The first time I met , we were both on an island.

Orcas Island, in the Pacific Northwest, where the blue water holds the light differently than anywhere I’ve ever been, where the trees lean in close, and the ferry crossing feels like a portal. We were both there for Write Doe Bay, and that first night she read from her memoir, All of This, in a little bookstore overlooking the water in Eastsound. The story gripped me immediately. It was intimate and chilling and funny and devastating and edgy and grief-stricken—all the things you want from a memoir.

After the reading she took questions, and what struck me most wasn’t just the way she spoke about writing, but the way she held the room. She has this rare ability to talk about grief and desire and death and power without collapsing under the weight of any of it. And somehow, in refusing to collapse, she makes everyone else feel a little more capable of carrying their own lives too. As both a writer and someone who teaches writing, I remember thinking, YES. This. This is the kind of presence I want to cultivate in my own work and in the rooms I lead.

A few days later, I took Rebecca’s workshop at , and she said something that physically shifted the way I think about writing.

I swear I felt something release. I could feel something give way to make room for permission. Permission to be weird and contradictory and desperate and angry and also warm and empathetic and attentive and tender, everything and all of it. To let the self be multifaceted because it is, because we all are, because anything that tries to be only one thing will always feel like a lie. We are never just one thing. We are never just one story.

That permission lives all through Rebecca’s work. On her Substack, , she writes about motherhood and desire, grief and sex, love and death, all braided together because that’s how life actually moves through us. Not in clean separate streams but tangled, inseparable, one pulling on the other. She’s the kind of writer who is devoted to telling the truth, even when that truth implicates her, even when it refuses an easy answer. Especially then.

The essay she sent me for this series is one of the most daring pieces of nonfiction I’ve read in years. It opens with a fight, a marriage, a corpse, then unfolds into the full complexity of what it means to tell the truth about someone you loved. What it means to write honestly about someone who can no longer consent. What it costs. What it frees.

It’s an essay that every memoirist, and really anyone who’s ever tried to tell the truth about their family, will find themselves wrestling with. It asks: what do we owe the people we write about? What do we owe ourselves? What does it mean to tell the truth when someone else’s truth is tangled up in our own?

In our interview, when Rebecca talks about writing the hard thing, she's really talking about our relationship to truth. Not the first truth we tell, but the one beneath it. And then the one beneath that. She’s talking about spending a lifetime getting closer to it. She reminds us that the deepest stories ask us to keep digging, to make room for fear and contradiction, and to trust that criticism and self-compassion can exist at the very same time.

Take a deep breath and dive in. And if you ever have the chance to learn from her, take it. You’ll leave not just a better writer, but a braver one.

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What Is Consent to a Ghost?

If someone dies and you write about them anyway—with their blessing, maybe, but never their consent—is it ethical?

One of the last big fights we had before he died was about a corpse. My husband, Hal, was months away from being diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer—a cancer he didn’t know he had until it was too late—but before that, before we knew he was dying, when it was just two unhappily married people barely speaking to each other, he had become obsessed with the story of Carl Tanzler and his one-sided love affair with his patient, Maria Elena Milagro de Hoyas.

The story goes like this: Tanzler had fallen in love with one of his patients – a young woman dying of tuberculosis who he was unable to save—a woman he had fallen deeply in love with – one-sidedly. Following her death, he paid for her burial and eventually stole her corpse from its mausoleum and spent several years living with it. Fucking it, maybe. No one knows for sure, but what we do know is that he had a years-long one-sided non-consensual relationship with her dead body that lasted up until Elena’s horrified family discovered that Tanzler had stolen, and was living with her decaying corpse.

Hal wanted to option the story – develop it for film. His working title was A Grave Affair. When he first mentioned it to me in passing, I didn’t think he was serious, but when he brought it up a second time, explaining he had already reached out to several people and was hoping to meet with someone who already was working on a musical adaptation, I lost it. This was not the first time he was invested in a love story with an exploitative power dynamic and while I had reluctantly supported his side projects in the past, even when they stood for everything I was railing against with mine, I was no longer masking my disgust.

He became obsessed with the story, the fact that even after death, a man’s undying love for a woman was all that mattered. Never mind that she didn’t love him back. That she was a corpse, dead and rotting in his arms.

In his words, it was a deranged and unusual love story.

“This isn’t a love story. This is a story about obsession and a dead woman who had no autonomy. This is about a man who kidnapped a woman’s dead body. Decided she belonged to him. STOLE her from her resting place. She probably didn’t even like him. He probably gave her the creeps. HE WAS HER DOCTOR WTF.”

Hal did not see the story as one of obsession and male dominance, but one of love. He felt it was one of the most fascinating, albeit macabre, love stories of our time and that it deserved to be retold. That it was weird and fucked up, but represented something human and carnal in all of us: that sometimes we cannot – are unable to – let go.

I was horrified that he thought there was anything fascinating about this story. He thought I was overreacting. I believed he was so fundamentally wrong to think this was a love story, but more than that, I compared it to my own. To feeling corpse-like in my own marriage. To going through the motions as his wife, feeling dead inside. What about how I felt? What I thought? Did it ever matter? I never doubted that he loved me but also … he loved me in his own way, never mine.

I had been married to this man for nearly thirteen years. And THIS was the love story he wanted to tell? This was what resonated with him? A man’s undying love for … a woman who would never love him back? A woman he could ONLY have in death, who he had dug up for his own pleasure, amusement, and joy? A woman whose feelings didn’t matter let alone exist.

His argument was that she was dead so what difference did it make. Tanzler wasn’t hurting anyone, least of all, her. And besides, we do crazy things for love.

One could say it was a similar argument I would find myself using to justify writing a memoir that included details about my marriage with a man who was no longer alive. It’s just that the love was for me this time.

Certain people believed I was also being self-serving in writing about my experience. That by writing my book I was digging up the corpse of my beloved – a man with whom I, too, had a complicated love story.

I don’t think anyone is wrong to feel that way. But I also believe we have normalized love stories being things that are other than complicated — a far more harmful thing.

In her memoir Why Be Happy When You Could be Normal, Jeanette Winterson writes, “…unhappy families are conspiracies of silence. The one who breaks the silence is never forgiven. He or she has to learn to forgive him or herself.”

And then, of course, there’s the Sinead O’Connor lyric (Black Boys on Mopeds), “To say what you feel is to dig your own grave.”

Truth telling gets us into trouble. Women, especially. Our silence is what makes us lovable. Our loyalty is what makes us safe. A dangerous woman has historically been a thing to villainize. Criticize. Shame. But a quiet one? A compliant one? A … dead one? It makes perfect sense that to many men, a corpse would make the perfect wife.

The truth is, it took my husband dying for me to write honestly about my experience, not only as his partner but as me. I had spent so many years lying to both of us, out of fear but also out of a need to protect both of us — our children — the family portraits on the fridge. No one wants to be an unhappy wife but women, so good at faking it, can go entire lifetimes without anyone ever having to know.

Beyond that, so many of us are afraid of the people we love, and it wasn’t until my husband died that I realized I no longer loved anyone in my life who I was also afraid of.

No one scared me anymore.

This is such a liberating concept and one I believe to be anomalous considering the conversations I have had through the years, mainly with women, fellow essayists, memoirists and writers of first-person non-fiction who feel they cannot write honestly about their complicated love stories.

When a writer is afraid of the people she loves – afraid of their judgment, their shame, their lack of support – she must make the choice to either tell her truth or make the people she loves feel comfortable. There is no other way.

Over the past few months, I have spoken at several writers’ groups and memoir workshops and everyone asks me the same question. How do you tell your story without hurting people?

And the answer is always the same. You can’t.

I touched on this briefly before and I intend to go into it deeper in future essays but a locked diary has never protected the writer so much as it protects those who have hurt her. That includes the loud and oft intimidating voices inside herself that for years have shamed her into compliance.

Even the loudest among us know exactly when to fall silent. It is a practice. And then, hopefully, eventually, an unlearning.

In the end, people will always make your personal story their personal affront. I have spent twenty-five years doing this work and have known all along that there is as much risk as there is reward. That for all the deep “I see you” love, there is hatred and a never-ending stream of judgment.

It’s why I love writers so much— memoirists — those who are willing to be human, vulnerable. Disliked. Fucked up. Free. I want my writers naked. With nothing but shoes on in case they have to make a run for it. I do not seek heroes in the people I read or write or raise or love. I seek humans.

In Melissa Febos’ Body Work (pgs 26-27) she writes, “Almost everything I’ve ever written started with a secret, with the fear that my subject was unspeakable. Without exception, writing about these subjects has not only freed me from that fear but from the subjects themselves, and from the bondage of believing I might be alone in them. What I have also observed is that avoiding a secret subject can be its own form of bondage. To William H Gass’s argument, ‘To have written an autobiography is already to have made yourself a monster,’ I say that refusing to write your story can make you into a monster. Or perhaps more accurately, we are already monsters. And to deny the monstrous is to deny its beauty, its meaning, its necessary devastation.”

Still, I recognize and find myself sitting with the same criticism of my work. I made a choice to write a book that my husband did not word-for-word sign off on – the only time I have ever written something about him that I didn’t give him final cut on. For years I wrote about our marriage, but only after giving him my work to read first to make sure he was comfortable with what I publicly shared. Every writer I know has done this, put their partners first. Often at the expense, not only of their work but of their truth. I know a lot of writers doing this now. I read them and know. Because if you know… you know.

Arguably, what I did to Hal was the same thing Tanzler did to his corpse-bride. I dug him up and brought him back to life in my image. I replaced his skin with silk. Put my need to tell my story first. Instead of allowing him to rest in peace, I went into the cemetery at night and spent a year with him propped up on the foot of my bed so that I could tell a story from one side. Claimed love as the culprit, but the love in my heart was for me.

