Is it really possible to write a book and not “insert” parts of your life or pieces of your emotions from the words on the page? If the answer is yes, then I guess I’ve been doing writing all wrong my entire life.

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There have been countless think-pieces about “self-insert” characters. Depending on who you ask, it means three different things: portal fantasy protagonists, authors literally writing themselves into a story, or characters who enter a fictional world with meta-knowledge about it.

But the version people usually criticize—the one that supposedly ruins stories—is the idea that an author is secretly writing an idealized version of themselves.

That can be true sometimes. But I think the real self-insert happens somewhere else entirely.

I guess what I really wanted to talk about in this post is the authors relationships with their writing. I was daydreaming about being on book tour in-conversation with V.E.Schwab (as one does) and in the dream she asked me if I saw myself in any of my characters and what influences the story I told. I’ve thought about this question numerous times, its a seemingly relentless question that I spend way too much time ruminating on, but I think the honest answer for me will always be that my emotions and experiences influence my writing to a large degree.

In my debut novel, The Shape of Dying (unreleased) the story circles three main characters: Detective Walter, Amelia, and Jakob. Amelia is dealing with the loss of her murdered son, Jakob. So with Amelia’s chapters we spend a lot of time circling her emotions surrounding motherhood; because as it turns out, Amelia never wanted to be a mom at first. While I’m not a mother (and do not want to be one), I felt myself being able to connect with her emotionally because many of the things she is feeling, I have felt at one point in my life or another.

In this way, I think I always insert my emotions and experiences into my characters, and I don’t understand how you can write and not do that. A writers first frame of reference is themselves. You can, of course, research what you do not know; however, writing feels more true to me when I can connect with the scenes I’m writing and what the characters are feeling—there is this eternal digging you do as a writer to go deeper and deeper into yourself.

Sometimes that digging is intentional. You sit down at the page knowing exactly which emotion you’re trying to translate—grief, anger, longing, love. But other times it happens without you realizing it. You write a scene, step back from it later, and suddenly recognize something familiar in the character’s reaction. A fear you’ve carried. A memory you thought you had buried. A question you’ve been asking yourself without knowing it.

Writing can feel a little like holding up a mirror you didn’t mean to look into.

Which makes me wonder: is that really such a bad thing? So much of the conversation around “self-insert” characters treats this kind of emotional proximity as a flaw in the writing, as if the ideal author is someone who can stand completely separate from their work. But I’m not sure that separation is actually possible.

And maybe that’s part of what makes writing so terrifying to share. It isn’t just that someone might dislike the plot or the pacing. If our stories are built from our own emotions and experiences, then putting them out into the world doesn’t just feel like sharing a story—it feels like sharing pieces of ourselves.

As humans we yearn to protect the most intimate parts of ourselves, and thats usually fear based. As writers this can show up in questions like: What if people don’t like my writing? What if my writing is not good enough? Can I meet people’s expectations of what my writing should be? Wow, their writing is so much better than mine, so mine can’t possibly be good!

In many ways, writers become their own worst critics long before anyone else has the chance to be. It’s easier to tear our work apart ourselves than risk someone else doing it first. But there’s an important difference between criticism that helps us grow and criticism that simply protects us from being seen. One pushes the work forward; the other keeps it buried.

To me, that’s where the conversation around “self-insert” misses the point. The problem isn’t that writers bring themselves to the page. In many ways, that’s the only way stories gain emotional weight in the first place. Characters become believable not because they perfectly mirror the author, but because the emotions behind them are real.

Every story is built from fragments—memories, fears, questions we haven’t answered yet, feelings we’re still trying to understand. We rearrange them into fictional lives and imagined circumstances, but the emotional core often remains ours. That’s the quiet exchange that happens between writer and character: we lend them our inner world, and in return they help us explore it.

If writing inevitably requires us to draw from our own emotions and experiences, then perhaps the presence of the author in the work isn’t a flaw at all. Maybe it’s simply evidence that the writer was willing to dig deep enough to find something real.

And once the story leaves us, those fragments are no longer private. They become something a stranger can interpret, critique, or even misunderstand. When someone reads our work, they’re not just reading a story.

