The Feed

Everything I post is basically a poetic diary entry pulled straight from my deepest thoughts, my real experiences, and the entire universe I built from daydreaming too much. This is all of it, in one place — no algorithm deciding what you get to see.

119 posts
Reclamation

I feel like religion and spirituality can be touchy subjects.

While many people have found comfort and meaning in them, many have also been traumatized by them. That includes me.

Religion has a long history of being used to erase cultural beliefs, justify genocide, control others, and divide people. It has genuinely caused so much damage.

As someone who left the high-control religion of Jehovah’s Witnesses, it definitely left its mark on me.

When I left, I was angry and bitter. I felt like my entire life had been a lie. Everything I had been taught to believe was “the Truth” suddenly became one enormous question mark, and that uncertainty ate at my very soul.

I hated Christianity. I hated the Bible. I hated anyone who believed in any of it. I was purposefully mean to people who followed any of the Abrahamic religions because I had created an us-versus-them mentality in my mind.

I dedicated a lot of time to studying other spiritual beliefs. Absolutely anything and everything. I did not hold back. I started collecting books about different philosophies and belief systems. I even joined a group that had traveled the world studying different spiritual practices and occult knowledge, and I learned from them.

Recently, I’ve realized that much of my trauma stems from my religious upbringing. Everything I’ve experienced, learned, observed, and processed, I subconsciously wrote into my Blood of the Wild Gods books. It’s everywhere.

Thirteen years after leaving, I’ve decided to face the very thing that destroyed me and accept it again.

But on my terms.

I’m allowing myself to find hope and comfort in the scriptures I grew up learning, only now without the pressure and control behind them. I’m reclaiming part of myself by wielding the very thing that once hurt me.

I refuse to let an ideology hold so much negativity over me. I refuse to let a book make me recoil into avoidance. I refuse to let my upbringing control me anymore. I refuse to let hatred settle into my heart.

And I refuse to let anyone make me feel bad about my journey of reclamation.

Open
Revelation

“He will wipe out every tear from their eyes, and death will be no more, neither will mourning nor outcry nor pain be anymore. The former things have passed away.”—Revelation 21:4

Although I’m not a religious person anymore, I still have a fascination with sacred texts. And while I feel like many people take scripture literally, I find myself thinking more about the lesson beneath it.

My life has been a storm lately. I’ve been filled with stress, and depression, and anxieties…

But today, I’m filled with hope.

I have hope that one day soon I won’t feel the need to shed so many tears. That I won’t always be weighed down by the sadness of my traumatic past. That the pain I’m feeling now will eventually be exchanged for happiness and contentment.

I have hope that someday I’ll wake up and realize I’m not just surviving anymore.

Day after day, I work on cleaning up my life. Sometimes literally cleaning up the messes left behind, and sometimes the ones that can’t be seen.

I work on accepting the love I finally deserve instead of pushing it away because some part of me is still waiting for it to hurt. I work on believing that good things can happen to me without something terrible having to follow.

And I’m seeing the progress.

Slowly.

Sometimes so slowly that I don’t notice it until I look back and realize how much has already changed.

There are still things I’m trying to fix. There are still wounds I’m trying to heal. There are still days when the past feels much closer than I would like it to.

But today…

Today is the first time in a long time that I really believe there will come a day when I can look around at the life I’ve built, look back at everything I had to survive to get there, and finally tell myself:

“The former things have passed away.”

So whatever darkness you are facing, you mustn’t give up.

Keep going.

Even when progress feels painfully slow. Even when you’re tired of rebuilding. Even when you’ve cried so many tears that you can’t imagine there ever being a day when you won’t have another one left to cry.

There is still more of your life waiting for you.

And one day, you may look back at the things that once felt like they would swallow you whole and realize that somehow, little by little, you made it through.

You made it to the other side.

And you can feel the light of the sun once again.

Open
I'm Sorry

I’m sorry if you’re seeing my posts a lot and don’t know why.

I don’t know why either. I don’t understand the algorithm. I just make pictures and post how I’m feeling in that moment.

I’m sorry that, for some reason, my posts seem to ruin so many people’s days.

I’m sorry people feel like my posts are getting “shoved down their throat.”

I’m sorry people think I just post for attention and validation.

And heck, maybe deep down, that’s the truth?

I grew up being ignored and talked over, so I grew into the quiet, shy girl who listens and doesn’t interject. But I’ve always had a lot to say.

So now I speak.

And for some reason, the algorithm has given me a megaphone. And admittedly, it feels good to finally be listened to.

I feel like I have important things to say, despite people telling me I’m a worthless human being or a waste of space. And maybe people follow my posts because they think it’s cringe content. I don’t know.

I was a girl who grew up feeling like I wasn’t allowed to take up any space. Now I’m a woman who would just like to have a spot in this world where I’m allowed to exist and share my thoughts.

I’m sorry that’s so bothersome to so many people.

I wish my words would at least spark some thought, or make someone feel heard in their own way because I’m saying something they’ve felt but never knew how to say themselves. I wish I could help be a roadmap through difficult times, especially for people trying to find their way through things I’ve already lived through.

That’s all I want.

I’m not trying to upset people. So I’m sorry if my posts keep showing up everywhere and it’s annoying. I just wanted to finally have a space where I get to say what’s on my mind.

I just want a spot in this world where I’m allowed to be myself.

I’m sorry that seems to be so painful for some people.

Open
Why So Mad Friend

A-holes, let’s talk about it for a minute.

So, in nursing, you’re taught to never take what a patient says about you or to you personally. They’re most likely in pain, struggling mentally, or dealing with some kind of personality or cognitive alteration that affects the way they behave.

Being in healthcare for over 14 years, I’ve had my fair share of being yelled at, called stupid, and insulted in ways that would hopefully be appalling to most people. Then add in the abusive relationships, where I’ve been called just about every name you can think of, and some creative ones I hadn’t heard before. Throw my own self-loathing into the mix, and you could say I’ve developed pretty thick skin.

(Not to say I never get hurt, because I absolutely do. I think I’ve just gotten better at processing the pain and moving on from it faster.)

And now that I make public posts that sometimes reach hundreds of thousands of people, I inevitably have some really nasty things directed at me pretty much daily.

My question is: why?

Why choose to direct your pain, your negativity, or your cynicism toward someone else when you could just… say nothing at all?

And I’m not saying you should never disagree with anyone. You’re allowed to not like things. You’re allowed to criticize people, ideas, art, opinions, whatever. But you can do those things with kindness and fairness.

So why the cruelty?

I genuinely want to understand, because I’m the type of person who will quietly decide something isn’t for me and move on without a word unless it really ruined my day. And even then, I try my best to make sure whatever criticism I give is fair.

Is it just a bad day? Do some people feel a compulsion to say the cruel thing that crosses their mind instead of letting it go unsaid? Is cruelty always rooted in something deeper, or are some people simply comfortable being unkind?

