Tag: writing for transformation

The Quiet Work of Staying: Healing in Fragments

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

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

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

1. Fragments as Language

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

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

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

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

2. The Work of Staying

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

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

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

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

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

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3. Healing in Fragments

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

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

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

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

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

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4. The Myth of Wholeness

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

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

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

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

5. What the Outsiders Teach Us

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

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

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

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

6. The Shape of Hope

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

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

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

7. The Quiet Ending

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

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

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

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

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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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.