They’re reading what we found when we started digging.

Graduation is around the corner for me and things at work/internship have been picking up. I’m finding that I’m just now easing into the rhythm of being a therapist, thankfully. Because not that long ago, I was experiencing full-fledged panic attacks over the mere thought of conducting a session.

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I haven’t been writing at all—creating much at all, really—because my focus has been entirely on work. I’ve taken on more responsibilities and can feel myself growing as a clinician, but beneath every moment lived was this deep-seated anxiety I couldn’t seem to shake.

I prayed for new clients while simultaneously hoping my schedule would stay empty.

I shut myself down in supervision, never even considering naming my perceived ineptness to my supervisor because what would she think of me? Imposter syndrome became the mask I wore every time I showed up at work, and slowly—almost imperceptibly—she began to seep into other parts of my life, too. The anxiety I felt around my career choice was visceral. It was all-consuming. It commandeered my body and colonized my thoughts. I was thinking about my upcoming sessions day and night—rehearsing every possible misstep, every ill-phrased reflection, every imagined rupture. I was pre-grieving failures that hadn’t even happened yet. I would lose control of my mind before sessions, feeling like I was just floating aimlessly without direction.

I kept asking myself:

What if I say the wrong thing?

What if I miss something crucial?

What if I’m not who they need me to be?

It felt like I knew very little but was being asked to hold so much. How could I—an intern at 27—possibly metabolize the magnitude of someone else’s grief? There was a fierce terror I felt in sitting across from pain I couldn’t fix.

I think that is why I began to start practicing tarot, and I can say it’s one of the most clarifying rituals I’ve adopted as of late. It’s offered me language for the season I’m in —a mirror, almost. Since this year began, it has felt like the theme from Interstellar has been swelling behind my life—everything feels so heightened, cinematic, and urgent, like one wrong misstep could send my whole life crashing down around me.

Now I’m an astrology girly so I think part of it is that I’m approaching my Saturn return. Life has felt less abstract and more confrontational. As if it’s standing directly in front of me asking, very plainly:

Are you going to evolve, or are you going to remain where you are?

And its asked that in every aspect of my life from my emotional wellbeing to my career and relationships.

I’m coming to realize that most of what I want in life isn’t asking for an enormous price. Being a therapist and sitting across from people in their most naked is about presence. Presence isn’t the absence of fear; it’s the choice to stay anyway. Clients aren’t asking me to perform divine intervention or prove that I learned and retained all the theories they taught us in grad school. So much of my life has been about proving to people how smart I am and how much I know because that was all I had. But I have to ask myself: does my client want me to sit and regurgitate theory to them, or do they want me to hold space (insert Ariana and Cynthia meme)?

I don’t have to be the perfect clinician. I have to be regulated enough to stay. Curious enough to listen. Humble enough to learn.

The anxiety didn’t mean I was incapable. It meant I understood the gravity of the responsibility, because it is a big one. I thought the anxiety meant stop. I’m learning it meant listen. It. meant to ask myself the same things I would ask my clients: what is the anxiety saying about me as a clinician? What is it like to sit with the imposter syndrome and what does it have to say? Is it possible to think of the best case scenario too?

The thing is, I’ve always known how to show up as a good therapist. Why? Because my understanding of what makes a good therapist was rooted in things I was already doing.

I’m slowly learning that my job is not to have all the answers.

I’m here to bear witness.

And that, I’m learning, is more than I gave myself credit for.

“The quality of your life is determined by the quality of your relationships.”

I’ve been thinking about this quote a lot. I can’t tell you how many times the importance of relationships has been stressed to me as a therapist. Relationships are the foundation of growth and connection in the therapeutic process. But it’s funny—our society today doesn’t always reflect that importance. Instead, there seems to be an increasing focus on individualism over connection.

Don’t get me wrong—I’m an introvert through and through. I genuinely enjoy my alone time: curled up with a blanket, a candle flickering, and a good book in hand. But enjoying solitude doesn’t mean I sacrifice connection. In fact, I’ve learned that meaningful relationships—whether with friends, family, or clients—nourish me just as much as my quiet moments do. Solitude and connection aren’t opposites; they complement each other.