I don’t know.

I just feel like we could all be a little kinder to one another.

Open
Maybe Maybe

I feel guilty for resting.

It makes me uneasy because I feel like I should be productive, like I should get something done that I know needs to be done. And I sure have a list.

When someone asks what I’m doing, and I happen to be doing nothing, I feel caught. Like I’ve been doing something wrong. Like it’s a sin to have moments where I do absolutely nothing at all.

But I must rest.

We have to rest our weary souls.

So I’m creating.

I’m writing. I’m recording. I’m building.

The world I’ve created continues to be my escape. What started as procrastination from nursing homework turned into me fervently writing chapters on a cracked phone screen from my bed at the homeless shelter, and now has became the place I disappear to when my reality is too ugly to look directly in the face.

Maybe one day I can finally free myself from this guilt. Maybe one day I’ll allow myself to rest without needing to scrounge up an excuse for why I deserve to.

Maybe one day I won’t need a world to escape to.

Open
Motionless

It’s hard not to feel like a failure when I see success all around me.

A younger version of me would have been bitter and jealous. But I’ve grown tired of carrying around my anger.

I can be happy for other people and still mourn where I’m at on my own path.

I always feel a little behind my peers.

And it’s true, social media tends to be biased toward the happy things. People want to show off what makes them look good and hide what doesn’t.

Maybe being honest about the ugly parts of my life makes me look messier.

Or maybe my life is actually just messy.

So tonight, instead of being bitter, angry, or jealous…

I’m just a little bit sad.

Not because I don’t believe things will get better, because they will. But while I watch the people I grew up with, and the people I’ve gotten to know, share their achievements with a smile, I can’t help but feel like I’m still…

Motionless.

Not going backwards, but not moving forward the way I’d like either.

Just…

still.

Open
Burden

I hate feeling like a burden.

I can’t remember the first time I ever felt this way. I just know I don’t remember a time when I didn’t.

I want to bring joy and happiness into the lives I touch.
Never frustration.
Or regret.
Or contempt.

To feel like your absence alone would make another person feel relief. To wonder if the air gets lighter after you’ve gathered your things and gone. To think the conversation finally relaxes once the door closes behind you…

It makes me feel so awful.

I know that sometimes I think I’m a burden when I’m not, but I can’t tell the difference between the two. And sometimes, even if you ask someone directly, the way they answer leaves you wondering if they’re lying just to spare your feelings.

I feel guilty when I accept help because I feel like I should be able to do everything on my own.

Maybe this is just what happens when you grow up getting punished for needing it.

Open
Not Okay

I’m not okay.

I haven’t been for a long time now. I’ve white-knuckled my way through every crisis for basically my whole life, but a person can only push through on sheer will for so long before something has to give.

When I was a brand new nurse, I was homeless, washing my scrubs in the sink and hoping no one would notice they were still wet when I walked through the employee entrance.

When someone who was supposed to love me and take care of me put his hands around my neck and shook me against a wall, I went straight to my 12-hour night shift and pretended like it didn’t happen. Until the bruises on my neck and the tightness in my throat made pretending impossible.

I got out. But getting out isn’t the end of anything. It’s the start of cleaning up everything that got broken along the way.

For the last year and a half, every time I’ve managed to put out one fire, another one has started. My house has been one thing after another. There are legal matters I’m not able to talk about publicly. And through all of it, I kept showing up to work like none of it was happening.

I can’t keep doing this.

It’s too much for one person to deal with, and my mental health has reached a point I can’t keep ignoring. I really need help right now, and for the first time, I’m actually letting myself ask for it.

I’m taking a leave of absence from work for a while. I’m hoping this is finally me giving myself some grace to process everything that’s happened, everything that’s still happening, and give myself the chance to put my life back together.

You’ll probably be seeing me post more regularly while I’m away from work, partly because I still have bills to pay, but also because writing and creating have always helped me make sense of the world. I appreciate everyone who has continued to support me and shown me kindness through all of this.

I’ve never felt like I was allowed to just stop. I’m giving myself that permission now, and I’m going to take full advantage of it and get better.

Open
Wonderland

Take me to Wonderland,
and then leave me
be.

But not the world
of Cheshire cats
and rabbits with watches
running
between the trees.

Instead,
take me to Atheria.

The land
of wheat
and honey.
The city carried out
by the sea.

Take me to the sand,
where we know not
where the water ends
and I’ve began.

Let me lose
my thoughts.
My very mind.

Let me leave
all my stress
behind.

The world is heavy.
The world is dark.

I could show you
every place
it’s left its mark.

But instead of dwelling
on the past,
and all the things
I cannot change,

take me away
to a land
that’s just
a little bit
strange.

Let me breathe
for the first time
in a while,

while we watch the dust
twinkle like stars
across every mile.

There must be
a place
for me.

So take me to Wonderland,
and then
leave me
be.

Open
Phantom Ache

When a person loses a limb,
they often feel it.
A phantom ache.
The limb is gone,
yet the nerves continue searching
for something they can no longer touch,
grieving a part of themselves
that no longer exists.

Ever since we’ve been apart,
I’ve realized
the heart knows how to do
exactly the same thing.

Even though you’ve never lived
inside my walls,
every time I walk down my halls
I feel it.
Something missing.
The outline of a person still lingering.
A shadow cast by someone
who should be beside me
but isn’t.

I have become homesick
for a life I barely knew.

Homesick for mornings
that only existed a handful of times.
For your voice.
For your laugh.
For the quiet that somehow never felt empty
when it belonged to both of us.

I fell in love with it
the way the tide falls in love with the shore—
effortlessly,
instinctively,
as though neither one ever knew any other way.

Sometimes I wonder if it happened at all.
Or if it was only one beautiful dream
buried somewhere beneath
my many nightmares.

I squeeze my eyes shut.
Tight.
Because some desperate part of me still believes
that if I hold them closed long enough,
I’ll open them
and you’ll be back in your chair.

The same chair I’d climb into
until I disappeared into your lap,
my face buried against your neck,
breathing you in
as though my lungs had been
holding their breath for years.

The same place where I’d pull your face to mine.
Feel your lips.
Slowly trace your cheekbone with my thumb.
Memorizing every part of the man
I was already beginning to call
home.

It was too easy.

Too easy to simply exist beside you.
Too easy to forget
where I ended
and you began.

And maybe that’s why it hurt so much
to look away.
Because somewhere in the back of my mind
I already knew
every glance had an expiration date.
Every smile.
Every touch.
Every precious moment I wanted to pull apart
with trembling hands
just to make it last
a little longer.

I know this isn’t goodbye forever.
I know it’s only for now.
But the tears tracing quiet paths down my face
can’t tell the difference.