***

My husband has now been dead for more than four years. And thousands will have read my book having never known him. And many will believe that I, too, have excavated his body in order to fulfill my own need to prove the livelihood of mine. And they will be right. Their criticism is as valid as my decision to tell my truth.

Every writer chooses herself if she is going to write honestly. There is no other way.

I have spent my entire life writing stories about myself as I relate to other people – beginning in high school when I wrote about the boys who broke my heart as a teenager for Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul. I often wonder if the boys I used to write about ever felt mortified or angry or sad, or whether they were unable to recognize themselves in my essays at all.

More recently, I have wondered why anyone has willfully dated me, knowing that they might end up on a page at some point, because everyone who is close to me inevitably has. Perhaps they knew I would protect them, that I would make myself the butt of the joke — which I have always done. Even in those early days, I was always hardest on myself.

I think of all the teenage girls — me included — who spent their formative adolescent years with reputations rooted in jealousy, lies, judgement. Had to wake up and show up to school every day with our names sharpied across the backdoors of bathrooms attached to words like slut, whore… How for so many women I know, taking back our stories was never about revenge but survival. Owning the parts of us that were scrutinized, shamed… saying, oh you think I’m too much? Just wait.

Last year I fell in love with a man who made it very clear from the beginning that he didn’t want me writing about us – or him. I understood, of course, and never made mention of him publicly at all. And then, days after reading my book, he broke up with me. What I had written about my life—about my marriage, sex life, me—gave him pause. And I realized (albeit agonizingly) that I had, once again, chosen myself. That by writing this book, I made the decision to end future relationships before they even began. That it would take a certain kind of partner to be comfortable, not just with my past, but with our future. That any day they—or our love—could die and I could write about them, too.

I have always made my living writing about my life, which means it will always be a risk to love me. And in understanding that, I must honor the feelings of those who feel they must leave me in order to protect themselves. Just as I have chosen to honor my feelings by making the choices I have made in my work. It has always been the paradox of truth telling — that what sets us free will also alienate us. That anyone who writes honestly about her life is, in a sense, digging up the bodies of her beloveds, dancing with their deteriorated flesh. Making words out of the bones.

I am currently dating someone who is not only supportive of my work — but it’s what drew him to me. We had casually dated for a series of months earlier this year. Stopped because neither of us wanted more than that and then he read my book, reached out and months later, here we are. What he read gave him the opposite of pause. (Play?) He wanted me for all the reasons so many in my past did not. I was not a liability to him. I was a person. I was also a writer. Two things he recognized could not be separated and shouldn’t have to be. I say this because it is possible to be with someone who isn’t afraid of the unlocking. To be rallied behind, as an artist, by the person you’re sleeping with. To be loved, not in spite of your work, but because of it.

Before I started this essay, while looking for some old paperwork on his desktop, I found Hal’s A GRAVE AFFAIR folder. His correspondences were thrilling. His passion palpable. His need to tell this story was suddenly relatable to me in a way it wasn’t when he first tried to tell me about it. And while he never gave me full consent to write about all of the things I wrote about in my book, he did tell me, on his death bed, that I had to write our story, perhaps for the same reason he wanted so desperately to tell Tanzler’s.

Because he recognized that love is not always selfless—that it is often grotesque and inhumane. That humans are complicated animals and acknowledging that without judgment is nearly impossible. That we are drawn to stories and to telling them for reasons many will never understand.

That doesn’t mean we all deserve to be forgiven, immortalized, let go … but to hold each other against the light, as unfiltered, nuanced human beings is not unloving and to say so is to assume a false identity. None of us are heroes. No matter how hard we want to write ourselves (and each other) into such molds.

“…And to deny the monstrous is to deny its beauty, its meaning, its necessary devastation...”

Which makes our need to tell certain stories arguably more interesting than the stories themselves—our willingness to put our own necks on critical chopping blocks. Because even though my book made some people uncomfortable, I have never regretted a word, in the same way my frustration with many of Hal’s projects never kept him from pursuing them. That for all our differences, we were both similarly unencumbered by judgment. Because in the end we both believed that unpopular love stories were worth telling, regardless of who we might lose or disappoint in the process.

Including each other.

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What is the “hard thing” at the center of this piece—for you, personally, not just on the page?

I felt it was important to acknowledge the elephant in the room that was writing about a person without their consent -- specifically about a person who was not alive to tell their side of the story. I felt it important to both critique and validate my own gaze and explain to myself why I ultimately chose to write the book that I did and to allow both criticism and validation to exist together.

What helped you regulate, or at least be present, while writing this piece?

If my nervous system isn’t triggered by something I am writing, I ask myself what is the point of writing it? Almost everything I publish scares me. I do not see a point in writing personal narrative unless it challenges both me and the reader, and I find that fear, for me, is always the doorway to freedom. So in a way, my nervous system responding, for me, feels like a good thing. It should not feel easy to write the truth. And I always feel insane after pressing publish! ha!

What changed for you after writing it, if anything (internally or externally)?

I remember feeling really proud of that piece when I published it. It felt like a companion to the book (ALL OF THIS) I had just released -- a sort of second epilogue. I have been writing personal narrative for long enough to know where and why I will be criticized for what I choose to share, so writing a piece as my own critic -- and sort of saying the quiet part out loud -- felt both protective and proactive.

For someone standing at the edge of their own hard story, what would you want them to know?

That everyone’s story is hard if they have the will to dig deep enough into it and I think one needs to write with both self-validation and awareness that “hardness” is relative to the person who has experienced it and to honor your personal experience without comparison. I also think there is a difference between truth and TRUTH and that it takes time and patience to feel safe enough to differentiate and then work towards the capital T truth.

Anyone can write the skin of her experience but what is underneath? what is the flesh? the bone? the marrow? I want every writer to know that there are layers to the truth, but the deeper you go into the darkness, the more you learn how to access the light.

Illumination becomes a necessity in those hard-to-reach dark places and by learning how and where to hold the light, the darkness becomes a gift.

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REBECCA WOOLF has worked as a freelance writer since age 16 when she became a leading contributor to the hit 90s book series, Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul.

Since then, she has contributed to numerous publications, websites and anthologies, most notably her own award-winning personal blog, Girl’s Gone Child, which attracted millions of unique visitors worldwide. She has appeared on CNN and NPR and has been featured in The New York Times, Time Magazine and New York Mag.

In 2008, Woolf authored her first memoir, Rockabye: From Wild to Child (Seal Press) and her second memoir, ALL OF THIS (Harper One) was published May 2022.

She lives in Los Angeles with her son and three daughters.

Where to find Rebecca:

Website | Substack | Instagram | Buy Her Book

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I met Shin Yu Pai last November at Write Doe Bay on Orcas Island. We were both teaching and the moment I met her, I was settled by her calm and steady presence. Over the course of the weekend, I felt the quality of attention she brings to everything—her writing, her work, and motherhood, which I enjoyed speaking with her about. I am so enamored by mother/artists who are doing the damn thing and doing it with the kind of grace and strength I felt from Shin Yu. I left that week wanting to sink into her work, and let me tell you, it’s vast and thoughtful and layered and devourable. She’s the Civic Poet of Seattle, the recipient of the 2024 Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the author of thirteen books.

Shin Yu also creates and hosts the award-winning podcast Ten Thousand Things—a chart-topping show about Asian American stories, identity, memory, and the way we construct and fracture and reclaim who we are. It’s in its fifth and final season now, with the first episode dropping today, and it couldn’t be landing at a better moment, as it’s Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. It’s the most experimental and introspective season yet, using art, memory, and altered states to examine how identity is built, broken, and reclaimed. Shin Yu moves through themes of assimilation and resistance, racial grief, and Asian indigeneity in conversation with artists working across disciplines—Korean-American bricolage artist Rob Rhee; Chinese-American author and psychedelic educator Amy Wong Hope; Khmer-American author Putsata Reang; mixed-race Okinawan American translator Thomas Hitoshi Pruiksma; and Filipina American magician Maritess Zurbano. A season that reaches into translation, healing arts, and magic—you will find what you’re seeking here. Watch the trailer below, and start listening here.

At Write Doe Bay, Shin Yu taught a beautiful workshop on the archival process of our lives—how we preserve history, both personal and collective. She had us make lists of what we archive, and when I read mine out loud, she reflected on how so much of what I collect and preserve is place-based. It tracks across everything I make. Even my memoir is shaped by place—the Mojave Desert, the meth lab, the prison wards, all the landscapes that hold what happened, even when I don’t want to remember, or maybe especially then. Her workshop completely changed the way I think about what I archive (and what I don’t), the way I write place, and even how I save my drafts. If you ever get a chance to learn from her, take it.

When I asked Shin Yu to contribute to this series, she sent me a poem about her son. It’s precise in its ache, in the particular helplessness of watching your child suffer and being unable to stop it. There’s a Buddhist understanding running beneath it that suffering is inevitable, and so is its passing. That everything is impermanent, always shifting, always becoming something else. She writes from inside that knowing and the poem doesn’t try to resolve the pain. It simply witnesses, and that kind of witnessing is one of the hardest things a mother can do.

Reading it, I felt the invitation to release the need to control and fix and resolve. How beautiful when we can let our children find their own way toward something—a name, a story, a small handmade thing that can hold what they’ve been carrying.

When I asked Shin Yu about writing the hard thing, she said, “We can put it down and come back to it, and re-enter the stream of consciousness when the nervous system can better tolerate what’s hard.” This is everything I teach in one line. The whole practice, the permission, the trust that you don’t have to do it all at once, that the story will still be there when you return.

Read the poem. Then read the interview. And follow Shin Yu’s work—it will take you somewhere different than where you started.

