos—the wild, cinematic projection of buried emotion. Mindfulness became my translation of control—the patient return to breath, to the present, to what is still possible.

Writing Long Since Buried was visceral. It bled from dreamscapes and flashbacks, the body remembering danger. Every paragraph was an adrenaline pulse, an echo of that twelve-year-old’s terror.

Writing Bedridden & Gutted to Mindful was slower—a reclamation of quiet. It was learning to listen to the world again, one heartbeat at a time. While the thriller roared, the memoir whispered. Both, however, were love letters to survival written in different tongues.

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The Mind–Body Bridge

Trauma divides us—the mind races ahead while the body stays trapped in old danger. Through therapy I learned how narrative and mindfulness work together to build a bridge back to wholeness.

Fiction let me remember safely. I could approach the pain through story, where characters held the fear for me. Mindfulness let me return safely. It anchored me to the now, reminding me that the threat was past.

I began to see that the very act of creating—forming sentences, describing light, naming sensation—was neurological repair. The brain’s storytelling instinct and the body’s breathing instinct are twin healers. Together they weave coherence from chaos.

When readers tell me Long Since Buried feels immersive, I know it’s because I wrote it with my entire nervous system. When they tell me Bedridden & Gutted to Mindful feels calming, it’s because I wrote it with the same system finally at rest.

Writing the Body Back Home

During therapy, my clinician once said, “The body keeps score, but it also keeps rhythm.” That sentence changed how I wrote. I started noticing rhythm everywhere—the pattern of my steps, the cadence of my sentences, the rise and fall of my breath.

In Bedridden & Gutted to Mindful, I intentionally explored this rhythm. The prose mirrors the inhale–exhale cycle: tension, release; grief, gratitude. It’s structured mindfulness, disguised as narrative.

In Long Since Buried, rhythm became heartbeat and gunshot—the percussive language of suspense that mirrors trauma’s pacing: freeze, run, breathe. The thriller was the storm; the mindfulness memoir was the still water after.

Together, they compose a symphony of the same theme: how the body returns to itself after being lost in fear.

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Why the Dark Still Matters

People sometimes ask why I continue to explore the dark—murder, secrets, obsession—after publishing a book devoted to calm and healing. I think it’s because darkness isn’t the opposite of peace; it’s the doorway to it.

Writing thrillers like Long Since Buried allows me to enter that darkness on my own terms. The fear that once hunted me now waits on the page, obedient to craft. Through fiction, I can orchestrate the chaos that once consumed me. Through mindfulness, I can sit beside it without flinching.

The two practices are not opposites—they are partners. One dives deep into the abyss; the other teaches how to resurface without drowning.

The Craft of Compassion

When I teach or speak about writing through trauma, I remind others that craft and compassion are inseparable. Good storytelling isn’t about dramatizing suffering; it’s about humanizing it. The line between a scene of violence and a scene of healing is empathy—for the characters, for the reader, for yourself.

While revising Long Since Buried, I played with quiet moments amid tension—the smell of coffee in a sheriff’s office, the tremor of a hand brushing against a windowpane—small reminders that even in fear, life insists on beauty.

In Bedridden & Gutted to Mindful, compassion showed up differently: as permission to rest, to not perform recovery as productivity. I wrote those pages with gentleness, the way you might speak to a frightened animal—softly, patiently, without sudden movement.

Both books required the same heartbeat of grace: You survived. Now, what will you make from the pieces?

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Creativity as Continuum

Looking back, I can trace a clear lineage between the two works—between the hunted girl of Long Since Buried and the healing woman of Bedridden & Gutted to Mindful.

  • One wrote from the wound.
  • The other wrote from the scar.

Together they tell a larger truth: healing is not an endpoint but a continuum of creation. We write the pain to understand it, and we write the peace to remember it.

If Long Since Buried was the exorcism, Bedridden & Gutted to Mindful was the benediction.

A Note to the Dreamers

If you’ve ever woken from a nightmare that feels too real, or carried a story inside you that no one believes—this is for you. You are not alone in the dark. The act of writing, painting, singing, or simply breathing through it is a radical declaration: I am still here.