My heart,
panicking beneath my ribs
as it reaches for you like a phantom limb,
can’t tell the difference.

My body,
which learned so effortlessly how to fit against yours,
still reaches for you in the early morning
and closes its hands around
nothing
but the cold air
between us.

And until I can find my way back to you…

I suppose this is what it means
to live with a phantom ache.
To live with the breath stolen from my lungs.
To feel someone in places they have never been.
To survive on memories
that refuse to stop feeling like home.

Until that moment comes,
I will have to learn how to live
with a heart that beats
in chronic ache
and monochrome.

Open
Homesick

I can see how a person could fall in love with a place that isn’t their hometown.

There are so many people who never leave where they grew up. They date people from their area, drive down the exact same roads every single day, and build a life out of routines that stopped feeling new years ago just because they’ve become so familiar.

I’ve always been scared to leave where I grew up. But there’s also always been a part of me that wondered what it would be like to make a new home.

To build new memories. To meet new people. To walk down roads that don’t already know every version of you. To live somewhere with a completely different history embedded into the land. A whole new life where no one knows your name.

And now here I am, fifteen hundred miles away from everything I’ve ever known…

And it’s so different.

The air feels different. The trees are different. The flowers. The roads. The people. The views. Even the history…

And I find myself liking it.

I keep looking around in this weird mix of wonder and excitement because everything is so new to me.

And I don’t know… there’s something strangely intimate about someone showing you their roads. The routes they’ve driven down their entire life.

As we drive down another stretch of road that’s completely ordinary to him, I catch myself wondering about all the different versions of him that have driven down it before.

What was he worrying about while absentmindedly staring out the window as he drove through each bend and up every hill? How many times did he drive home smiling because something good had happened? How many times did he cry here? How many huge life decisions were made while driving through these liminal spaces that now just feel…

normal to him?

It’s a strange sort of feeling to realize that every ordinary place has quietly witnessed someone’s entire life.

I think this trip has also given me a renewed appreciation for my own country. I’ve always known the United States was huge, but I don’t think I ever truly appreciated just how different we all are, right down to the way the trees sway in the breeze, the even how the land beneath your feet feels like it belongs to a different story.

And now I keep thinking about when I have to leave.

Am I actually going to feel homesick…

For a place I only just met?

Open
Just A Freaking Tuesday

I remember the exact moment I knew my drinking had become a problem.

It was a Tuesday evening. Not even the end of the week yet—a freaking Tuesday. I was talking on the phone with an old friend I hadn’t spoken to in ten years, and we decided to have a few drinks while we caught up.

But I couldn’t stop.

The conversation made me want to keep drinking, and the more I drank, the more fun it was to stay on the phone. Then she had to get off because she had work the next morning.

The moment I lowered the phone from my ear and the conversation ended, everything hit me.

I realized just how drunk I was.

And it dawned on me that I was about to have a very, very bad night.

When I tell you I thought I was going to die… I genuinely thought I was going to die.

I kept blacking out every time I stumbled toward the bathroom to throw up. Halfway there I’d collapse to my hands and knees, crawling across the floor while the room spun so violently I couldn’t tell which way was up. I remember crying, “I need to go to the hospital.”

Instead, I was told I’d be fine. That I’d get through it.

So there I was, convinced I had alcohol poisoning, too drunk to even use my own phone, while the person I was with brushed it off.

Just silly ol’ Mileena.

Drunk again…

I couldn’t take care of my kids the next day. I called my grandma and lied, telling her I must have food poisoning. But when she walked through the door and looked at me, I could see it on her face.

She knew.

That was a wake-up call.

It wasn’t the last time I drank too much, but it was the last time I ever drank like that. Every time I slipped after that became another reminder that I needed a new way to cope with how sad life made me.

I’m still not perfect. Sometimes I still catch myself wanting a drink for the wrong reason. But instead of a few drinks every night, it’s a few drinks a year now.

There’s still more work to do.
But I’m so much farther than I was.

And I’m proud of that.

Open
Graveyard

So,
you found her.
The old me.

You clawed through
years of my survival
just to exhume a corpse
I spent a lifetime
putting to rest.

You dragged her up
by the hair,
dirt packed deep beneath your fingernails,
and shoved her rotting face
into mine
as if I don’t know
what my own past
looks like.

I know her.
I was there.

I was there for every
humiliating,
broken
version of her
you’re passing around
like a punchline.

You share her picture like a joke,
pointing
and laughing
at a frame frozen in time.

But I remember the terror
bleeding
just beyond the edge of the lens,
and I promise you,
it wasn’t funny.

I know.
Because I was the one
bleeding.

My transformation happened
slowly,
privately.

Paid for in blood,
at a cost you couldn’t afford
on your best day.

You mock me
as if outgrowing your own ruin
is some kind of fraud.

As if healing
is a deception.

As if evolving
is a performance,
rather than the brutal act
of surviving
long enough
to become
unrecognizable
to your own ghosts.

I
buried
her.

I buried her with panic attacks,
rocking back and forth
alone in the dark;

with apologies spoken
to empty rooms;

with nights spent staring
at my own reflection,
wondering who I was;

and now
with iron-clad boundaries
no one
will ever get to cross
again.

I know exactly who I was.
And I know exactly who I am.

But let me tell you
who I am
not.

I am not someone
who crawls through a cemetery
on my hands and knees
in the dark.

I am not someone
who tears my fingers to the bone,
packing graveyard dirt
into my own mouth,
just to drag someone else’s worst moments
back into the daylight.

But you
are.

You did that.

And the stench
of that rotting soil
on your hands
is far uglier
than anything you dug out
of my past.

One day,
the earth will turn.

One day,
you will outgrow
a version of yourself,
and you will have to lay them
in the ground.

When that day comes,
I genuinely hope
you are spared this.

I hope no one becomes
so starved for vengeance,
so consumed
by their own hollow bitterness,
that they desecrate your resting place
just to parade your corpse
through the town square.

I hope no one
mistakes your graveyard
for a stage.

And most of all,
I hope no one ever smiles
while trying to salt the earth
of a garden
that finally figured out
how to bloom.

Open
Never Too Much

I truly found an amazing man.
I’ve never been treated like this before.
It’s not that every man in my past was bad;
we just never quite fit.

But with him…
It’s like we’re the perfect amount of
opposite
and the same
in all the right ways.

When he comforts me,
my anxiety settles.

When he makes me laugh,
I genuinely forget why I was even upset.

When I’m hurting,
he listens to understand,
and then he adjusts
because he wants to love me better.

He has seen some of the ugliest,
most painful parts of me,
and he loves me anyway.

Every time I reveal another piece of who I am,
I catch myself holding my breath,
waiting for this to be the thing
that finally makes him leave.

But he doesn’t run.
He doesn’t hide.
He just stays.

His feet planted firmly in front of me,
holding all the weight I’ve just handed him,
and all he says is,

“More.”