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My son Tomo knits a doll at Waldorf

all fall, he’d been bullied
by an 8-year-old classmate

while his third-grade teacher 
at Broadview-Thomson

made it even worse;
he’d never held a knitting

needle in his two hands
didn’t know the first thing 

about casting or purling
the girls had to help him

get started so that six months 
later, a shapeless mass of 

soft beige yarn grew to have 
legs and arms, he gave 

the doll a belly button, 
red hair to mirror his own 

and when the children were 
asked to give their creations

a name and a story 
or a friend, my son 

called him Siddhartha
after the Buddha who

was born to free himself
from suffering

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What is the “hard thing” at the center of this piece—for you, personally, not just on the page?

It’s a tender thing to write about one’s children as a mother and to see and reflect them back to themselves, both on and off the page. The hard thing at the center of this poem was this period of time when my son Tomo was being bullied at school, by both a peer and a teacher, and how deeply that unkindness impacted his sense of well-being. It was hard to be in it, to not know if my son would turn a corner and discover a sense of resilience.

What helped you regulate, or at least be present, while writing this piece?

There’s a Buddhist belief that all life is suffering. There’s also an end to that suffering because all things inevitably change. Our minds and emotions are in a constant state of flux. And we are always changing. Turning the attention to this core belief and allowing compassion and love to come in for the circumstances depicted in the poem and trusting that my son could also know and touch that truth, and embody it allowed me to be more present with that suffering.

What changed for you after writing it, if anything (internally or externally)?

My regard for my son grew as I recognized his sense of agency and ability to turn his attention inwards to access his own resourcefulness. I could not change the past and was powerless to protect my son from bullies. I felt pain as a witness to his suffering. As a mother, I wanted to prevent harm from coming to him and to protect or fix or control the situation. None of that is really possible. What I can do is develop in my son a sense of resilience, self knowing and self regard that can allow him to tell a different story about his suffering.

For someone standing at the edge of their own hard story, what would you want them to know?

We don’t have to say it all or say it perfectly when we’re deepest in the grief or in the hardest part of our lived experience unfolding. It takes time and perspective to make sense of the hard things through the wisdom that slowly grows within us over time. We can put it down and come back to it, and re-enter the stream of consciousness when the nervous system can better tolerate what’s hard.

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Shin Yu Pai was Civic Poet of Seattle (2023-2024) and is the recipient of the 2024 Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America for poetic genius. She the author of 13 books, including most recently No Neutral (Empty Bowl, 2023). She is the recipient of awards from the The Academy of American Poets, City of Seattle’s Office of Arts & Culture, 4Culture, and The Awesome Foundation. She is a 2022 Artist Trust Fellow and was shortlisted in 2014 for a Stranger Genius Award in Literature. From 2015 to 2017, Shin Yu served as Poet Laureate for The City of Redmond. Her writing has appeared in Atlas Obscura, Tricycle Magazine, YES! Magazine, NYTimes, Zocalo Public Square, Seattle Met, ParentMap, Seattle’s Child, International Examiner, and South Seattle Emerald. Her work has appeared in publications throughout the U.S., Japan, China, Taiwan, the UK, and Canada.

Shin Yu is the writer, host, and producer of Ten Thousand Things – a chart-topping podcast on Asian American stories that she produced for three years with KUOW Public Radio, Seattle’s NPR affiliate station. During its run, the show won a regional Edward R. Murrow Award, two Golden Crane Awards from the Asian American Podcasters Association and a silver from the Signal Awards. After three successful seasons with public radio, Shin Yu is now making her show independently with Wonder Media Network. If you’d like to support production, make your tax-deductive donation here.

Shin Yu also co-wrote a book on psychedelic microdosing which is out now from Chronicle Books.

Where to find Shin Yu:

Website | Podcast | Books

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This month’s On Writing the Hard Thing features —writer, teacher, and someone whose work has quite literally changed the landscape of what it means to tell the truth on the page. For over forty years, she has been going first into the hardest material and I find her endlessly inspiring—not just as a writer but as a human being who has chosen, again and again, to shine out into the world through radical honesty.

The excerpt I’m sharing is from her award-winning memoir, The Burning Light of Two Stars—a book about one of the most complicated relationships there is. A mother and a daughter who spent decades estranged, 3,000 miles apart, slowly finding their way back to each other, until dementia began erasing the mother Laura had only just started to know again. The memoir opens with a phone call. Her mother, Temme, announces that she is moving across the country to Laura’s town for the rest of her life. Reluctantly, Laura becomes her caregiver as her mother sinks deeper into dementia.

The excerpt I chose centers on a single afternoon. Laura is trying to get her mother to accept help, and what should be a straightforward conversation becomes something else entirely—layered with exhaustion, with old wounds, with the heavy grief of watching someone you love disappear in real time while still being fully, maddeningly present. The scene builds the way caregiving builds, slowly, and then all at once, again and again, until something breaks.

What I really want to point to, craft-wise, is how Laura handles interiority in this scene. She gives us access to two simultaneous experiences—what is happening in the car, on the street, in the room, and what is happening inside her body AND her history all at the same moment. The present scene and the decades of story behind it exist on the page at the same time, and that layering is powerful. We’re not just watching an argument between a daughter and her mother. We’re watching fifty years of a relationship reach a breaking point.

In her interview, Laura talks about how with each subsequent draft she understood more, protected herself less, and cared less about what other people would think of her for telling the truth of that terrible moment. THIS IS THE POWER OF WRITING. She rewrote every scene in this memoir a hundred times. A hundred times back into the hardest afternoon of her caregiving life, each pass revealing another layer she hadn’t been able to face before. That’s what it looks like to write all the way down to the bone.

And what she found at the bone was freedom. Writing this scene loosened the residual shame she was still carrying. Telling the truth about hard things, she says, has always been a part of how I shine out into the world. Forty years of that. Forty years of going first so her readers don’t have to go alone. That’s the gift of this excerpt. And that’s the gift of Laura Davis.

Shine, baby. Shine.

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Note: The other characters mentioned in this chapter are Lizzy, Laura’s 15-year-old daughter; Karyn, Laura’s wife; and Fiona, the caregiver living with Temme, whom Temme detests and can’t wait to get rid of.

Chapter 47

The Burning Light of Two Stars

West Cliff

821 Days

Mom was eighty-four years old when she went back into therapy for the last time. She’d been seeing a counselor, on and off, for as long as I could remember. Now at the end of her life, she was back in therapy again. The losses were piling up too fast for her to process. She needed to vent about the person she depended on who was taking over her life: me. But mostly, she went to therapy because she was lonely, no longer capable of making a friend. She needed a compassionate ear and was willing to pay for it, even though she couldn’t remember anything said in those sessions. And of course, her therapist couldn’t tell me.

His name was Shaw Coleman. Or was it Coleman Shaw? Neither of us could ever remember, and when our memories failed simultaneously, it was always good for a laugh.

One day, Mom asked Coleman to mediate for us. She wanted to get rid of Fiona, and I was the obstacle standing in her way. I couldn’t leave Mom unsupervised, but she hated Fiona and wasn’t ready to “move in with the zombies.” I had to find an alternative. I knew that negotiating with Mom, with dementia, was bound to fail, but I reluctantly agreed. Maybe there’d be a miracle.

That afternoon, Mom rose out of her mental fog and rocked the mediation. She was articulate and charming. No one would have guessed there was anything wrong with her brain. Coleman took notes, and in fifteen minutes, we negotiated an agreement:

April 24, 2012

Temme and Laura agree:

• Someone will come each morning to assist Temme with medication management, possibly her neighbor, Jane.

• Laura and Temme will hire a caregiver they both agree on, to come three times a week, for three hours each time, to assist with driving and errands.

• Laura will give Fiona thirty days’ notice to move out.

I knew our written agreement wasn’t ideal. I was giving up a lot, but Mom had finally agreed—in writing—to have help. That was a huge step.

“Mom, thanks for being so cooperative.”

She teared up. “Oh, darling, I knew I could count on you.” And just like that, we were golden. As Mom struggled out to the car, I carried our newly forged agreement in my hand. Maybe God was giving me a gift.

Five minutes later, as we drove to pick up Lizzy, I broached the subject. I kept my voice light. “So . . . let’s talk about how to find someone to help with your pills.”

“I don’t need help with my pills.” Oh no you don’t. Not again.

“You just agreed!” I held my voice steady, like a metal ice cube tray headed for the freezer.

Mom glared back. “I said no such thing.”

I slammed on the brakes at the next traffic light, reached into the back, and threw the evidence onto her lap. “Read it!”

She glanced at the piece of paper. The ink had barely dried. “You just made that up.”

“I did not. Your therapist just wrote it down for us.”

“Well, that’s not what I meant.”

I felt flammable. Pricks of energy raced over my skin. Was this her dementia or just the same gaslighting mother I’d always had? The one who’d forced me to perform, then insisted it was my idea. I’d spent my life listening to her say “I never said that” and “You don’t feel that way.” Making me feel like the crazy one. Not this time.

I jammed the car against the curb in front of Lizzy’s school, where she’d soon emerge from tenth grade. Gossiping teenagers surrounded the car, their laughter ricocheting off the hard glass windshield. I spoke through pursed lips. “We just made this agreement. Let’s read it together.”

“Oh, yeah, yeah,” Mom said, suddenly remembering. “I’ll call my neighbor, Jane, tomorrow. Maybe she knows someone who can drive me.”

I yanked the emergency brake upward like an accusation. “You need more than just a driver!”

Lizzy bounded down the steps with her skinny jeans and curvy hips. She threw her heavy canvas book bag in the back and gracefully slid in. A dad I didn’t know stood on the steps. He came over and peered into the car. “How sweet! Three generations!”

