These songs carried me through different chapters of my life, and through the writing of this book.

Healing is not linear.

The Mask She Wears was written during a time when therapy asked me to do the hardest thing: slow down and name what I had spent a lifetime avoiding. It came from sessions filled with unpacking, of emotions, memories, and survival instincts that formed long before I understood them. It came from learning the language of feelings I was never taught, and from sitting with a version of myself shaped by a time period that has quietly, but also loudly, influenced my life. I didn’t

When I first sat down to write Because of Jane , I didn’t begin with a plan. I had started and restarted this story a million times in different ways. But then I saw her sitting in the corner. I began with a presence. Her name was Jane. She had always been there, quiet, waiting on the edge of the bed or tucked into the corner of a room. She was the one thing that never asked me to explain myself. Never asked me to be brave. Never asked me to be quiet, either. So when the sto

A ‘Stranger Things’ Reflection on Ending Cycles Without Ending Yourself There are moments in stories when something breaks through the screen, when a character isn’t just speaking to another character, but to every person watching who has ever carried pain quietly and for far too long. The season finale of Stranger Things gave me one of those moments. When Eleven believes the only way to end the cycle of violence is to die with the Upside Down, Hopper’s response hit me in the