I’m never too much.
I’m finally
never
too much.

Open
Liminal Spirituality

I was incredibly nervous to share the video I posted tonight.

I feel like I’m existing in a spiritual liminal space.

I don’t belong with the strictly religious, but I don't belong with the strictly non-religious, either. I’m somewhere in the in-between.

Growing up as a Jehovah’s Witness left me with deep trauma. As a young girl, I was mentally conditioned to be subservient to all men, especially my husband; to endure abuse with a smile; and to lay down my life at any second in the name of my god.

But it also showed me what a community who shows up for their own looks like. I learned the importance of fierce loyalty—and how you deserve to lose everything if you betray it. I was taught how to be thankful for the smallest things and how to see beauty everywhere.

And when I left, I realized you can burn down everything you thought you knew, and you will still be okay. You can walk away and build something better, as long as you put in the effort, believe it’s possible, and stubbornly refuse to give up until you get it.

I understand why people are religious, and I understand why they aren't. But I refuse to judge or hate someone just because the very thing that brings them comfort once caused me pain.

Maybe in order to see that nuance, you have to live in this liminal space where you belong to no one. And maybe you have to become so numb to the pain of your past that you can finally look at its entire shape without needing to look away.

Open
On Your Own

You had no one.

Look around you. Who was there when you hit rock bottom? Nobody showed up. Nobody pulled you out of that dark place. Nobody stood over you making sure you didn’t quit when every part of you wanted to.

I know you kept waiting. I know you kept hoping one person would notice you were falling apart and say, “I’ve got you.”

But nobody came.

You were on your own.

You kept going when there was no reward for it. You did it dirty. You did it tired. You did it angry. You got out of bed when your body begged you not to. You went to work with your head screaming about all the ways you’re not enough. You did it with nothing but your own two hands and whatever stubborn piece of you refused to give up.

That was you. All you.

Do you know how much strength that takes?

Weak people don’t crawl out of the kind of dark you crawled out of and still have enough heart left to be kind.

So stop waiting for someone to come tell you who you are.

You already proved it. You already know.

And you’re still here.

Open
The Moment I Knew

I can remember the moment
I knew I wanted to be with him
forever.

He thought my heart
was still reaching backward
toward another man.

I thought his heart
wasn’t reaching for me
at all.

For a moment,
we were both standing there
with the wrong story in our hands,

hurt
by things neither of us meant,
afraid
of things neither of us had done,
bleeding
from wounds
the other had never made.

But as it turns out,
he did care.

And I was already gone
from the place
he was afraid
I still belonged to.

And the way we handled that conflict
showed me what it looks like
when two people
refuse to leave.

Refuse
to be cruel.

Refuse
to let a misunderstanding
put its hands around the throat
of something rare
and beautiful.

It showed me what it feels like
when you are not the only one
running straight into the fire
to put out the flames.

When you are not the only one
standing in the smoke,
genuinely asking
how to fix something
you believe you may have broken.

It is possible
for two good people
who have lived through
a whole lot of bad
to find each other
and finally be happy.

To be grateful
for the simple mercy
of each other’s presence.

To love someone enough
to want them
whole,
healthy,
safe,
and becoming
the happiest version of themselves.

To lay every terrible thing
you have ever done
in another person’s hands
and have them
look at all of it,
look back at you,

and love you anyway.

🖤

Open
For The Children

For the children
who carry their parents' ghosts—
You who inherited more
than eye color
and blood type.

Who got the family demons
still warm from their hands—
the rage that learned to smile,
the sickness that learned to hide,
the violence that learned to call itself love.

You
who were born already holding a torch
you never asked to carry,
already burning with fires
that were lit generations before
you drew breath.

Who learned, too young,
that blood carries more than oxygen—
it carries curses,
compulsions,
the careful madness
that runs in families
like a faithful river.

This is for those who feel it stirring—
that thing that destroyed them,
now alive
in you.

The temper
that cost your grandfather everything.
The hunger
that ate your mother hollow.
The cold precision
that made your father terrifying.

You who watch yourself becoming
what you swore
you'd never be.
Who hear their words
coming out of your mouth
in moments of stress.
Who see their hands in yours
when you raise them
in anger.

For those who know the exquisite horror
of loving someone who damaged you,
and worse—
understanding them now.

Understanding why they broke
what they touched,
because you feel that same breaking thing
inside yourself,
restless
and ready.

This is for the ones brave enough
to look at the long line of wreckage behind you
and say:
It stops with me.

Who choose to be the last burning building
in a legacy of flames.
Who understand that sometimes
the most heroic thing you can do
is refuse
to continue
the story.

You
who are learning the hardest truth:
that loving them
doesn't mean becoming them.
That understanding where the darkness came from
doesn't mean you have to pass it on.

The cycle breaks
the same way everything breaks—
first in one place,
then another,
then all at once.

It breaks when you put down the bottle
they taught you to reach for.
When you unclench the fist
that learned its shape from theirs.
When you speak gently
to the child who expects
your inheritance of rage.

We are all fighting wars
that started before we were born,
carrying wounds
we didn't earn,
bleeding from cuts
we never felt.

But we are also the generation
that might finally win—
not by defeating them,
but by refusing to continue
their battles.

This is for every one of us
who chooses to disappoint our ghosts.
Who would rather die
as ourselves
than live
as their echo.

—May you find the strength
to break the chain,
even if it means
breaking yourself.

Open
The Stories That Were Born Underground

I wrote the stories in The Lost Histories underground.

In a windowless room inside a homeless shelter, where time forgot to exist, where day and night bled into the same fluorescent twilight, where I could sleep sixteen hours straight and wake unsure if I had lost a day or a lifetime.

I had grown up believing a shelter would be the end of everything. Rock bottom. The place you went when you had failed at being human.

But that small locked room became my sanctuary, a place where I could finally stop swimming against the current long enough to understand that sometimes drowning is just another way of learning to breathe.

The walls echoed with voices I could not quite decipher, conversations bleeding through concrete like prayers through cathedral stone. I would lie on my narrow bed with my three-year-old daughter curled against me like a question mark, typing these stories into my phone’s cracked screen while she colored on donation paper, both of us creating worlds in a room suspended outside of time itself.

Anger came first. Anger at being separated from everything I owned except one laundry basket of clothes. Anger at rules dictating when I could eat, sneaking granola bars into my room like contraband, disposing of wrappers like evidence of crimes against institutional order.

My family was angry too. They could not understand why I would choose that windowless room over their spare beds, that rigid schedule over their flexible concern. But sometimes safety is not found in familiar places. Sometimes it hides in the anonymous walls of strangers, in the blessed distance from those who love you too much to let you break properly.

Sometimes the only way to recover is to step outside the architecture of obligation and memory, to find a room where no one knows your name well enough to call you back to who you used to be.