Fiction may not heal the wound, but it can build a bridge to the part of you that wants to. Mindfulness may not erase memory, but it teaches you to hold it gently, without letting it consume you. Every story we tell from a place of survival becomes a lighthouse for someone still lost at sea. That’s why we keep creating. Not because we’ve conquered the dark—but because we’ve learned to live with its light inside us.

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In Closing, A Reflection…

When I look at my bookshelf now, I see not just titles but testaments. Long Since Buried stands as the girl’s scream turned into structure. Bedridden & Gutted to Mindful stands as the woman’s whisper turned into prayer.

Between them runs a thread of ink, breath, and bravery—proof that stories born of pain can become the architecture of peace.

And perhaps that’s the most honest definition of healing I know:
Not erasing the nightmare,
But rewriting it until it learns how to dream.

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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.

Book review for Writing for Bliss: A 7-step Plan for Telling Your Story and Transforming Your Life by Diana Raab

“Bliss may be defined as a natural direction to take to maximize your sense of joy and sense of fulfillment and performance. It is more powerful than happiness.” Writing and Bliss is about writing for therapy, for healing, and for transformation. It is about journaling (documenting and getting in touch with your feelings) which is a cathartic and safe way to spill out your stress or pain by being a storyteller which helps us understand and make sense of our lived experiences, the lessons we learned and our dreams for the future to help us transform to becoming aware of, facing, and becoming responsible for one’s thoughts and feelings.

In preparation to write, the author tells of the necessity of a writer, which is voraciously reading by being a seeker on the path to self-discovery. The book explains how to set up a writing spot, grounding, feeling gratitude, the connection of mind, body, and spirit, calming your mind, being fearless and courageous, and nurturing creativity, inspiration, and flow. Also interesting was the part of cultivating awareness, recalling your dreams, setting intentions and creative visualizations. Finding your voice, reflective writing, memory, and imagination were a good precursor to examining your life which encompasses purposes and themes, the meaning of experiences, the patterns in our lives, writing about difficult times, and sharing stories to heal the inner child.

Finding your writing form was also explained well, whether it be journaling, stream-of-conscious writing, memoir writing, poetry, or fiction. I particularly liked how the author wrote about the courage to write poetry as well as the necessity in reading poems of all kinds, shapes, and sizes. I also made numerous sticky notes focusing on the handy table of writing prompts. It gives you a starting place to find your bliss. This book is a keeper. Get yours here and read it in its entirety.

Until my next post, why not check out my YA novels about mental illness, memoir writing, or even my Native American mystery series on Amazon, or follow me on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Goodreads, LinkedIn, Bookbub , BookSprout, or AllAuthor.

Memoir Writing for Mental Health (Details—Part Three) Mapping Out Memories

Where do you get the details to put in a memoir? How do you remember things from so long ago? Which ones are the correct memories to use? How do I connect them?

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You will now gather the particular details and make them universal so your reader can connect with the words you write. Use one part exertion to one part grace as you engage all your senses and summarize the events when you need to pick up pace and intersperse narration with scenes, dialogue, and action to allow the reader to experience your life through their eyes. Be sophisticated and subtle but don’t get preachy.

First things first, let’s set out your timeline of important events in your life.

  • Aha moments
  • My wake-up calls
  • Event that I’ve survived
  • What I know now that I’d wish I’d known back then
  • Think eight-word logline
  • Moments of epiphany
  • What you’d be willing to sacrifice to protect your deepest truths
  • What would you die for?
  • Times of crisis, losing all hope and how you recovered
  • Experiences that have shaken your sense of meaning
  • What you must bury

Don’t forget to add local and world events to give the reader a sense of history. Our timeline (time + space) is our setting. Use your chosen theme to find elements to illuminate your setting then sprinkle the elements of plot. Don’t forget that an easy life is a dull life so add turning points or obstacles or conflict that caused us to scurry in a new direction. These trials and tribulations where your life didn’t run smoothly give your story flavor. Allow your character passions and obsessions reveal your theme. Remember that you’re not writing an autobiography (life to death) but a memoir (highlight of a given time). You want to be deep yet selective. On this timeline, you’ll determine where to start your story, which point of view to use to emphasize plot, eliminating backstory and focusing on plot, where to sprinkle flashbacks and memories, emotional pacing, and where to end your story. Begin with 5-8 key points and then turns those into 40-50 scenes.