Mom put on her beauty queen face, beamed him a megawatt smile. “Well, hello there! We’re here picking up my granddaughter. She’s such a smart girl—at the top of her class. And who’s your child?”

Really, Mom? Now you’re going to flirt? Now you’re going to brag? The man smiled. Obviously, he was clueless; he couldn’t feel the venom wafting through the car.

I slammed my foot on the gas and peeled away. The dojo where Lizzy taught martial arts was just a few blocks away. I glanced at her in the rearview mirror and consciously released my grip on the steering wheel. For ten minutes, I could play Good Mom. Dealing with my mother would have to wait.

I gave my daughter a big smile. “How was your day, sweetie?”

“Fine.”

I wasn’t the only one on good behavior. With Lizzy in the car, Crazy Woman in Denial was replaced by Benevolent Grandma. “So, darling, tell me, what are you doing this summer?”

Mom had been asking Lizzy the same question for months, several times each visit. Lizzy patiently answered every time, speaking slowly and clearly, rather than mumbling the way she did when she addressed me. “I’m going to study French and international relations in France this summer. Thank you, Grandma. I wouldn’t be going without your help.” Mom radiated pride and glowed with satisfaction. I had to hand it to her. She was generous and cared about education. When I was young, she’d offered to take me to Israel, and I’d spurned her offer. She’d scrimped to save for my college education, and I’d spat on her opportunities.

Lizzy reached across the seat and squeezed her grandma’s shoulders. She did it easily, effortlessly. I wished I could touch my mother like that.

Mom beamed all the way to the dojo. When Lizzy hopped out, I checked the clock. I still had to take Mom home, redo her pills, fire Fiona, then drive back across town in rush hour. My class started in two hours. I wrenched the car around. I’d wasted my afternoon at that appointment when I damn well knew better. Dinner? Forget it. I’m not living in the sandwich generation. I’m living in a fucking vise.

But Mom was happy. Ten minutes with Lizzy had made her day. “That Lizzy. She’s really something. Eli, too. You and Karyn did such a good job with those kids. Who says lesbians shouldn’t have children?”

Despite myself, I had to laugh. “Thanks, but a lot of it was just dumb luck.”

Both of us enjoyed the momentary truce Lizzy’s presence had created.

***

The shortest way to Mom’s house was also the prettiest. Five minutes after we dropped Lizzy off, I turned right onto West Cliff Drive. It was a sunny spring afternoon. I slowed the car to a crawl and rolled down my window. I needed this: The Pacific on my left. Surfers dotting the rising and falling waves. The clackety-clack of skateboard wheels. The bark of sea lions. Laughter on the wind. West Cliff was the picture of the health and beauty that is Santa Cruz, but all I could think was How can I keep her safe now?

In the Alzheimer’s group, we’d learned that people with dementia need clear, limited choices, like the ones Karyn and I used to give the kids when they were small: “Eli, would you like to put away the blue blocks or the red blocks?” I decided to give it a shot. “Mom, I really appreciate you inviting me to see your therapist. It’s so great that we have an agreement. Now we just have to find someone to help you a few mornings a week. We could go back with an agency, or I could follow up on referrals from the support group. An agency costs more, but if you don’t like the person, they’ll send someone else. Which do you want?”

“Oh, I’ll just call Jane when I need a ride. You can set up my pills like always, and I’ll be fine.”

I slammed my hand against the steering wheel. “You won’t be fine! I just wasted two hours going to that therapy session—that you asked me to go to—and you agreed to have help!”

“I never agreed to that.”

“Yes, you did!” I wanted to smack her.

“No, I didn’t!”

My voice grew, filling the car and broadcasting our fight. “You need help, Mom! You don’t remember anything, so how can you possibly remember whether or not you’ve taken your pills? You can’t even remember an agreement you made five minutes ago! If you don’t agree to get help, I’m not firing Fiona.”

The sound of congas rose up from the beach. “I’m perfectly capable of living alone!”

“You are not! You know what one of the symptoms of Alzheimer’s is? You insist there’s nothing wrong with you! There is something wrong with you! Your brain is broken, and you’re not safe. It’s my job to take care of you, and you won’t let me! You have to do what I say!”

“You’re not the boss of me!”

Oh yes I am. “I hate this. I hate taking care of you!”

“And I hate that you keep treating me like I’m losing it!”

“Well, you are losing it!” My voice echoed through the car. I could feel my eyes bulging. “I don’t want to do this anymore! I’m sorry I invited you here.”

“And I’m sorry I came.”

I ran a stop sign. A bald guy on a ten-speed banged on the side of my car and yelled, “Fucking maniac!” I ignored him. I slammed on the brakes, right in the middle of West Cliff Drive, so I could hate Mom with my full attention.

“I don’t want to be your daughter anymore. I want my life back!” I yelled as cars honked behind me, a cacophony of horns, but I didn’t hear them. All I could hear was the inferno blazing in my head.

A vein next to Mom’s right eye pulsed. “At least you have a life.”

“I hate my life!”

“Well, I hate my life, too!”

I stared at her. My vision narrowed. A sledgehammer pounded in my ears. I couldn’t stop shaking. I screamed with a voice that had never come out of me before. “I wish you’d have a stroke and be done with it!”

My words reverberated through the car and out onto the street. Mom flinched, and her head jerked back. Her chin trembled. A scared child crawled out from the depths and peeked at me through ancient eyes. Then Mom turned away, wrenching her body as far from me as she could get, as far as the tightly buckled seat belt would allow. She reached for the door handle with a shaky hand, but it was childproofed. I’d locked her in.

Suddenly, I could hear again—the bicycles, waves smacking the seawall, the bellowing chorus of horns behind me, blaring their reprimand.

It was ten minutes to Mom’s place. Ten minutes on one of the prettiest roads in the world. But I saw nothing. I was aware of one thing and one thing only—the hell that was my life. I drove in silence as Mom cowered beside me. Voices echoed in my head: Bad daughter, selfish daughter. But I didn’t listen. Those voices were wrong. This was all her fault. She’d moved out here and ruined everything. She was crazy. She was manipulative. She made me say those things. Fuck you, Mom. Fuck you! I drove in a trance, my body trembling.

When I finally reached her unit, I braked hard. “So, you want me to fire Fiona? Okay, I’ll fire her. Then I’m going to do your pills, and then I’m leaving. And I plan to stay away for a long time!” I yanked out the keys. “Go ahead—live alone! It’s your life!”

And it’s going to be your death.

I slammed the car door, leaving her behind. Bolted up the steps. Thrust open the door. Strode into Fiona’s bedroom. “We need to go for a walk.” Fiona’s face darkened. She took one look at me and knew. She was about to lose her home.

By the time we headed out, Mom was in her bedroom, railing to her sister Ruth on the phone.

***

As Fiona and I walked to the lagoon, I tried to focus on the clear blue sky, the warmth of sun on my skin, the smooth glide of the swan Mom loved. I pressed my feet into the earth with every step, reaching for the molten center of the earth, until finally, my breath slowed. My chest filled with regret. What had I done?

Fiona and I chose a small bench overlooking the water. For better or worse, I was giving Mom what she wanted. “I’m sorry, Fiona, but this is not working.”

“I know.” Being fired was not a surprise.

“I’m giving you thirty days’ notice.” What I was going to do next, I had no idea, but there had to be something better than this.

Fiona looked out at the swan. It had a reputation for biting people—its days were numbered, too. We both knew Fiona had nowhere to go. Now, we both had to start over.

Mom was still holed up in her bedroom when we returned. The theme music for Jeopardy! boomed through the door. Good. She was busy.

Fiona and I moved fast, methodically plunking pills into Mom’s caddies while I redid the master list. As I was taping on the final pill, Mom burst through the door, stormed over, and grabbed the list. “I need that!” I yanked the paper back, and my careful work was ripped in two.

Mom gestured at Fiona dismissively. “What if she drops dead? How am I going to get my pills then?”

“Fiona will be here all month, Mom.” I held the torn paper out of reach, smoothed the damaged halves, zigzagged a piece of tape across the ragged tear. “I just gave her notice, but she needs time to find a new place to live.”

“I want her out of here right now!”

“She has thirty days. That’s just how it is.”

Mom’s cheeks flushed with fire. She wheeled on me. “You’re really pissing me off! I want you out of here!”

I glared back at her. “I want to get out of here, too!” I slapped the medication list high inside a cupboard. I was nine inches taller than Mom and used it to my advantage. “I have to go to work.”

Mom gripped the edge of the kitchen counter, knuckles white, her whole body about to ignite. Spiky energy radiated all around her. Everything about her said to me, Go on; get out.

With pleasure. I grabbed my purse and pivoted toward freedom. In four long strides, I was at her front door. I reached the knob and hesitated for a second, but momentum carried me forward. Rage propelled me. Regret did not stop me. I turned the knob. I did not look back. I couldn’t bear to see her enraged and ragged face. Maybe I’d have an accident on the way to class and never have to deal with any of this again. I wrenched open the cheap, hollow door and fled.

***

By the time I got home from teaching, Karyn was already asleep, so I sat down next to Lizzy, who was watching Dr. Who and doing homework. She paused her show.

“I really blew it with Grandma today. I yelled at her like I’ve never yelled at anyone before. It was really bad.” That’s as much of a confession as I was willing to make. Lizzy was only fifteen, and I was ashamed to let her see the ugliest part of me.

“You need to apologize.”

“I don’t want to.” Apologies were always hard for me. And apologizing to Mom was the toughest of all.

“She can’t help it. It’s the disease.”

“I know, but sometimes it’s just so hard.” I looked at Lizzy, so young, so full of promise. “Well, you’ve certainly been provided with a great gene pool. Heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and now Alzheimer’s disease.”