Anger, I learned, makes excellent ink.

I worked weekends as a newly graduated nurse, night shifts that bled into morning, still learning how to save lives while I could not quite save my own. Then Monday would come and I would return to my underground room, to my timeless cave, and I would sleep. And sleep. And sleep. Dissociating into dreams so deep I would forget I had a body, forget I had a name, forget everything except the ache of existing.

Until the writing began.

In that timeless underground place where day and night meant nothing, where meals happened whether you were hungry or not, where sleeping for twenty hours was both symptom and cure. I wrote gods who understood what it meant to be exiled for your own good, who knew that sometimes the greatest mercy is distance, who learned that love and destruction often wear the same face.

These stories saved me from dissolving completely into that fluorescent nowhere. They gave me something to do with my hands besides scroll numbly through a phone that connected me to nothing. They transformed dissociation into creation, anger into art, the echo of incomprehensible voices into the music of divine catastrophe.

Now I live above ground again, in a place with windows where time moves normally, where I can eat whenever I want and the judgments come less frequently. But I carry that underground room with me: that perfect nowhere where these stories were born, where my daughter and I existed in our own pocket universe, where the shelter’s rigid structure held me together just long enough to remember who I was becoming.

We are all underground sometimes, writing by the light of phones with cracked screens.

These stories were born in the dark, underground, in a place outside of time.

Just like gods.
Just like hope.
Just like me.

—Mileena Rayne
Written in the light now
But forever grateful for the dark

Open
I Don't Know

I can’t help but feel lonely a lot of the time.

I feel like I never quite fit anywhere I go. All my life, making friends has felt harder than it seems to be for other people. Belonging has always felt just out of reach, like I have to create my own little spaces just to exist comfortably.

I don’t really understand what it is about me, but sometimes I feel like I repel people without meaning to.

I try to be friendly.
I try to be kind.
I just don’t always know what to say.

And because of that, I start to feel annoying. I feel like a burden. I feel misunderstood in a way that makes me wonder if anyone actually cares enough to want to ask questions and try to understand me.

Even my own family.

One thing I’ve heard about myself more than once is that I give off this energy like I don’t care, or like I don’t want to be where I am. People tell me I need to act like I actually want to be there, but honestly, I don’t even know what that means.

Is it my face?

I’m autistic, and I have what’s called a flat affect. My face can look blank or expressionless when I’m just sitting there, even when nothing is wrong. I’ve noticed it makes a lot of people uncomfortable, like they’re reading something into me that I’m not actually feeling.

Maybe they think I’m cold.
Maybe they think I’m rude.
Maybe they think I don’t care.

But I do care.

I just don’t always know how to make my face, my voice, or my body prove it in a way other people understand.

I don’t know.

I don’t get it.

I just know it makes me really sad.

Open
Magnum Opus

I know I shouldn’t feel jealous
of the ones who came before.

I’m not naive.
I know you’ve held others in your arms
and called it home.
I know you’ve dreamed of futures
with people who did not have my name.
I know you’ve whispered those sacred words to others
and meant them
with the version of your heart
you had at the time.

I know you have,

and so have I.

So maybe it isn’t fair
for me to ache over a story
I wasn’t there to read,
over chapters that were already written
before my hand ever found yours.

Maybe I should only be grateful,
because somehow
every wrong turn,
every almost,
every love that could have been
but never fully was,
still led us here.

To this page.

To this beginning.

To this new chapter
with our names written as the title,
like it had been waiting for us to arrive
this whole time.

And maybe that’s the part
I have to learn how to love:
that the tragedies before us
were not proof that love failed,
but proof that the story wasn’t finished.

Every broken heart
was only a bookmark.
Every goodbye
was only the plot moving forward.
Every person we thought we might keep
was only a sentence that had to end
so this one could begin.

And if I cannot be your first,

then let me be your last.

Your last first kiss.

Your last first night
with a trembling body beside someone new.

Your last promise of forever
leaving your lungs.

If there is one thing I get to claim
as only mine,
let it be this:

let me be your true love.

Let me be the final destination
after a long journey of disappointment.

Let me be your magnum opus
in the story of your life.

Let me be your co-author
in every chapter that comes next,
until the final page closes
on a saga so beautiful
it makes people weep
for generations to come.

Open
Unexpected Emotions

I hated her. And I love her for making me hate her.

When I graduated from my nursing program, it hadn’t fully hit me yet. I knew I had done it. I knew I had survived the exams, the clinicals, the care plans, the stress, the sleepless nights, and all the moments where I questioned if I was even capable of becoming a nurse.

Out of all my instructors, there is one I will always feel the most heartfelt gratitude for because without her wisdom and guidance, I can confidently say I would not be the nurse I am today.

But I cannot express strongly enough how much I hated this woman while I was in the trenches of that program.

She was the most difficult teacher I had, and we knocked our heads together in disagreement constantly. There were days—weeks—when I wished I were at a different school. Somewhere with an easier program. Somewhere, anywhere, she was not.

One time she docked me points because my fingernails were too long, and I was so upset and petty over it that I got out a ruler, measured my nails, took a picture, and sent it to her alongside the student handbook policy stating I was within the limits.

And I got that point back.

That was the kind of relationship we had.

But now, I’m able to look back and feel so incredibly grateful to have had her as one of my instructors. She broke me down into a million tiny pieces, but I see now that it had to happen so I could be rebuilt—piece by piece—into something completely new.

I am so thankful to have been shaped by her excellence, and I hope to become even a fraction of the nurse she is today.

Open
Signed

Wow.

Today was my first time signing my books for someone as a published author.

And of course, I did it in my car outside a UPS store, wearing a Bob Marley shirt I got from the homeless shelter.

Maybe dreams really do come true.

Open
How Far Have You Come

“How far have you come in life?”

I’ve been thinking about this question a lot lately. And not even just from the beginning of life until now, but even just these last six months.

I was on the news advocating for bail reform, especially in strangulation cases. Then I started posting about my healing journey and my dating endeavors, and honestly, I kept wondering what the heck I was even doing.

Why am I telling the internet all my deepest, most inner thoughts when half the time all it does is open me up for ridicule?

Is this healthy?

Is this stupid?

But then people would thank me for what I was doing. They’d tell me my writing helped them somehow, and I started to realize maybe there was a reason for all of this.

Other than pure catharsis.

I still don’t really get it.

Why so many people enjoy reading what I write, whether it’s my books or my confessional posts or my poems. I can’t wrap my head around it, but I’m thankful so many do. Because without my love for writing, and without the reach I’ve gotten on different platforms,

I never would have found this one man from California.

A totally different time zone.

A totally different part of the country.

Just this random person who somehow found me, then decided to message me, and then I decided to open the DM and reply, and he just so happened to make a joke that made me do a double take and stutter over myself.

