Why I Write What I Write

I didn’t start writing because I wanted to be an author.

I started writing because I needed somewhere to put what I survived.

I began healing my traumas in my early twenties.
Not fixing them.
Not erasing them.
Healing them.

For a long time, that work felt invisible. Therapy. Reflection. Learning how to live inside my own body again. Showing up even when there was no proof that it was working. Eventually, something loosened. Not all at once—but enough to breathe.

And then life cracked open again.

A lot happened, layered close together.
Moving.
Surgery.
Medical issues without clear answers.
Working from home.
Volunteering for the state and within my community.
Stepping far outside my comfort zone.
Adopting another animal.

ESA animals didn’t begin with Sedona or Onyx.
But it may have ended with them.

Trauma doesn’t ask your permission.
It doesn’t wait for timing or capacity.
It arrives and demands that you deal with it anyway.

What comes after isn’t clarity or clean healing arcs.
What comes after is choice.
Effort.
Work.

And it’s messy.
And it’s hard.

I lost Sedona in September 2021.
I lost Onyx in March 2024.

You’ll hear their names. Often.
They mattered. They still do.

Onyx was the most bonded ESA I ever had.
He was like my own little daemon—always there, always tethered to me.
When he passed, it broke me in a way I won’t romanticize.

Soul-deep.
The kind of grief that doesn’t resolve neatly.

I survived the only way I knew how.
I dove into work.
I stayed functional.
I kept moving.

It took close to a year before I felt human again.

And when I finally did, I wrote him into my first book—quietly, during editing.
Not as a memorial.
As a truth.

Authorship became an outlet I can never repay.

I don’t write to relive pain.
I write because pain taught me how to see.

I write women who endure, fracture, and rebuild—
because I know that process intimately.

I write men who carry weight, restraint, devotion, and consequence—
Because power without grounding never felt honest to me.

I write darkness with care.
I write love without self-erasure.
I write survival as something that becomes art, not spectacle.

My stories are raw, real, and vulnerable.
They’re messy on purpose.

I don’t write to offer false hope.
That never helped me when I needed it most.

I write so that if someone recognizes themselves in a character—good or bad—there’s a seed of growth waiting inside the story.
Not instruction.
Not answers.

Possibility.

My grandmother taught me young to treat others as I wish to be treated.
Later, I heard about pay it forward.

Writing is how I do both at once.

I don’t write the Daughters of Violence Universe as self-help.
I write from the wound.
From lived experience.
From the place where wisdom is felt, not preached.

This is my artwork.
Like painting.
Like sculpting.

I write to feel the truth—
not to tell anyone what to do with it.

I am a perfectly imperfect work in progress.

I don’t believe in being healed once and for all.
I believe in tending.
Returning.
Choosing progress—no matter how small.

The day I stop working toward growth
is the day I’ve truly given up.

And life has never allowed me that luxury.

I can break down.
I can crumble.
I can be a mess on the floor with my hands in my hair.

But eventually, that wrung-out woman will sit up.
She’ll wipe her eyes.
She’ll take a breath.

And she’ll get back to work.

Because the stories still matter.
And so does she.

✍🏻 AM — Grounded in raw. Real. Grit. Healing.