“Yeah, thanks. But I’m not worried. By the time I’m old, they’ll have cured all these things.”

If only. I turned to my daughter and took her warm, slim hand in mine. “Lizzy, when I get old, if I live that long, I hope I never give you such a hard time. If I ever start resisting your efforts to help me, remind me what happened with Grandma.”

“I will Mom, but . . .” And here, Lizzy paused for effect. “You won’t remember.”

We both cracked up.

***

That night I couldn’t sleep. The wind was rising from the south, bringing the bark of sea lions from the harbor and the yipping of coyotes from the nearby woods. But these wild sounds, deep in my suburban neighborhood, did not provide their usual pleasure. The rhythmic whoosh of my CPAP machine ricocheted in my head, amplifying my jagged breath. I ripped off the mask, slid out of bed, and drew a bath. Green Epsom salts. The hottest water I could stand.

I slid into the steaming water, stretched my legs onto the smooth white porcelain. Cranked the window open. Cool night air blew against my face, a welcome counterpoint to the searing heat. An alto chime sang in the ornamental cherry tree, but its mellow tone failed to soothe me. I had to face the truth. I was an awful person and a terrible daughter. I had betrayed my mother completely. Our grand reconciliation had all been a sham, and this proved it.

I wanted Mom to have help, so she could stay in the little home she loved, doing the things she loved for as long as possible. I wanted to take care of her, in theory anyway, but I wasn’t actually sure I’d ever be able to do more than just go through the motions. Could I ever be wholehearted, or was I destined to remain an ambivalent caregiver?

This tragedy was heading only in one direction. And I wasn’t sure I could survive until the end. I’d made Mom a promise, and I wanted to find a way to keep it, but I desperately needed to know: How much longer was this going to take? When would it be over?

***

The next morning, just as I was about to call Mom to apologize, I found a chipper message from her on my voicemail: “Good morning, Laurie. I want to apologize for yesterday. I don’t know what’s happening to me. I’m going nutso. You absolutely don’t deserve any negativity from me. You have been fabulous, and I’m not sure what’s going on for me to react like this. Totally uncalled for. You don’t deserve that. Okay, bye!”

My God. She didn’t remember what I’d said. She and I were the only witnesses to my crime, and she didn’t remember a word of it. Because I was her lifeline and she needed me, she had blamed herself. I’d gotten away with it. And I could get away with it again. I could say and do anything. I could vent my rage, exact my revenge, and no one would ever know. I had all the power now. And all the glory. “You’re such a good daughter.” I heard that every day. “You take such good care of your mother. I wish I had a daughter like you.”

I had never understood elder abuse before, but now I understood it perfectly. I had the freedom. I had the license. I had the opportunity, and somewhere buried inside me, I still had the motive. The woman who’d screamed at my mother had been waiting a lifetime to come out. For fifty-six years, Mom had told me I was a liar, that it hadn’t happened, that I was wrong. For years, this crazy streak of hers had been kept under wraps, but dementia had exposed the bare wires. I was being triggered in a way I hadn’t been in decades. All the rage I’d ever felt as her daughter for gaslighting me was right there, blistering my tongue. And I’d let it out. Me. I’d done that. But there was more. The worst part was that it felt good. Screaming at Mom was primal. It felt good to lose control. I’d been so controlled all my life. Finally, I had let the raging demon out. But I couldn’t let it happen again. She was defenseless. I had to be her mother now.

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What is the “hard thing” at the center of this piece—for you, personally, not just on the page?

Revisiting the moment when, as a caregiver, I screamed at my mother and wished her dead was incredibly challenging, as you can imagine. Going back to that day and facing what I had said and done was excruciating. Committing the events of that day to the page was one of the hardest things I’ve ever written.

When I wrote the first draft, I was still carrying tremendous shame about the way I’d turned on my mother, even though another part of me recognized that it was deeply human. Still, my body was in revolt as I moved my pen across the page. I was shaking and crying as I got the story down.

But I had to write it. I felt compelled. I’ve always felt compelled to write about things other people see as forbidden. This is who I am and what I’ve been doing my entire adult life. Publicly sharing my underbelly in public is something I’ve done for the last forty years, starting with my first book, The Courage to Heal, about healing from child sexual abuse, published in 1988 when I was just 31 years old.

And I know it’s the courage I’ve demonstrated in my own writing that inspires my writing students to risk sharing their own deepest truths.

Personally, I always feel liberated when I write all the way down to the bone, when I don’t hold back, when I’m honest with myself in a way I can only attain on the page. Writing has always been my best means for discovering, facing, and acknowledging the truth. Most of my greatest realizations about myself and my life have emerged through the process of writing.

And I pretty much always share what I write—if not in public or in print, with a safe friend I can entrust my words to. For me, having a reader, a listener, or an audience completes the circuit. I don’t like what I write to just fester in my notebook.

In this particular instance, because The Burning Light of Two Stars was about caregiving, I felt it was essential to reveal aspects of caregiving most people never talk about. I wanted people reading this book to breathe a little easier, to accept their own terrible moments with more compassion and forgiveness. Oh, phew. I’m not the only one.

Another thing that reinforced my decision to publish this scene was something I heard Cheryl Strayed say during a keynote speech she gave at the San Miguel Writer’s Conference. She talked about the one sentence she had debated taking out of Wild—where she describes tasting her mother’s ashes. Cheryl ultimately decided to include it and told us that it was the one moment in the book people commented on more than any other. I remembered that when I was deciding whether to include this scene in my memoir. Cheryl’s courage to go ahead inspired my own.

What helped you regulate, or at least be present, while writing this piece?

I’ve been doing a writing practice, as taught to me by Natalie Goldberg, for the last 45 years. I feel fearless in that practice and will go wherever it takes me. That doesn’t mean I might not be shaking or scared or crying when I write something raw or hard to face—it means I don’t stop and that I keep going deeper. I never let go of that thread. For me, this kind of embodied writing, from the soul to the soul, is a discipline, a practice. I have relied on it and taught it for decades. I believe it is a sacred path.

The other thing that matters to me is having a safe container in which to write the hard things. As a writing teacher, I provide this for my students. And as a teacher, I always make sure I’m a writing student as well. I need to sit in a safe, confidential circle with others who are committed to telling the truth. I need to regularly do the hard thing I’m asking my students to do.

If I’m not in a group and am writing alone at home, I make sure I am in a private space where I won’t be interrupted. When I know I’m going to be writing something hard, I make sure I build time and space around my writing time so I can ground myself after I’ve written, before I need to interact or function. Walking on the earth in nature after a hard piece of writing really helps me.

The other thing is that I’ve been practicing this kind of writing for a very long time. Nothing I’ve written down has ever killed me. Ultimately, I know from experience that I always feel better (eventually) for having written and shared the truth.

Still, as I wrote this particular piece, I had to reassure myself, “I’m just writing this for me. I don’t have to publish it.” Even though the author in me recognized that this was a critical turning point for the protagonist in the memoir and that I would ultimately publish it, I had to pretend I still had the option to leave it out.

With each subsequent draft (and I literally rewrote every scene in The Burning Light of Two Stars a hundred times), I understood and revealed more layers of the truth of that afternoon, I protected myself less, and I cared less about what other people would think of me for admitting the truth of that terrible moment. The long process of writing and editing created separation between me as a daughter and a caregiver and me as an author. By the time I published my memoir, this episode had become a crafted story that I had emotional distance from, no longer a raw confession.

What changed for you after writing it, if anything (internally or externally)?

Writing it loosened any residual shame I was still carrying. And including it made my memoir better. It was a necessary moment in the arc of the story. It helped me reach readers in an even more visceral way. Later, I loved hearing from people who told me that reading this scene helped them feel less alone.

For someone standing at the edge of their own hard story, what would you want them to know?

Telling the real truth of your life is one of the most empowering and freeing tools for healing available. And it is always available—all you need is a notebook and a pen. Writing the hard story can be an incredibly powerful way to chew things over, to understand your life and reclaim it.

But if you’re considering writing about the really hard things, it’s also important to assess whether you have the emotional stamina and support you need to face those painful realities. If you don’t have the inner strength, the self-soothing skills, or external helpers to guide you, writing about difficult events can retraumatize you.

In the healing process, there are times we need containment and grounding. And other times, when excavating more of the truth is what’s needed. The whole time I was writing about my sexual abuse, for instance, I was in therapy. I needed that support to help me process the things that were coming up in my writing. I’m really glad I wasn’t out there trying to do this work alone.

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If this conversation leaves you wanting more, Laura is teaching a FREE virtual writing workshop called, Flourishing as We Age on Saturday, April 18.

Details: ONLINE: Via Zoom
Saturday, April 18, 2026
10 am - 12 pm Pacific Time | 1 - 3 pm Eastern Time

Aging isn’t just about getting older—it’s about navigating all that comes with it: the losses, the changes, and the unexpected discoveries along the way. In this free two-hour writing workshop with Laura Davis, hosted by Gail Warner, you’ll use writing as a tool to explore what matters most to you now. No writing experience required—only a willingness to show up honestly on the page. This workshop offers a taste of the deeper work we’ll do together at the seven-day Flourishing as We Age retreat in Santa Cruz this June.

P.S. The workshop will be recorded if you can’t make it to the live event.

You can sign up here.

Laura Davis is the author of The Burning Light of Two Stars, the award-winning story of her loving, tumultuous relationship with her mother, and six other non-fiction books. Her first book, The Courage to Heal, paved the way for hundreds of thousands to heal from the trauma of sexual abuse.

In addition to writing books that inspire, the work of Laura’s heart is to teach. For more than twenty-five years, she has helped people find their voices, tell their stories, and hone their craft. She loves building and facilitating writing communities online in weekly classes and in person at writing retreats in beautiful locations in the US and around the world.