And now I truly believe I found the kind of love I only thought was real in fairytales.

I didn’t think this existed anymore.

I didn’t think it was real.

But I think I’m holding it in my hands right now, and it’s so beautiful and I’m so grateful for this gift. I wish I could hand it to everyone.

But I can’t.

What I can do is write about it and hope I describe it so specifically and so well that if anyone ever sees it, they’ll recognize it.

So they know what it looks like when it finally finds
them.

So they know they deserve it too.

Because everyone deserves to find love.

Every single person.

Open
My Vows

“And now, please state your vows.”

I wish I could stand here
and promise you a flawless love.
That I will never miss the mark,
never speak the wrong word,
never leave even a fingerprint of hurt
upon your heart.

But I will not build our house on a lie.

So instead,
    I promise you
        the brutal,
        beautiful
            truth.

I will be the spine you lean against
when your own feels brittle.
You will never face the dark alone.
I knew how to survive a war
long before I knew your name,
    and now,
    every battle I walk into,
    I walk in wearing your colors over my chest.

When your voice fractures,
I will lend you mine.
When your name is spoken in rooms you are not standing in,
I will guard it
    like a sacred text.

Anyone who tries to make you small in my presence
will learn exactly
    how fiercely
        I defend my own.

When you fall
(and we both know you will),
I will not watch from the safety of the edge.
You will never be left behind.
Never left hollow on the ground.

I will meet you in the dirt.
My hand will be the first thing you feel—
    reaching,
    steady,
    sure.

And if your legs forget how to hold you,
I will carry the weight of you
    until they remember.

I vow to be the anchor
beneath a world that forgets how to stay.
The current
that always finds its way back to your shore.
The quiet in the chaos,
and the storm against anything
that tries to stand between us.

A fire steady enough to warm our home,
    measured enough
    never to burn down the forest.

I cannot promise you perfection.

But I offer you
every fractured,
    flawed,
        ferocious
            piece of me,
laid entirely open in your hands.

I promise you my effort.
My absolute loyalty.
My return.
    Every single time.

As long as there is breath in my lungs,
you will never look across a crowded room
and wonder who I am looking for.
You will never have to ask
    if you are claimed.

Because my answer is yes.
    Today.
    Tomorrow.
    In this life,
        and whatever comes next.

Open
Would You

Would you lay down your life
    for the one you love?

It is an easy hypothetical.
A swift and romantic surrender.

We make promises of sudden, violent ends:
“I would take the fall.”
“I would step into the fire.”
“I would burn the world to the ground
    and stand in the ashes with your name on my lips,
        just for you.”

And perhaps,
    in the wreckage,
        that looks like devotion.

Maybe there is something beautiful
about loving someone enough
to surrender everything in
    one final,
        holy second.

But I don’t want your ghost.

I am asking for something
    infinitely
        harder.

I am asking you to live.

To keep breathing
even when grief settles inside you
like still water.

To pry open your eyes
when the gravity in your bones
begs you to sink.
    To drag the curtains apart.
    To let the sun touch your face,
    even when you don’t know
    what to do with the light.
Would you keep choosing morning?
Even as the dark whispers your name,
promises you quiet,
promises you nothingness?

Can you find one
    single
        kind
            thing
inside a day that tried to ruin you?

Dying is a reflex.
Living
    is a relentless,
    agonizing
        choice.

It takes the brutal, ticking hours
and asks you to endure them.
        On purpose.

To sit shivering inside the pain,
refusing to build a home in its hollows.
To stop pretending that erasing yourself
is the same thing as finding peace.

To believe
—against all the screaming evidence in your head—
that there is still something
    Worth wanting.
    Worth touching.
    Worth seeing.

I know you would lay it down.
You would drop it in a heartbeat.

    But would you pick it back up?

Would you linger
    just long enough
    to watch the night sky turn to gold?

Would you let me love you
past the exact moment
you decided you were beyond saving?

    Would you live?

Not because it is easy.
(We both know it isn’t.)

But because
    I love you enough
        to ask.

Open
What Is Love

What kind of man does it take to heal what another broke?

There was a time I was too bitter to admit the Bible had anything left to give me. But there's one scripture I never let go of, even after I let go of everything else.

1 Corinthians 13:4–7.

Love is patient.
And I know what patience is not.
It is not measuring your tone, your look, your breath against his temper. It is not making yourself smaller so he has less of you to punish.
Patience is the man who lets me explain without making me earn the right to be heard, who holds steady while I learn that safety is not a trick.

Love is kind.
And I know what kindness is not.
It is not hands that hurt you and then wait to be thanked for stopping.
Kindness is the man who never turns my wounds into weapons, who reminds me to eat and rest because he knows I forget that I matter too.

Love does not envy.
And I know what envy is not.
It is not a man who dims at my joy, my voice, my light.
Love is the man who isn't threatened by my fire, who sees the parts of me others tried to put out and says, “no, keep going.”

Love does not boast.
And I know what boasting is not.
It is not praise demanded for the bare minimum. It is not a man believing that not hurting me should have earned him an applause.
Love shows up without an audience. It lets my body believe it doesn't have to brace for impact anymore.

Love is not proud.
And I know what pride is not.
It is not a man who would rather break you than admit he was wrong. It is not the story twisted until you're the villain for bleeding.
Love is the man who can hear me. The man who would rather understand me than win against me.

Love does not dishonor others.
And I know what dishonor is not.
It is not your pain mocked, your body threatened, your reality rewritten until you can't trust your own mind.
Love is the man who protects my dignity like it is sacred. Especially when I cannot protect it myself.

Love is not self-seeking.
And I know what selfishness is not.
It is not a man taking and taking until there's nothing left of you but survival.
Love is the man who considers me—my life, my children, my exhaustion, my dreams. The man who never makes loving him mean abandoning myself.

Love is not easily angered.
And I know what anger is not.
It is not doors slammed while the walls shake. It is not every disagreement turned into a threat. It is not your own heartbeat pounding like a drum in your chest because you don't know what happens next.
Love is calm enough that my body can finally know peace. Love is not surviving the person who says he loves you.

Love keeps no record of wrongs.
And I know what that is not.
It is not every mistake dragged back out as evidence. It is not being sentenced again and again for things you already apologized for.
Love remembers the truth, but it does not use the past to keep you on your knees.

Love rejoices with the truth.
And I know what truth is not.
It is not being lied to and then called crazy for noticing. It is not documenting your own pain because you already know he'll deny it later.
Love is the man who does not make me fight for my own reality.

Love bears all things.
Love believes all things.
Love hopes all things.
Love endures all things.

I am no longer religious. But my spirit still recognizes the message of what was written, because I have lived on both sides of it.

He was everything that love is not.

And you, my darling…
you are everything that love is.

Open
My Person

People keep telling me the longer I'm alone, the easier it'll get. They say it like it's a law of the universe.