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I think we’ve really confused, and sometimes distorted, therapy speak (don’t get me started). On one hand, I’m grateful that conversations around mental health are becoming more open and normalized. On the other hand, the internet has weaponized therapy language to the point where I genuinely worry it’s doing more harm than good. So no, you’re not always being gaslit, and not every discomfort is trauma—but choosing constant comfort over connection can be damaging, not just to yourself, but to the people around you as well.

Humans are wired for connection. From the moment we’re born, we begin to grow and develop bonds with our caregivers. Babies rely on secure attachment to their parents to thrive emotionally and physically; it’s the foundation of trust, empathy, and resilience that carries into adulthood. Connection isn’t optional, it’s essential. Choosing isolation or comfort at the expense of genuine relationships may feel safe in the short term, but over time it erodes the very thing that sustains us: the shared human experience.

That brings me to another point: avoiding discomfort as a way to “keep ourselves safe” often has the opposite effect. You cannot grow in comfort. You cannot expect to break old patterns or make different choices while staying in the same familiar loops—and expect a different result. That’s basically the definition of insanity, right? I think that’s why therapy can be so incredibly helpful, especially for those who tend to shy away from connection. Usually, there’s a reason behind that avoidance, and therapy provides a space to process difficult and uncomfortable emotions safely and without judgment. It’s in that tension between discomfort and safety where true growth happens.

So how do we as a collective move away from staunch individualism and move towards connection without the use of a therapist? I think it starts with small, intentional acts.

Showing up for your people, even when it’s inconvenient. Listening without judgment. Being present in moments that might feel uncomfortable, awkward, or outside your comfort zone. There are so many times I didn’t feel like going somewhere, didn’t want to show up, or just wanted to stay in my safe bubble—but I went anyway. And almost every time, it ended up being such a rewarding experience. I met people I didn’t expect to connect with, shared moments that turned out to matter, and, honestly, I felt proud of myself too. Showing up—even when it’s inconvenient, awkward, or just not “your mood”—is how we build trust and strengthen bonds. If you want others to be there for you, you have to be there for them.

Connection doesn’t require grand gestures, it only requires consistency. Over time, those small actions ripple outward, creating a culture where people feel seen, heard, and supported. The more we practice this, the less we reinforce isolation, and the more we cultivate communities that thrive on mutual care and presence.

One of the ways we avoid connection—sometimes without even realizing it—is by intellectualizing our feelings. We break down our emotions, analyze them, and try to make sense of them from a distance, as if thinking about them hard enough will somehow make them safe. On the surface, this can feel productive, like we’re “handling” our emotions responsibly. But the truth is, the more we live in our heads and distance ourselves from what we actually feel, the less available we are to truly connect with others. Emotions are meant to be experienced, shared, and reflected back through relationships—not just examined in isolation.

When we suppress or over-analyze our feelings, we’re essentially putting up walls. We show up intellectually, but we hide emotionally. And without that emotional presence, connection becomes shallow or transactional. True intimacy, trust, and belonging require us to be vulnerable, to risk discomfort, and to let others see us fully—even when it’s messy or uncomfortable. Ironically, it’s exactly when we allow ourselves to feel deeply that we find the courage to show up for others, and to let them show up for us in return.

With how the world is today—especially politically—connection is what saves us. It fuels us, grounds us, and empowers us to go out and make change. But there’s a challenge: many of us have been taught, consciously or unconsciously, to suppress our feelings, to intellectualize our emotions rather than experience them fully. We analyze, rationalize, or distract ourselves instead of sitting with what’s real and raw. And when we do that on a collective scale, it doesn’t just impact our personal lives—it weakens the social fabric, leaving us isolated, defensive, and disconnected from one another.

Coming together as a society starts with acknowledging our shared humanity. It’s about being brave enough to feel, to listen, to empathize, and to show up for one another. When we allow ourselves to experience our emotions fully—without shame or over-intellectualizing—we build the capacity to relate to others authentically. Connection, then, becomes both a personal practice and a societal necessity. It’s in these shared experiences, these moments of vulnerability and presence, that we cultivate communities strong enough to face the challenges of today.