Keep in mind that you can tell the story in a linear fashion (moving forward through time), begin with the ending and work backwards, the twist where we invert expectations we’ve been building all along, a sequence of events moving through fascinating experiences, a story within a story, or non-linear (moving between past and present). While you proceed in the way you chose, remember to tease with tension (foreshadowing events, deadlines, warnings, premonitions, withholding information, building anticipation, and surprises or secrets) to keep your reader on their toes.

Now use your universal voice to gather those details to emotionally activate your reader. The first thing we write is our gateway to delve into our truth or felt experiences, where it may even be scary to say out loud, instead take a risk, and make your heart race. Use your opening lines to hook your reader, make them care, and feel they are in a reliable storyteller’s hands. Shock, grip, or compel them to fascinate in your words. If you lose your way, the real work starts, and your journey begins. Examine the complexity of multifaceted events (great, tragic, desperate, and undetermined). Use your voice to create a connection from your personal to the universal so your reader will understand the significant meaning. Feel deeply to evoke the emotional experience. Allow the reader to connect their own stories with our experience.

Now it’s time to tighten and trim your manuscript by editing it. Analyze the pace, setting, point of view, structure, plot holes, character arcs, and voice. Then it comes the time to seek out constructive feedback. Let it go and it will come back to you with suggestions that will put it in a new light. It was a long, tenuous road but you mapped it out which made it easier. Voila!

Until my next post, why not check out my YA novels about mental illness, memoir writing, or even my Native American mystery series on Amazon, or follow me on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Goodreads, LinkedIn, Bookbub , BookSprout, or AllAuthor.

Memoir Writing for Mental Health (Details—Part Two)

What type of memoir do you choose to write? Thematically based or on a particular timeframe. Some common themes are death of a loved one, career, marriage, childbirth, moving to a new home or town, etc. What are the important moments that stand out for you with the chosen theme or timeframe?

Once you understand how plot, character, and theme all work together, chances are good that, if you get one of them right, you’ll get all three right.

K.M. Weiland, Creating Character Arcs: The Masterful Author’s Guide to Uniting Story Structure, Plot, and Character Development

Let’s take a moment to figure out the story arc of the main character: you. Why? Because over the span of your memoir, you change, people change. Where you begin isn’t the same place as where you end. How did you change? Stronger, happier, married, divorced, alone, wiser, or maybe more resilient? Did you escape abuse and are stronger for it? After a bad marriage, did you find the love of your life? Was that challenging career that you had to sacrifice family time for worth it? Did you prove a naysayer wrong and succeeded at something? Or was it rags to riches? How did your personality change? How did you change? That is your character arc.

If you can’t recite your elevator pitch at the drop of a hat, stay home.

Aliza Licht, Leave Your Mark

Now lets take your chosen type of memoir and add it to the character arc. What do you get? Your memoir logline or its elevator pitch that describes what your memoir is about in a brief paragraph or even a couple of sentences?

Did you run yourself from riches to rags in a span of a few years by being a shopaholic? What did that teach you? Did you work as a missionary in Africa during your twenties? Were you a doula in Guatemala for a brief time? Did you serve in the military and saw combat? Are you a cancer survivor? If so, how did that make you grow as a person? You should have your logline (elevator pitch) by now.

The scariest moment is always just before you start.

Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

So, let’s get to the outline. You can use Writer’s Blocks software and title each column a chapter head, a spreadsheet, or even use a sheet of paper to list the chapter numbers down one side. Titling the chapters with important events from the thematically based or timeframe-based memoir that you chose above gives you a starting point as to what each chapter will be about. It’s best to start with a small number of chapters like ten which gives you a good place to begin. Then write 2-4 smaller events or scenes that occurred under each chapter heading. When your done with that go one step further and note 3 even minor events that occurred under those headings. It’s perfectly okay to have some blank lines. You’ll fill those in later. Voila! You have your outline. (If your using Writer’s Blocks software, hit the manuscript transfer to outline format tab and you’ll have your outline typed up for you.) With Writer’s Blocks you can drop and drag your events into a different order or altogether different chapters, and you can expound on your notes or headings. You can expound on an major or minor event of even subtract from it. It’s completely up to you about how much information you wish to share or keep to yourself.

Syd Field’s 3-act Structure

Now let’s get to the structure. I use Syd Field’s paradigm story structure worksheet. It’s meant for screenplays but it will work for any type of book structure with a beginning, middle, and end. You can find a pdf of that here. (If you’re interested in an example of how to fill out the paradigm you can click here.) But for the memoir project, the paradigm structure is to show you the story arc. If you want to break it down further, you can look into the 4-act structure as is in Larry Brooks’ Story Engineering. If you clicked on that page, you could also check out Rachael Herron’s books, one of which is on memoir building.

Larry Brooks’ 4-act Structure

Now on your outline, divide up the chapters according to either the 3-act structure or 4-act structure. Think: beginning, middle, and end. If you want even further instruction, you can check out Blake Snyder’s Beat Sheet. It breaks down the 3-act structure into 15-points or beats, think scenes or minor events. Again, it’s meant for movie screenplays but can easily be adapted for our purpose: memoir.

I suggest before you begin writing your memoir, according to the structure you chose from above that you plan your writing out on a calendar to keep you accountable and motivated. Cross out the days as you see your results. Some days will be better than others as is life. Whatever you do, don’t stop caring. Because when you do, the readers will stop reading. It’s easy to tell when an author gets bored say somewhere in the middle. Try to keep your motivation up.

Every ending is arbitrary, because the end is where you write The end. A period, a dot of punctuation, a point of stasis.

Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride

TIP: Why not write the beginning then the ending? You already know what it is because you lived it. This makes it easier to fill in the rest, or at least to break it down into more manageable bites. Then write to prompt a reaction. Make the reader care, cry, laugh, or empathize. When you’re excited about your writing, so are we. It comes through each page. Just like when you talk on the phone and you can sense the person is smiling, reading the written word is similar. Have you ever read David Sedaris’ work such as Me Talk Pretty One Day or Holidays on Ice? You can just sense the smile on his face as he recounts certain scenes in his life.

Now before you go off to write that memoir that world is waiting to read, here are some other suggestions to help you get to the pulp of the matter. Writers Helping Writers Series (8 book series) that includes such titles as The Emotion Thesaurus, The Conflict Thesaurus, and The Emotional Wound Thesaurus, plus more are extremely helpful during the writing process.

Writers Helping Writers Series

Just think how far you’ll be and how soon you’ll finish if you write just one page a day. That’s 182 pages in half a year which is close to the size of most readable memoirs. If you go to 365 you’re having the reader make a big commitment learning about your life. But if you’ve got that much to say, go for it. There’s always time to edit it down to a manageable size during revision.

For now, write quickly. Get those thoughts out of your mind and down on paper. You can always come back later. But you can’t edit a blank page. So, get to it. And check back for my book reviews of such memoir writing titles as Writing Life Stories: How to Make Memories into Memoirs, Ideas into Essays and Life into Literature by Bill Roorbach, or The Truth of Memoir: How to Write about Yourself and Others with Honesty, Emotion, and Integrity by Kerry Cohen.

The point is, you never know what you can do until you really put yourself out there and try. Do it. Whatever it is. Challenge yourself. If you can’t imagine the finish line, the first step is to just show up. And don’t worry about what everyone else is doing. Run your own race.

Angie Martinez, My Voice: A Memoir

Enjoyed this post? Why not check out my YA novels about mental illness, my memoir writing, or even my Native American mystery series on Amazon, or follow me on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Goodreads, LinkedIn, Bookbub , BookSprout, or AllAuthor.