But it isn't getting easier. It's getting worse.

I miss having my person.

It isn't that I don't like people. I do. I can talk with just about anybody and find them interesting. But there's a meter inside me, and I can hear it ticking the whole time. Eventually, I have to peel myself away from the world, find a dark room, and sit inside the quiet until I'm full again.

That's my baseline. That's the reality of being me with most people.

But rarely, so rarely it almost feels like a glitch in the physics of my life, I meet someone who runs on the opposite current. Someone whose presence doesn't drain the meter, but feeds it. Someone I can wake up to, fall asleep next to, spend every second in between with, and never once feel sick of their presence. Someone who feels less like a visitor in my life and more like the air in my lungs.

I don't know how to explain what that is to someone who's never felt it. The closest I can get is this:

It's like a kind of starvation.

Most of my life, I've gone without the kind of human connection that gives back instead of takes. So when I find it, I don't know how to be casual about it. I devour them. I want to drink them down to the bottom of the glass, then turn the glass over and lick the rim, because somewhere underneath is a panic that says: this is going to disappear. This is going to be gone before you've had enough. So take it now. Take all of it. Take more than you can hold.

And the part I can't make peace with is that I know this rare thing exists. I've held it in my hands. I've fallen asleep with my head on the chest of someone I never got tired of, and woken up wanting more of them, not less.

But now I'm here again. Alone.

And I just want my person.

That's it.

That's the whole prayer.

But the longer I go without it, the more I believe that people say it gets easier with time because they need to believe it's true. But the truth is, that pang of hunger becomes more painful with time. The truth is that the body remembers what it has been fed, and it does not forget the taste.

Open
Our Community

Over the past few months, I’ve started recognizing a lot of repeat names.

I feel like I’ve gotten so many little glimpses into so many of your lives just from reading the hundreds and hundreds of comments you all leave me. I really do try my best not to miss a single one, because you took the time to write something for me to read, and I want you to know that your effort is appreciated. Even those of you who have been here for months without ever saying a word, your name does not go unnoticed.

Lately, I’ve seen a lot of you keep saying “we” in your comments.

And that has really struck something in me.

Because it feels like we can all feel the shift. Slowly, there are more and more of us gathering here, and this space has started to feel like something bigger than me.

I think I’m starting to see why.

The people who keep showing up here are a specific kind of person. You love hard. You feel things deeply. You carry emotions that the people around you did not always know what to do with. A lot of you have spent a long time being told that the parts of you that love the most are the parts that are wrong with you.

So you got quiet about it. Because being loud about it kept costing you.

I know that because I am one of you.

And I think what is happening here is that we are finding each other.

That is why this feels different.

And people notice it. A lot of people read your comments to me too. They see the way I respond to you. They see the way you speak to each other. They recognize that this is a place with an unusual amount of thoughtful, kind, extraordinary people gathered together.

That is not something you find very often. But it is what we have made together.

And I’m so grateful that I get to be part of it.

Open
So Scared

I’m so scared right now.

I’m scared that the way I’m living right now isn’t temporary. I’m scared this is just how my life is going to look like for an unforeseeable amount of time.

I’m scared that I’ll never get away from my hometown.

I’m scared my family is going to stay broken from now on, and all I’ll have left is the memory of when it wasn’t always that way.

I feel like people resort to fairytales when life gets a little too real. We say things like “karma will get them” or “good things happen to good people” because we need to believe there is some kind of order to all of this. Like the world is keeping track. Like the pain has a reason. Like the people who break things eventually have to answer for it.

But I think the scariest part is realizing life doesn’t actually work that way.

The universe doesn’t care about morals.

Sometimes bad things happen for no reason. Sometimes people do terrible things and nothing stops them. Sometimes they get to keep living normally while everyone else has to figure out how to live with what they did.

I’m so tired of starting over. I’m so tired of being hurt by people that are supposed to love me. I’m so tired of everything that I love dearly getting ripped from me.

When do I get to keep the beautiful things?

Or is that really what life is?

Loving things for a little while, losing them, and then spending the rest of your life remembering how beautiful they were before they were gone.

Open
Worst Luck

I’ve had the worst luck with dating lately, and I’m really starting to wonder what I’m doing wrong.

There’s one pattern that keeps happening over and over. A lot of the time, the guy comes on strong first and shows a lot of interest, while I’m the one keeping my distance and staying a little guarded. But as we keep talking and getting to know each other, if he starts checking my mental boxes, I begin to get more interested. Eventually it gets to the point where I’m fully invested, excited, and comfortable enough to be completely myself with him.

The thing is, I know I can be intense. When I care about someone, I make it known. I can make a person feel deeply wanted and special because that’s genuinely how I feel, and I don’t really know how to hold back once I’m there. Unfortunately, that always seems to be the point where the guy starts pulling away, and sometimes he fades out completely.

So it ends up feeling like the less interested I am, the more interested they are. But the more interested I become, the less interested they seem to be.

This has happened to me so many times over the past few months that I’m starting to feel like something is wrong with me.

I’d really appreciate any male perspective that might help shed some light on this for me.

Open
Doing Your Best

The people who hurt the most do not always look broken.

We are rarely seeing the full picture of what someone is living through, which is why kindness and grace matter so much. When people fall short, it is not always because they don’t care or because they are unwilling. Sometimes they are doing all they can, and it still is not enough for the season they are in. More often than not, they already know that. They carry that guilt silently, and in those moments, being met with mercy can make it easier to keep going.

Open
Starfish

I can’t remember where I first heard this story, but it has stayed with me since I was a child.

An older man was walking along a beach after thousands of starfish had been left stranded on the sand. In the distance, he saw a boy bending down, picking them up one by one, and throwing them back into the ocean.

The older man called out, “Boy, you can’t possibly save them all. There are too many. What you’re doing won’t matter.”

The boy picked up another starfish and threw it back into the water.

“It mattered to that one.”

Then he reached for another.

“And that one too.”

That story has never left me, because I think it says something important about the way we look at change. When people talk about saving the world, they often speak as if one person is too small to matter, as if impact only counts when it is massive, visible, or undeniable. But the truth is that every life we touch is a world of its own.

I have not spoken much about my spiritual beliefs, but I do believe this: I am here for a reason.

I believe I am here to be the champion of the rejected. To heal the wounded. To be a light for people who have lost their way in the dark.

But no one is meant to carry that burden alone. One person throwing starfish back into the ocean matters, but imagine what happens when others kneel beside them.

We must fight in the ways we know how. Through truth. Through courage. Through art. Through compassion. Through refusing to abandon one another. We have to find our fellow warriors and hold the line together.

Too much light will make you blind.

And too much darkness will swallow us whole.

Open
Authenticity

I remember telling a girl in elementary school that I had a crush on a boy, and she told me to pretend I liked something he liked so he would like me back. I remember thinking, what an odd thing to do. Why would I lie about who I am just to be liked?