So how do we take all of this: showing up, feeling our emotions, and prioritizing connection and turn it into action? If you came to me as a client feeling disconnected from yourself or your community, here’s how I might approach it. First, we’d start small, intentionally noticing where you already experience connection and where you might be avoiding it. I’d guide you to practice reaching out to someone you care about, checking in, or offering support—even when it feels uncomfortable. We’d explore moments when you tend to intellectualize or suppress your emotions, and gently experiment with allowing yourself to feel and express what’s real.

Other simple, universal practices include: sending a thoughtful message, asking a friend to share how they’re really feeling, making time to be fully present in a conversation, or even just showing up to an event or gathering when you’d rather stay home. These small choices accumulate over time, creating a ripple effect that strengthens relationships and builds community.

Connection isn’t just a nice idea, it’s a muscle that requires training; it takes practice, effort, and courage. But when we choose it over avoidance, when we allow ourselves to feel and be present with others, we create the kind of world we want to live in: one full of empathy, trust, and shared growth.

this book asks me to look backwards, but i’m afraid to go back to that period in my life because it feels unresolved and cyclical. the feelings aren’t processed. i’m not proud of who i was—my naivety, my mistakes. the past self i revisit is complicated. she’s flawed—self-absorbed, naïve, blind to her faults—but she’s also alive, determined, and capable of compassion. she tells white lies to survive. she bends so she can endure. and looking back, i want to tell her: you are enough. you are not your mistakes. you are more powerful than you realize. you will become the person you dream of being, and you will leave far more good than harm in your wake.

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writing this book now also means confronting a younger me who didn’t yet understand the stakes of living in a country built to erase people like us. i didn’t yet have the language for structural violence, for systemic gaslighting, for how power moves through classrooms, media, beauty standards, and law. i only knew the feeling: the sense of being slightly out of place everywhere, of needing to make myself smaller, quieter, more palatable. the world is terrifying right now, and so was i then. but the terror now has names. it has policies. it has court decisions and banned books and carefully worded speeches that decide whose lives are “controversial” and whose suffering is negotiable.

to write in this political moment feels like writing while the ground is shifting beneath my feet. rights that once felt stable are suddenly fragile. history is being edited in real time. language itself is under surveillance. there is a constant, low-grade hum of threat: to bodily autonomy, to racial truth, to queer existence, to the very idea that marginalized people deserve to tell their own stories without apology. the message is subtle and relentless—some narratives are acceptable, some are “divisive,” and some are dangerous. when a society tells you your story is inconvenient, you begin to doubt your right to tell it at all.

i’m trying to convince myself to write in whatever way possible, even if it’s on my phone—but it’s just not happening. physically, avoidance for me shows up as a kind of anxious heaviness in my chest. i daydream about the story constantly. i pin ideas on pinterest, imagine scenes—but when i sit at my computer, i can’t bring myself to write. instead, i scroll to distract myself, tidy, do anything but face my own emotions. what i’m avoiding isn’t danger though—it’s myself. my feelings.

i’ve only written two chapters, and writing the first was the hardest. i still hate it. in the opening, the fmc meets her new roommate and one of the first things she feels is a deep-seated contempt for herself. the line i almost deleted—because it was too blunt, too exposed—reads:

“i wanted to disappear. i wanted to bask. i wanted—if i’m honest—the impossible; her ease, her blue-eyed certainty, her claim to her mother as best friend. and beneath all that, something i never said out loud: i wanted the thing she didn’t even have to notice—her whiteness.”

that sentence points directly to one of the central themes of this book: internalized racism.

writing a single line about how the fmc feels about herself, her blackness, forced me to confront feelings i had years ago—feelings that being black was somehow wrong, that there was something defective in me. this book is unlike anything i’ve ever written, even the genre and themes itself just things i’ve never touched on in my writing. in a way it always felt like there was no audience for what i had to say. but i realized identity, racism, power, privilege, and trauma are all still so relevant today (disgustingly). these threads run through the story because they ran through my life.

