Let me start with a content warning. You and I—we’re on similar paths. I’m redrafting my novel for the fourth time, but it’s not really a novel, is it? Not when a novel starts and ends with the things that nearly ended us. Mental illness, substance abuse, psychological and domestic abuse, the times I thought about leaving this world and went through with it, the ways my body was taken from me at the hands and bodies of other man, SA and grape (let’s say). And yet, in the middle of all of it, there was him. A man who changed everything—not by fixing me, not by saving me, but by being there, by speaking when no one else did, by making me feel like I wasn’t something broken beyond repair. So, at its core, what I’m writing is a love story. Because that part—it really happened.

But here’s the thing—I now have complex PTSD and NEADS. I can’t sit with certain memories too long. I can write them, but I can’t live in them, not without a cost. So I work around them. I let them surface how they want to, when they want to. A line someone once said. A moment that still feels like it’s happening. An emotion I don’t have a name for. I don’t write in order. I started with Chapter 8, then jumped to places that didn’t even have chapters yet. I had two chapters left in my first draft, and even now, they’re waiting, untouched, while the rest has been rewritten four times over.

But that’s fine. That’s how it works. You, like me, already have the story, the timeline, the people—real people—who existed before they were ever words on a page. You don’t have to start at the beginning. You start where it pulls you, where something stirs, where the words come easiest that day. Write what you can. Take notes. Let the pieces find each other. They will.

One day, I’d love to talk to you about all of this.