Laura has been published in Publisher’s Weekly, Writer’s Digest, CrimeReads, Brevity, and The New York Times, and has been a featured speaker for The National Association of Memoir Writers.

Where to find Laura:
Website | Substack | Buy Her Book

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If you want to read more from Laura, here’s a piece that’s a fave of mine…

The Writer's Journey with Laura Davis

The Portal in the Wound

In a text thread last night, I wrote to a friend, “My life feels rich and expansive in its diminishment…

Read more

6 months ago · 90 likes · 64 comments · Laura Davis

This month’s On Writing the Hard Thing centers around one of my favorite humans and her essay, “The Facts of Your Body,” which was originally published in Hippocampus Magazine. The piece by begins with her mother’s autopsy report. A list of facts that are clinical, detached, and exact. Cause of death, organ weight, the mother/human/body/soul reduced to data.

The essay moves between two worlds—the sterile language of the autopsy report and the living, breathing memory of a mother—the love, the laugh, the temper, the specific details that no official record could ever contain. And in that movement, there’s an insistence that a life (and a love) cannot be reduced to facts.

One of my favorite things about the piece is that Ava writes it in the second person, addressing her mother as “you,” and that choice alone does so much work. It collapses time, refusing the distance that death and documentation try to impose. At the same time, it holds the tension of that distance because this is a conversation that can no longer be answered. The “you” becomes both a reaching and a reckoning.

I also love how much the piece can hold in such a small space. It’s tight and precise, and yet it carries grief, anger, tenderness, memory, distance, intimacy, all of it. It’s a masterclass in compression. Nothing is over-explained, and somehow, that restraint makes the emotional impact land even harder.

In her interview, when she talks about writing this essay, Ava says, “I needed to bleed in order to stay present.” And you can feel that. There’s no distance from the material, no stepping away to make it more palatable. She stays inside it. Writing not from resolution, but from the place that is still open, still questioning, still in contact with the body of it. Which, to me, is exactly why the piece lands the way it does. Writing from the emotional heat is often how we write the hard thing, and Ava does it from the heart and the bone and it is beautiful and true.

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The Facts of Your Body

Your autopsy was performed at 9:20 a.m. on June 30, 2013. I was 25 years, 3 hours and 50 minutes old. It made me think of the times you woke me at exactly 5:30 a.m. on the day of my birth to tell me, “You were born exactly <insert years> ago today.”

You were born once too, you know.

You were here.

I had to look up the definition of “coffee ground emesis,” and instead of shuddering at the thought of blood-stained vomit surrounding your crown like a halo, I felt closer to you than I have in years.

What does that say about me?

Death is due to acute aspiration pneumonia complicating mixed drug toxicity, the autopsy report reads. Obesity played a significant role in the death. The manner of death is an accident. I roll my eyes at the assertion that your body weight played a starring role, and I think to myself, Fatphobia truly knows no bounds. You choked on your vomit; that’s the fact.

I scroll down and read the section titled, “General Description Clothing/Effects.” They note the anklets that you always wore—and by always, I mean for the 24 years and 363 days of my life in which you were here. This makes me smile; and I can still hear those anklets tinkling in the distance as you made your way to the kitchen to refill your coffee.

These are the facts. You were here.

They remark on the weight of your organs, and I imagine what it would have been like to hold the weight of your heart in my hands instead of bearing the weight of the questions I never got to ask you. Step aside, I want to tell them. Let me do it. I knew how to be gentle with you even when I hated you for it. I decide to print the report so I can feel the weight of the paper instead. They say that your rigidity is pretty well developed but easily broken, and I want to tell them yes/and. I watched you rise a hundred times for every time you fell. I guess they’re right when they say sometimes you go down and stay down. I never thought of you as easily broken but tender enough to leave marks. I can’t stop thinking of the marks their examination will leave on you.

They recorded your irises being hazel, even though you always said they were brown. I called mine hazel, but that never sat right with you. “You’re my brown-eyed girl,” you’d always tell me. They’re hazel after all, Mom. The medical examiner said so. I wonder, if the same pathologists were to do my autopsy, whether they would say mine were hazel, too.

They cover all their bases and were nothing if not thorough. All ten of your fingers don acrylic nails, although your thumb nail is slightly broken. Your back is unremarkable. Not an inch of you went undocumented; but for as meticulous and methodical as they were, I want to tell them about the size of your laugh and unflinching temper. I want them to note the 5:30 am birthday wake-ups, the song of the anklet charms against your feet, the way your eyes – hazel, brown, whatever they were – narrowed when you saw something you wanted.

I want to tell them that your autopsy is not a sterile grocery list, an accounting of the facts and nothing more. I want to tell them that it’s a testimony – a gospel.

You are my mother. You were here.

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What is the “hard thing” at the center of this piece—for you, personally, not just on the page?

The not-knowing. My mother’s death has always felt amorphous on an intrinsic level. While her death was technically listed as accidental, I have always felt in my body that there was more to the story. On paper and accident, in my heart I know that she was ready for life elsewhere. Not cerebrally understanding is mostly why I write in the first place– to make sense of something.

What helped you regulate, or at least be present, while writing this piece?

To be honest, I was absolutely dysregulated while I wrote the bulk of The Facts of Your Body. I was getting ready for a concert that evening when I heard an email notification. I had been waiting for my mother’s death certificate and never considered that they would also send her autopsy. I sat at the dining table, poring over it while wearing a lingerie bodysuit, I had mascara on only one eye, and hadn’t begun doing my hair. I looked like I felt– half-state, liminal, and a little unhinged. I read her autopsy over and over while simultaneously beginning to write. How do you ask questions you’ll never receive an answer for? I had so many. I wrote and wrote and wrote and as I’m writing this, I am understanding that the answer to this question is that by writing I was able to regulate. Usually, I would tell you that I took a great deal of time to stop for walks or baths. Or that I would pause to spend some time in the kitchen or the garden to keep myself grounded. This was not that– I needed to bleed in order to stay present.

What changed for you after writing it, if anything (internally or externally)?

This was the first piece I had ever submitted to a literary magazine and with its acceptance came the feeling like my writing does in fact have a place in this world. It wasn’t so much the validation of being published (although of course it was– I am human) in a literary magazine but more so the idea that I could write the way I wanted to, the way that feels true, and still be understood. This was after several years of having personal essays published in places that never felt right because of how I had to censor or cleanse my writing. This is on me but nevertheless a lesson I needed to learn. The line, I had to look up the definition of “coffee ground emesis,” and instead of shuddering at the thought of blood-stained vomit surrounding your crown like a halo, I felt closer to you than I have in years, is not hyperbole. What had changed in me was this– after a severance from my mother both physically and emotionally in her last years here, I feel closest to her now that she’s gone.

For someone standing at the edge of their own hard story, what would you want them to know?

Write the heart. Most writers have some version of this rattling around in their heads– there’s the thing you want to write and then there’s what really needs to be written. Writing about vulnerable and tender moments can be cathartic but it can also dredge up too much if we aren’t ready. Don’t force, tell your truth, write from underneath.

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Ava Robinson is a genderqueer writer, workshop facilitator, sex worker, witch, home cook, mother, and reader living in Denver, CO. She publishes the newsletter food//and and is currently working on an essay collection.

If you want to read more from Ava, here’s a piece that’s a fave of mine…

food//and

Read this when you want to return to the peat from which you came

I feel far from the internet. To be honest I never cared much for computering at all. I hold both//and in the palm of my hands— the relationships I’ve built with other hearts in different time zones…

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9 months ago · 10 likes · 8 comments · Ava Robinson

February’s On Writing the Hard Thing turns toward the body (y’all know this is where I tend to linger).

Some stories aren’t buried somewhere far back in memory, waiting to be unearthed. They live in muscle, in scar tissue, in blood and bone.

They unfold in moments where survival and consequence blur together in ways that don’t feel clean or simple or fair. And what happens there has a way of following you home. It settles into the body and changes the way you move through an otherwise ordinary afternoon.

These stories ask what it means to keep living after the hard thing. To carry what your body remembers, even when your mind would prefer some distance, and to keep going with something threaded through you and in you that isn’t easily set down.

This month, I’m honored to share an excerpt from Chapter 12 of ’s memoir, Lightning Flowers: My Journey to Uncover the Cost of Saving a Life, published in 2020. In this book, Kati traces her complicated relationship with her cardiac defibrillator — facing death as a young person, navigating the American healthcare system, and reckoning with the unsettling question of whether the technology that saved her life may have cost lives elsewhere in its supply chain.

In the passage that follows, Kati is waking up from a heart surgery in which a cardiac surgeon has attempted to remove a fractured wire from her heart. The reality is technical and almost impossible to imagine from the outside, but she writes it in a way that is so visceral, you not only see the scene, you feel it.

And then, after the excerpt, she walks us through what it actually took to write it. The way she approached memory that felt distorted and uncontainable. The way she resourced her body, slowed herself down, let energy move instead of forcing the story forward. The way she stayed with herself and with the story.

Her process conversation is, truly, one of the most profound things I’ve read about writing trauma. I had full-body chills. At one point, I could feel my heart creeping up into my throat. It’s the kind of honesty and rigor that anyone standing at the edge of their own hard story needs to receive because it shows what it actually requires.