my current strategy is to immerse myself in other work, reading widely to see how similar stories are told. i allow myself bursts of writing, journaling, and then stepping back. the structural and stylistic elements of this draft are another source of challenge. this is an unmarked, genre-blending book—part horror, part dark academia, part magical realism—and it stretches into territories i haven’t navigated before. a lot of my other writing played it safe so to speak, and with this book i really want to challenge myself and work on improving my craft.

each chapter requires so much research and reflection, careful attention to both accuracy and resonance. managing that while keeping the story cohesive feels overwhelming at times.

even with all the fear, even with all the avoidance, there is something sustaining about showing up. there is a quiet power surging within me when i return to the page, in letting myself fall into the story even when the world outside feels unpredictable and heavy. writing has taught me that fear is not a signal to stop—it is a compass pointing toward what matters most. the story that scares me is the story that is most necessary, for me and, i hope, for others who may see themselves in these pages.

i have no expectations for this first draft, and i keep reminding myself of that; that this is the first time i’m telling this story—that perfection isn’t the goal. so i keep going. i write sentences i know will change, characters who will evolve, scenes that will grow richer with revision. i remind myself that progress is not linear and that showing up is enough. that sometimes, the act of writing itself—without judgment, without expectation—is its own form of understanding and healing.

in this way, the story becomes a mirror: reflecting both the past and the present, both fear and hope. it asks not only who i was, but who i am now and who i am becoming. and it invites the reader to sit with those questions, too. perhaps that is the beauty of writing honestly: it transforms fear into curiosity, paralysis into movement, and memory into a story worth telling.

And God, I think I’ve needed that kind of space.

For a while, writing stopped being somewhere I could land and started feeling like another place I had to get it right. Another thing to do well. Another thing to prove I was okay at. I was trying to write a book last year in the middle of school, in the middle of dealing with a body that was falling apart (and is still falling apart woohoo), a nervous system that was shot, a life that was pretty obviously asking me to slow the hell down. And I kept trying anyway, trying to pull something beautiful out of a system that was just trying to survive.

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It’s no wonder I felt disconnected from it. Writing, at its core, has always been therapy for me. Not in a curated social media way, bits and pieces I can bite off and share as content. In the ugly-crying-on-the-page way. In the “I don’t even know what I’m saying yet but I need to say something” way. In the way where you only discover what you feel by watching the words appear under your own hands.

Somewhere along the way, I forgot that writing could be that again.

I think part of it is that I (embarrassingly) became influenced by able-bodied people on social media—especially able-bodied wellness influencers. I didn’t realize until this year how loud wellness culture is, and how easily I got swallowed by it last year—trying to do everything, all at once, in a body that was telling me it couldn’t. Wellness culture insists that consistency is everything. That discipline is everything. That showing up every single day in the same way, at the same time, with the same relentless energy, is the only path to being “successful” or “healed” or “evolved.” You can’t scroll for five minutes without being handed a script: wake up at 5 a.m., drink lemon water, run five miles, journal for twenty minutes, meditate, cold plunge, manifest, grind, repeat.

But consistency is a luxury when you live in a body with chronic illness.

Your “normal” is not the normal. Your energy fluctuates. Your pain fluctuates. Your brain fog fluctuates. Your capacity fluctuates. Some days, showing up looks like writing three pages. Some days, it looks like opening the document and staring at it. And some days, it means honoring the wisdom of stopping, of closing the laptop and letting rest be the work. And for a long time, I internalized the idea that if I couldn’t do it the “right” way—every day, perfectly, on schedule—then I was failing. That if I couldn’t push past my limits like everyone else on social media told me to, then I just wasn’t trying hard enough.

Learning to slow down has been an act of unlearning cruelty toward myself.

So this year, my mantra has been simple and blunt: slow the fuck down.