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Lightning Flowers: My Journey to Uncover the Cost of Saving a Life

Chapter 12, pg. 188

To wake from a surgery can mean waking into a nightmare. The nurse stood over me, angry. The edges of everything fuzzy. “This will hurt,” she said darkly. “They’re supposed to do this while you’re still under.” Then her mouth filled with words I could not understand. The procedure failed. The wire broke off. All at once she pulled the sheath from my femoral incision and slammed the heel of her hand into my groin, and I was screaming. “Stop that,” she said harshly. “We have to get a clot to form or you’ll bleed in spurts every time your heart beats, because in the femoral the pressure is high, coming right from the heart.” But I was not in control of the sounds of me, so sharp red the sensation, the most painful moment of my life. She slid a slender metal arm over the side of the bed and cranked a black knob as the pain in my groin exploded, and I saw it was a C-clamp, not unlike the kind I’d used in industrial arts class in sixth grade to hold wood while I sawed along a carefully pencilled line. Now I was clamped to the bed by my groin, in the fold where my right thigh began. “Twenty minutes,” she said, and I tried to breathe, tried to follow my breath in and out of screaming, but none of the lines of the room were right, there was only that jagged red pain.

Later she would release the clamp and look back at me fiercely. “Now you cannot move for six hours, do you understand?” I was not to sit up in the slightest, because it would cause a rush of blood to the groin and dislodge the tender clot we’d built, and then we’d be back where we had started. I was not to laugh or sneeze or cough. If I felt something coming I could push my hand where the incision had been, to hold the clot in place.

Then into a cramped, shabby room, where a woman who’d just come out of open heart surgery moaned and snored on the other side of the curtain, her monitors beeping. The new nurse--a more compact, cheerier woman--began to attach the automatic blood pressure cuff to my left arm. “No,” I said. “I have a fresh incision on that side.” I needed to be able to keep my arm at a protective angle. But in my right arm ran all the IV lines, bruises already pooling inside my elbow and forearm. With my right leg off-limits because of the femoral incision, the blood pressure cuff went on my left calf, the muscles getting painfully squeezed each hour through the night.

As the anesthesia ebbed, in rushed the nausea I’d heard about, a horrible lurching, a cheek-flushing sourness. “We can give you something for that,” the nurse said.

“Excuse me,” I said, “I just want to make sure you saw that I’m a long QT patient. If it’s what I think it is, it’s on my drugs-to-avoid list. Please be sure you check my contraindications.”

“Oh, no, it should be fine,” the nurse said.

“I need you to double-check,” I said. “When I’ve come out of anesthesia in the past, I haven’t been allowed anything.”

“Well, you have an ICD,” the nurse said. “That’s what it’s for!”

She wasn’t joking.

Mom and I exchanged horrified looks. “You’re going to give me a drug that could put me in cardiac arrest because it’s fine, I have a defibrillator? Which would go off under my fresh incision? At a moment I’m not supposed to move at all because I could dislodge a femoral clot? Are you crazy?” I said.

At that moment, my mom and I knew she wouldn’t be leaving that night. She would sleep sitting up in a chair, if she slept at all. The care I was receiving felt scary. If something happened in the wake of surgery and I couldn’t advocate for myself, someone else would need to be there, not several miles away; the nurse’s judgment couldn’t be trusted. I thought of the eyes of the owl. It was easy to think that once my six hours lying flat were up, the medical part of my stay would be over, but someone had been tugging at the thinnest part of my heart, sticking technical tools up my veins and arteries. If there was a slow bleed, we might not know about it right away. If there was a clot. Here began a long night...

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What is the “hard thing” at the center of this piece—for you, personally, not just on the page?

This was the most painful moment of my life physically; my memory of it felt distorted and wild. Yet because what was happening in the scene was fairly technical, I knew I couldn’t just narrate what it was like for me-- I had to ground readers in what was happening.

In order to do that, I had to watch a YouTube video of someone performing a femoral sheath removal. (Shudder.)

What helped you regulate, or at least present, while writing this piece?

At the time, I was lucky to be working with a therapist certified in Somatic Experiencing. Although I was staying on a remote New Mexico mesa with limited wifi, I descended the mountain to my landlord’s yurt each week for Zoom sessions in which I slowly got used to Lynne slowing me down. When I tried to talk through something quickly, barreling forward like a train, she would stop me and require me to actually feel what I was saying. Often she would note how my shoulder changed positions when I told a certain story--how I protected my heart or held my head. We explored why I instinctively did these things. Therapy became less about telling stories than letting energy fully move.

If I was crying but tried to push forward, Lynne would encourage me to instead let the cry take as long as it truly took. Honestly, this unhinged me. As someone who had already been processing complex trauma through my body for years--including for other scenes in this book-- I was shocked by how often I limited the length of time somatic processing could take out of some idea of how long it should take. My work with Lynne helped me build the muscles to notice subtle changes in my body--an essential skill for safely titrating on-the-page trauma work.

At first I could only watch about three seconds of the YouTube video before the sensations in my body became excruciating. I pressed pause and tried to remain present with what I felt--whether physical pain in my pelvis, a crawling sensation across my chest, or the need to scream, sob, hyperventilate. I shook my body, used my breath to move the energy. Then, when I felt a readiness creep back--enough capacity to consider continuing--I would press play again, for however many seconds I could tolerate.

I scrawled notes about what they were doing in the video, how the tools looked, and what it all would have meant on my body.

When capacity failed to come back, I’d stop for longer--lying on my yoga mat, getting in bed for a nap, or pulling on my boots to go for a slow walk down the dirt road. I made tea, cooked green chili pork, built up the fire in the stove. I made a point of visiting hot springs once a week and committed to both a qigong class and an acupuncture appointment weekly. As a survivor of many types of trauma, I knew I needed to strengthen my underlying parasympathetic nervous system if I wanted to be able to re-regulate after this kind of intense writing.

I know this description reeks of privilege. But I’m a single childless person and was on deadline with a major publisher. I’d sublet my house to save money, and was living on credit cards because writing this kind of trauma material while teaching/ coaching other writers had already failed. Pushing through wasn’t going to be successful, so I committed to giving myself the resources required to work more intentionally with my nervous system... and I put myself somewhere I could scream without anyone calling the cops. :)

What changed for you after writing it, if anything (internally or externally)?

Well, this goes back to the first question--what is the “hard thing at the center of this”?

I thought the hard thing was confronting searing pain and the way it was held in my body, which then led to the craft challenge of how to capture an impossible experience. And of course these were both hard things.

But it turned out confronting the pain in my body meant confronting the months I could barely walk because of medical trauma held in my pelvis. It meant feeling the grief from all the months I tried to run but couldn’t. It meant understanding how I’d been shaped by going through my third heart surgery-- a brutal one-- at age 30. It meant feeling the devastation of trying to recover from the procedure without the support of a partner, and how the constant crises in my life made me unavailable to find partnership. It meant feeling the anger of being told not to scream, and being abandoned by my doctor who never came to explain what had happened in the surgery.

It meant understanding I would never be the same again. Not even if I healed.

When I sold my book to Hachette in November 2017--about a year and a half after the surgery in question-- I thought it could somehow bring me a clean slate. Instead of living inside a medical nightmare, I hoped, I would live a crisp, lovely life of getting to write and publish my book. I imagined this would somehow take the sting out of the events and make them worth it.

But book writing brought me into the center of what had happened. As I screamed and sweated and wept through the later chapters of my book, much of the physical pain lifted out of my body. Yet facing and integrating this kind of pain forged me into a certain kind of person. Suddenly I carried an enormous capacity for facing and holding darkness. Being deeply embodied meant hiding from pain would never fully be an option again.

Without all the “scar tissue” I’d wrapped around me to numb me from pain, my sensitivity heightened. Within months I’d moved from primarily physical processing work to more energetic and spiritual forms of healing. As my light brightened, I started to attract spirits-- and then I had to learn what to do with them.

I now work as a shamanic practitioner, and my Substack The Wild and Holy Moment tells the story of my death initiations and the process of being courted for shamanic practice in a modern world that doesn’t believe in it. Not everyone who alchemizes their pain is being initiated as a shaman, but I do believe all of us are being invited to become a version of ourselves that we are meant to be, that we can’t be if we shy away from the most difficult work.

My commitment to writing hard things became the portal to my becoming.

For someone standing at the edge of their own hard story, what would you want them to know?

Plenty of people are not drawn to write difficult stories. If you are, it’s for a reason. That compass inside you, pulling you toward writing the impossible, knows there’s something waiting for you on the other side.

You are strong enough. You are brave enough. Figure out how to resource your body, and walk into the fires of your making.

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If this conversation leaves you wanting more, Kati also speaks with resilience coach in How Do You Actually Move Trauma Through the Body? It’s a deep, generous exploration of walking toward death, somatic processing, and what it really takes to move trauma through (not bypass it).

The Wild and Holy Moment

How Do You Actually Move Trauma Through the Body?: On Walking Towards Death and Somatic Processing, with Resilience Coach Jillian Parkhurst

“It was the first moment in a decade that I chose myself. When I really look back at, ‘When did I choose to live?’ it was that moment, when I said, 'He’s not welcome [in my hospital room]’… Something in me—the most primal part of me—knew this wasn’t the time to default to taking care [of him] or making sure his needs were met. It was: This is Go Time. T…

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7 months ago · 17 likes · 10 comments · Katherine E. Standefer and Jillian Parkhurst

Katherine E. Standefer‘s debut book Lightning Flowers: My Journey to Uncover the Cost of Saving a Life was a Finalist for the Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction, an New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, and shortlisted for the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Prize from Columbia School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. Lightning Flowers was the Common Read at Colorado College in 2022, featured on NPR’s Fresh Air, and named one of O, The Oprah Magazine‘s Best Books of Fall 2020. Standefer earned her MFA in Creative Nonfiction at the University of Arizona. She has been a Logan Nonfiction Fellow at the Carey Institute for Global Good and a Marion Weber Healing Arts Fellow at the Mesa Refuge. Her work appeared in The Best American Essays 2016. She lives in a cabin in Wyoming.