In the first 21 days of the new year I took time to myself and started working on a new book (without publishing deadlines).I’m letting first drafts actually be first drafts again. Not already cleaned up for an audience. Not run through the constant, exhausting question of, is this good enough to be seen? I’m writing the way I used to— following a thought even when I don’t know where it ends yet, letting paragraphs exist before they know what they’re trying to say. I’m remembering that the point of a first draft isn’t perfection, but instead honesty—just gently grazing the thing you’re trying to understand.

Falling back in love with writing hasn’t looked like how I thought it would. It’s looked like sitting on my bed with my laptop and letting myself write badly. It’s looked like stopping mid-paragraph because my head hurts and trusting that I’ll come back, even if it’s not until the next day. It’s looked like choosing to go slower and actually mean what I’m saying. Letting things be honest before they’re pretty. Letting myself be in it instead of trying to make it impressive.

It’s looked like first drafts.

A first draft is gentle in a way I forgot about. It doesn’t need to make sense yet. It doesn’t care if I know what I’m trying to say. It doesn’t rush me anywhere. It just lets me start where I am, with whatever I have, even if it’s messy.

And maybe that’s what “getting my life back” actually means for me right now.

Learning how to slow down and really feel how the words fill in the page.

Because when I do that—when I stop trying to make the writing impressive and let it be intimate instead—I remember why I started in the first place. I remember that writing was never about proving anything. It was about making sense of being alive. It was about building a small, quiet bridge between what I feel and what I can say.

Even the writers I admire most have struggled with this—the messy, uncertain, frightening space of the first draft. Joan Didion, for instance, wrote endlessly in her journals before shaping a single sentence for publication. She called it an act of finding her mind on the page, and I love that phrasing, because it implies that thought itself is not fixed, not static, not fully formed until it has been wrestled into being. Writing, in this sense, is not just about communicating something that already exists. It is an act of creation in itself, a way of noticing what was always there but invisible until you bring it out of the fog.

Toni Morrison would revise novels endlessly, sometimes rewriting entire sections, discarding pages, letting the story stretch and twist until it revealed itself. She has said that “the story does not exist fully in your mind before you write it; it is in the act of writing that the story comes alive.” There is a humility in that, a recognition that control is an illusion. You cannot impose a perfect plan on creation—you can only respond, listen, shape, and sometimes, surrender. There is liberation in that surrender. There is freedom in letting your own curiosity guide the way.

Anne Lamott famously declared that “the first draft is just you telling yourself the story.” She understood, fundamentally, that writing is not a linear, orderly process. It is a dialogue with yourself. The page is a mirror, reflecting back the fragments of thought, feeling, and memory that you cannot fully articulate until they are in front of you. There is a kind of intimacy in this—intimacy with your own mind, with your own nervous system, with the parts of yourself that are still learning, still curious, and still searching.

All of them, Didion, Morrison, Lamott, grasped a truth I am only beginning to understand for myself: the act of writing—the messy, sprawling, imperfect act—is where discovery lives. Discovery about the story. Discovery about the characters. Discovery about the sentence. But most importantly, discovery about the writer herself. Writing is a space where you can encounter yourself fully, without pretense. The first draft is not a failure or an embarrassment; it is an essential threshold, a liminal space where your mind and heart meet the page, where ideas are tested, discarded, revised, or celebrated.

And it is often in those messy, incoherent moments that the most profound insight emerges. I think about Virginia Woolf, who would walk in circles in the garden, carrying notebooks, capturing fleeting thoughts that no one else would notice. She understood that consciousness is not continuous or neat; it is a flickering, shifting, ephemeral thing. The act of writing is what allows consciousness to cohere, if only temporarily. Similarly, James Joyce’s manuscripts—dense, chaotic, almost illegible—reveal that genius is not a straight line but a labyrinthine process of trial, error, and intuition. To write badly is not to fail; it is to inhabit the chaos where meaning is waiting to be discovered.

What I am realizing is that writing, at its most essential, is not about producing something to be consumed. It is not about achieving mastery or perfection. It is a way to think. A way to feel. A way to notice the world, to notice your body, your mind, your limitations, your delights. It is a form of exploration that is intimate and dangerous because you can never fully control it. You step onto the page without knowing where you will end up, and in doing so, you are learning something about the world and yourself that could not have been learned otherwise.