Where to find Kati:
Website | Substack | Buy Her Book

On Writing the Hard Thing is a monthly series devoted to the invisible labor of telling difficult stories.

So many conversations about writing linger on the finished piece—on craft, publication, or even bravery—without pausing to ask how these stories actually get written. What it looks like to sit your ass in the chair day after day and negotiate not just with language, but with fear, shame, memory, and the nervous system itself. What it takes to stay present. What it costs. And what changes when the story finally leaves the body and enters the world.

Each feature centers a writer’s hard story alongside a conversation about process. How they stayed with the material, what supported them as they wrote, and what shifted after the story was finally told—the parts we rarely get to see, but so many of us need.

This series matters to me because I believe writing the hard thing is not just a creative act, or even a freeing one. It’s a relational act. These stories widen the field of what can be spoken. They disempower shame and interrupt the long holding pattern of silence. They offer recognition and community and resonance, and damn, it feels good to witness and be witnessed by others who are excavating their own pasts, doing this slow, difficult, deeply rewarding work.

And for readers standing at the edge of their own hard stories, unsure where to begin or whether they’re allowed to begin at all, these conversations offer the simple, but vital knowing: you’re not alone.

I’m deeply honored to open the series with of Forager Field Notes and her powerful essay, “Religion Is an Ex I’m Still Trying to Leave Behind.” Originally published in TIME magazine just before the release of her memoir Forager: Field Notes for Surviving a Family Cult, this piece marked the first time Michelle publicly named her experience of growing up in an abusive, high-control religious cult and the long aftermath of leaving it.

Take a deep breath and dive in. After the piece, I’ll talk with Michelle about what it took to write it.

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Religion Is an Ex I’m Still Trying to Leave Behind

When I was 21 and living states away from my family of origin and the fundamentalist community I had left four years earlier, I was washing dishes in the sink when I noticed that the water turned playfully pink. I didn’t know why. Sometimes I would see bright droplets of blood on the floor and follow them like breadcrumbs, looking for some creature who had bled out and died.

Then, I realized it was me.

I hurt myself often in those days, whether that was slicing my hand while cleaning a knife, or cutting my bare feet on broken glass when I walked barefoot (which was almost everywhere). After leaving the community that I would later recognize was a high-control, high-demand religious cult, I felt so dissociated that I didn’t know where my body began or what it felt like to live in it. I hadn’t developed any strategies to numb my pain, except to refuse to feel it. I had left my body years ago—and I feel safe enough to find my way back yet.

Many of us who were raised in religious extremism don’t live in our bodies. Our days are spent in our heads and our nights are disrupted by the ghosts of our early indoctrination—our subconscious rising up to haunt us. We were trained to live for an afterlife, so when there is pain here, we transport ourselves there.

The strict religious programming of our early years is part of identity, not only through family connections, but in the language we use to communicate with our own minds, bodies, sexuality, and self-worth. Religious indoctrination materializes everywhere, and studies on Religious Trauma Syndrome (RTS) show that dissociation occurs when an individual struggles with leaving a religion or a set of beliefs that has led to their

indoctrination—similarly to an ex who won’t leave you alone, long after you filed a restraining order.

High-control religion is my ex. Let me tell you about how I left.

I grew up on a mountain in California’s Angeles National Forest, preparing for the Apocalypse. This doesn’t explain the juxtaposition of faith and famine, or how the landscape of my childhood was more amorphous than the boundary of a mountain implies, but it’s the simplest truth for which I can find words. For a decade of my childhood, a mountain was the closest thing I had to a home, and I learned to forage for local plants, including acorns, pine seeds, nettles, and elderberries, finding what I needed to survive on it.

But my real home wasn’t a place. It was an idea. An idea my maternal grandfather turned into a fundamentalist religious community, governed by him, where I learned to subjugate my needs and desires to his.

Grandpa visited a lot of churches, peddling among disparate denominations, and sometimes I was allowed to go with him, to learn the seductions of commonplace belief systems which pave the way to hell. We sat down in church basements to break bread with Southern Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians. We ate supper with Mennonite and Amish families in the dining rooms of their homes. Grandpa criticized them all for different reasons. Some drank wine, which Jesus had clearly intended to be grape juice, or they decorated their churches with pomp and circumstance, like heathens, or they worshiped the idols of popular music, clothing, or entertainment. Grandpa believed even the Amish were too liberal because they allowed their youth to sow wild seeds of rebellion, encouraging them to drive cars and drink liquor and lose their purity in order to get it out of their system, so they would know what they were giving up and wouldn’t yearn for what they never had.

Grandpa told us he was God’s prophet and would live to be 500 years old, that the angels would descend from heaven and take him up into the clouds like Elijah. Grandpa was the only one with authority. And his pontifications were the soundtrack of my childhood. All the women in my family—my grandmother, mother, aunt, siblings and me—were born and raised with the fear of Grandpa and his jealous God, whose voice we could not escape. Our first love.

When I left my grandfather and the mountain, the scariest thing, I realized, was that the girl they indoctrinated still lived inside me. While I relished the freedom of being able to make my own choices, I continued to hear Grandpa’s voice in my ear, yelling at me that the price I would pay for leaving him would be an eternity spent in hell—like an ex I can’t get out of my head.

Like many former believers, I was afraid of hell and other punishments God might mete out. I suffered from triggers and flashbacks, with a foreboding feeling there’s something inherently wrong with me, something that makes me unworthy of love, comfort, or rest. Even though I’ve turned my back on my early teachings and created a template of new morals to live by, the God of my grandfather haunts me to this day. I live with a low-grade fear that if I let go of my vigilance, my ex will find out and punish me for trying to get away. It makes it difficult to live in a secular world. Or even one in which religion is soft and yielding, called to comfort, rather than afflict.

You can take the girl out of the cult, but it’s hard to take the cult out of the girl. As the Gospel of Matthew says, “For wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat.” How can I yield to pleasure, rest, comfort, or acceptance, when I learned that entering at a narrow gate cannot be replicated, that anyone or anyone I find as a replacement has the possibility to betray me?

Time, I learned, is the greatest healer. Like many former believers, I’ve left my ex behind, to build relationships and communities that serve me on the earth I know, rather than a nebulous afterlife. But that doesn’t mean it has fully let me go.

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What is the “hard thing” at the center of this piece—for you, personally, not just on the page?

The hard thing was admitting how thoroughly my family had trained me away from my own body—and how long that exile lasted.

Writing this piece meant telling the truth about dissociation without turning it into a metaphor. The pink water in the sink wasn’t poetic. It was the evidence of how completely I had learned to leave myself. The hardest thing was acknowledging that survival came at the cost of embodiment, and that for years afterward, I didn’t know when I was hurting, or even that I was.

There’s a particular shame in realizing that the most dangerous voice didn’t disappear when I left the mountain. It moved inside. Naming that meant relinquishing the illusion that leaving is the same as being free. It meant admitting that the indoctrination still had jurisdiction over my nervous system, my pleasure, my sense of safety.

That was the hard center: not escape, but aftermath.

What helped you regulate, or at least be present, while writing this piece?

I didn’t try to stay regulated the whole time. That would have been another version of control.

What helped was writing in short, embodied bursts, often stopping mid-paragraph to stand up, walk, touch something solid, drink water, look out a window. I paid attention to where the writing landed in my body. If my jaw locked or my breath went shallow, I paused. That was information, not failure.

I also anchored the writing in the physical world: sinks, floors, blood, mountains, food, hands. Sensory detail wasn’t aesthetic; it was a way to stay tethered. The body I was writing about was the same body doing the writing, and I needed to keep reminding myself that I was no longer 17, no longer trapped, no longer alone.

Most importantly, I wrote with the knowledge that I didn’t have to explain everything. I didn’t have to justify my leaving, or prove that it was bad enough. Letting go of the need to convince an imagined skeptic was regulating in itself.

What changed for you after writing it, if anything (internally or externally)?

Internally, something irreversible happened: I stopped protecting the cult’s secrecy more than my own life.

Once this piece was published, the story was no longer just mine to carry in private. That didn’t fix the trauma, but it shifted the power. The fear that had lived in silence lost some of its leverage. I felt less haunted, not because the past disappeared, but because it had been witnessed without collapsing me.

Externally, the response surprised me. People who had been raised in other high-control religious groups recognized themselves immediately. Many told me it was the first time they had seen their experience named without mockery or dismissal. That recognition deepened my sense of responsibility, but it also softened my isolation.

The piece didn’t close a chapter. It opened one. It made it possible for me to talk about Forager.

For someone standing at the edge of their own hard story, what would you want them to know?

You don’t owe the truth all at once.

You don’t have to start with the most violent moment, the most shocking detail, or the version that makes sense to other people. You can begin where your body can tolerate beginning. You can tell the story sideways. You can tell it slowly. You can tell it to yourself first.

Also, the fear that tells you writing it will destroy you is often the last voice of the system that benefited from your silence.

Telling the truth doesn’t mean reliving everything. It means reclaiming authorship. And you are allowed to do that in a way that protects your life, your nervous system, and your future.

The hard story doesn’t ask you to be brave. It asks you to be honest enough to stay.

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Michelle Dowd is a journalism professor and contributor to The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, TIME magazine, Alpinist, and other national publications. She was raised on a mountain in the Angeles National Forest where she learned to identify flora and fauna, navigate by the stars, forage for edible plants, and care for the earth. Her memoir, Forager: Field Notes on Surviving a Family Cult, showcases her life growing up on an isolated mountain in California as part of an apocalyptic cult, and how she found her way out of poverty and illness by drawing on the gifts of the wilderness.

Where to find Michelle:
Website | Substack | Instagram | Buy Her Book