And being back in it like this, I can feel the difference—the feeling of finding my way back to something I’d lost.

If I were to intentionally categorize the years of my life as good or bad, 2025 would be categorically bad, in most of the ways that matter to me. I was surviving, barely, day by day—doing the minimum while literally watching life pass me by through the open window behind my bed.

In a matter of months, I gained over thirty pounds. Most days I could barely get out of bed, let alone move my body in any intentional way. Exercise became something other people did, something from a past life. My days were organized around pain avoidance now—everything in my life a trigger for my illness. Chronic migraines took so much from me this past year: my routines, my energy, my social life, my ability to plan, my relationship with my body, even school at one point. There’s this huge cloud of grief that follows you everywhere you go when you live with chronic illness. Grief for the person you want to become and could’ve been. Grief over losing the things you once loved. At times it really felt like migraines stripped away everything that made me feel like myself—writing, reading, moving, seeing friends, feeling spontaneous. Existing. And before I knew it and in no time at all, I let myself become very small inside that loss.

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Living with chronic pain is not just exhausting, it is isolating in a way that is difficult to articulate without sounding dramatic. Pain narrows your world. It makes your life small and then tells you that smallness is all you can handle. It teaches you to measure days not by what you do, but by what you endure. It tells you that wanting more is greedy. I have long struggled with depression in a very visible way, but this time it crept in so quietly until an appointment with my psychiatrist revealed that I was not as in control as I had believed. It didn’t look like how my depression normally manifests because I was functioning. Because I had to. Because what other choice do you have when your body is already unreliable? You keep going. You show up. You survive. And you mistake that for being okay.

In the week between Christmas and New Year’s, I woke each morning with the same dull sense of revelation, as if I were on the verge of understanding something about myself that kept slipping just out of reach—a constant almost-epiphany. The feeling of standing in a doorway and forgetting what you came in for.

Part of it was how I looked. I hated myself in photos. My body had become unfamiliar to me, changed in ways I didn’t like. A little softer here, a little bigger there, stretch marks wrapped around my skin, irreversible. I couldn’t find the version of myself I still carried in my head. I know bodies change. I know illness changes them. But knowing that intellectually doesn’t stop the grief.

What’s harder to admit is that there were also good days. Not many, but some. Days when the pain wasn’t overwhelming. Days when I could have gone for a short walk, made a nourishing meal, drank water like it mattered, gone to sleep at a reasonable hour. And instead, I stayed in the same posture I used on the bad days—doing nothing but waiting for the other shoe to drop.

I think I got so used to being sick that I forgot how to take care of myself when I wasn’t.

For a long time, I didn’t want to admit that to myself because it didn’t feel fair. If most of my days were filled with pain, didn’t I have the right to spend my pain-free ones however I wanted? I asked myself that over and over until it finally collapsed into the truth: laying in bed all day was not what I wanted. It was not how I wanted to spend the rare days my body offered me a truce. I was doing the best I could, but I had also stopped believing I deserved more than the bare minimum.

All year I had been tethered to stability and to mania at the same time—functioning just enough to pass, just enough to get by, while inside I oscillated between hypervigilance and total collapse. It is a disorienting way to live. You are both holding everything together and falling apart. You are both present and absent. You are both here and not.

I wanted to blame the migraines for everything. And in many ways, they deserved it. They took my routines, my social life, my sense of physical freedom. They took long walks and spontaneous dinners and the simple luxury of waking without fear. They took the version of me who trusted her body to carry her through the day.

And yet some of what I lost, I also abandoned.

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Not because I didn’t care. I think instead it was because caring hurt. Because hoping required energy I didn’t have. Because tending to myself on good days felt almost superstitious, as if acknowledging wellness might jinx it. Because it was easier to live as though pain were permanent than to risk the disappointment of its return. There is a safety in resignation—a numbness that passes for peace.

I broke down to my husband on Christmas night, in the middle of a bad migraine. I admitted that I was depressed, that I was unhappy with myself, that I hated how out of control my life felt inside a disabled body, that I wanted change and didn’t know how to reach it. I couldn’t go on like this anymore I was at my breaking point. But the road I’m on does not offer clear answers yet. It offers continuity. Forward motion whether I feel ready or not. The reminder that time will keep moving, that bodies will keep aging, that landscapes will keep changing.

I am not cured by this realization. The migraines will still come. The depression will not evaporate because I named it. The weight will not disappear because I made peace with its origins. What I gained from that liminal week is the understanding that I am allowed to participate in my own care again. That I am allowed to imagine a future not organized solely around avoiding pain. That on the days when my body grants me a truce, I can meet it with nourishment and movement instead of suspicion, with rest that is intentional rather than defeated.

What I am learning, slowly, is how to distinguish between honoring my limits and disappearing inside them. That consistency for me is measured by my good days. That I can have many bad days in a row and still let one good day matter. That grace looks different in a body like mine, and that comparison to able-bodied wellness is a language I no longer want to speak.

I know I will still fail. But I no longer want to live as though the best I can hope for is simply to make it through. Life does not care about my migraines or my grief or my complicated relationship with my body. It exists anyway. And in its indifference, I am still here. In this body. In this year. In this life that looks nothing like the one I imagined—and is still, somehow, mine.

my name is mia, and i’m a 27-year-old grad student, migraine victim (yes, victim), and writer. i’m currently working on my debut novel the shape of dying, suffering through the woes of grad school, juggling internship life, and — of course — trying to keep my migraine attacks to a minimum. (spoiler: i’m failing. thank you, summer.)

i was diagnosed with chronic migraine a little over six years ago, and since then, it’s been a rollercoaster i didn’t buy a ticket for. some seasons, i’ll go months without a single episode — almost forgetting what it feels like to live in the shadow of it. other times, like now, i’m clocking 4–5 migraines a week, and the fog never quite clears.

i started this newsletter because it feels like there’s this invisible space — or rather, a missing one — between chronic pain and the creative process. especially in writing circles. especially in the online world where it feels like if you’re not writing every single day, you’re falling behind. there’s so much pressure to keep up. to perform. to produce.

but what about the writers who simply can’t?

life with chronic pain looks a little like this:

7:00am – wow, i’m pain free… for now. (cue the anxiety about when it’ll return.)

7:01am – okay, i need to do everything right so i don’t trigger it. (spoiler: everything is a trigger.)

7:02am – caffeine, but not too much. breakfast, but not that one. avoid the sun, avoid stress, avoid noise, avoid screens, avoid tight ponytails, avoid that sandwich i love, avoid joy, avoid myself.

7:03am – congratulations, i’ve stressed myself into a migraine while trying to avoid one.

there’s no winning. not really. migraine arrives like a storm through your bones —shattering your focus, your mood, your body. it ruins plans, delays deadlines, derails your entire week. it turns something as gentle as light into a weapon. it takes your words.

writing, for me, happens between the migraines. not after them. not around them. not despite them.

between them.

when the pain lets go just enough to think again.

when the nausea lifts and i can sit upright.

when i’m not scared the next sentence will push my brain too far.

i write in the dark. in bed. with blue light glasses and a heating pad wrapped around my head like a crown. i use voice memos on the worst days. i forget entire scenes i’ve written because the migraine fog eats memory like candy. sometimes i cry through revisions. sometimes i stare at the screen until the letters blur, and i shut my laptop with nothing done — but still, somehow, feeling like i showed up.

this is not a productivity newsletter. this is not a place to find hacks or hustle culture.

this is a soft, slow space.

a space for aching artists.

a space for people like me — like us — who still have stories to tell even when their bodies are screaming.

between the migraines will be part essay, part reflection, part survival journal. sometimes you’ll get a poem. sometimes just a note from the fog. i won’t promise consistency — because that’s not how chronic illness works. but i will promise honesty.

if you’ve ever felt like you’re not a “real writer” because you can’t write every day…

if you’ve ever felt like your pain has stolen something from your voice…

if you’re writing slowly, softly, and sometimes not at all—

this is your place, too.

welcome in. i’m glad you’re here.

-xoxo, mia