Throughout my life, family, friends, teachers, and all kinds of people have told me who I should be, even when it didn’t feel like me.

And I just can’t do it.

We’re given one life. You can live yours however you want, and that’s fine, but I’m going to keep doing my own thing.

I’m going to make the song, write the book, take the picture, and edit the forking heck out of it, because those are the things I genuinely enjoy. I like exploring things that are weird, unconventional, even a little taboo.

The things I create are for me. If other people connect with it, that’s just a bonus, and I’m so grateful for it. And when I find people who like me for me, I know I’ve filtered through the crowd and found MY PEOPLE.

I’ve never been able to be anything other than who I truly am, and that’s not going to change. Because that’s how it’s supposed to be. That’s how you find the people who are actually worth keeping around. Think about that next time you feel like watering yourself down.

Open
Heroes

The ones most acquainted with suffering are often those most capable of extraordinary mercy.

For having felt the brutal hand of pain upon their own soul, they stand forever at a crossroads: to become hardened by what wounded them, or to grow gentle in defiance of it. And those who choose kindness after cruelty carry a rare and sacred strength.

For having crawled through their own living hell, they learn how to bear light into the dark places where others still wander. For having loved deeply and lost dearly, they know the sacred worth of what is meant to be kept, and they do not handle it with careless hands.

Your suffering was never your due.

Yet in surviving it, in rising from it as a warrior rather than a ruin, you were given a solemn gift: to protect, to guide, to guard what is fragile, and to become a blessing where once there was only harm.

May we all bring forth the gifts carved into us by sorrow, and offer them freely to a world in need.

Open
Body Art

I’m not sure if anyone’s noticed yet, but I enjoy various creative paths.

Music. Writing. Photography. Video editing.

I just love creating things, and there’s something satisfying about making art that feels beautiful to me, even if that beauty doesn’t always fit neatly into other people’s expectations of what it should look like.

And I think the human body is a really interesting subject. The way certain lines and curves and facial expressions capture attention says a lot about how we experience beauty, emotion, and even vulnerability.

It’s too bad we’re such a prude society. We either hide the body in shame, or objectify it so sexually that we pass right over the middle point where art lives. People are so quick to force things into extremes, and our culture is deeply uncomfortable with nuance. We tend to treat the body as something to censor or consume, but not something to simply observe, interpret, and find meaning in. And I think about that a lot. Our cultural obsession with extremes is something I explore in my books.

I think there’s beauty in art that challenges the way we’ve been taught to look at things. In art that does not ask permission to exist within other people’s comfort zones. Sometimes the most interesting work comes from contradictions, where something can be broken and strong, beautiful and strange, intimate and artistic all at once.

Perhaps that’s what I’m drawn to most: the taboo, the unsettling, the misunderstood, and the way those things still hold beauty and meaning.

Open
Moving On

I was so angry that my ex fled the country to avoid facing the felony charge for strangling me—but honestly?

Feck him.

I just don’t care anymore. I’m at the point where I’m actually glad he’s gone. Now that all of his stuff is out of my house, I feel like I can finally exhale.

I can finally enjoy the gift in all of this: freedom.

He hated when I talked to my friends. I wasn’t allowed to post pretty pictures of myself without it turning into a fight. He hated it when I’d sing. I couldn’t even do something as simple as eat a snack in bed while I listened to music.

So yeah, I’m going to be doing things these days because life is short. INCLUDING (but not limited to) snagging myself an amazing man. And if anyone has anything negative to say about any of it, they can feck off too.

Thank you to everyone who’s been part of this journey with me already. If you want to follow me into this next chapter, I’d love to have you here!

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Friends Thank You

Thank you to all of my dear friends I’ve made and come to know.

You have been a light in my darkest nights. I almost wasn’t here anymore—my heart was so heavy, so hopeless, so alone. And one by one, you gave me back the strength to keep going. Every message of kindness. Of concern. Of wisdom. Of connection. And slowly, I feel like you’ve helped make me whole again.

I’m so lucky. I’m so grateful. I’m so blessed.

I wish I could name every one of you, but please know your compassion has made a difference in my life. And for that, I am eternally grateful.

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Book Thank You

I’m so grateful for every person who has taken a chance on my writing. Thank you for believing in me—for stepping into a world I built out of everything I’ve survived.

Every time someone shares that they’re reading my work, it means more to me than I can really put into words. I don’t think that feeling will ever become normal, and I don’t want it to. I never want to reach a point where I take that kind of support for granted.

I want to keep celebrating these moments, keep sharing them, because you deserve to be seen and appreciated just as much as you’ve made me feel seen.

And maybe one day, if I’m lucky, this could become more than my hobby. Maybe it becomes the life I get to live every day.

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Scared to Love Again

I’m scared to love again.

Because my life has taught me, over and over, that the things I love do not stay.
They leave.
They get ruined.
They get torn out of my hands.

So now when someone finally good finds me, I don’t just feel the happiness.
I feel the fear standing right next to it.
I feel the grief before there is even anything to grieve.
I start waiting for the shift.
For the sentence.
For the unseen thing that always finds me and says,

No.
Not this.
Not him.
You do not get to have this.
You do not get to be loved like that.
You do not deserve it.
You have not suffered enough.

I do not know what I did to make pain so faithful to me.
I do not know why love always feels like something I have to prepare to lose.
I only know that I am tired.
I’m tired of feeling unsafe inside beautiful things.
I’m tired of reaching back with one hand while the other braces for the blood.

So how much pain is enough?
How much do I have to survive before whatever is watching me decides I have paid my debt?
Before it stops turning every beautiful thing into something I have to grieve?

And yet… some part of me still believes.
Some part of me still looks at love like it’s something I get to keep.
Like maybe this time it won’t destroy me.
Maybe this time I will not have to bleed for it.
And I don’t know if that makes me brave, or if that makes me a fool.

Open
The Wounded Healer

I’ve had a few people be really concerned today, almost angry for me, because I basically collapsed at work from not being able to breathe, went to the ER to get treated, and then walked right back to my floor to finish my 12-hour shift.

But that’s just kind of how healthcare is, unfortunately.

I started as a CNA 14 years ago, and now I’m an RN, and the story has always been the same:

You show up to your shift.
No matter what.

Some of you have been following my story from the beginning, and some of you haven’t.

But the night my ex strangled me, it happened right before I was supposed to leave for work. I was putting my scrubs on, getting ready to go, when he grabbed me, shoved me into the wall, then put his hands around my neck and shook me.

When I got to work, I was messaging my manager about what had happened, and the expectation was still that I work my shift and go to the ER afterward.

So that’s what I did.

I had bruise marks on my neck while I was taking care of other people.

I’m not saying that’s right.
I’m not saying that’s okay.

But it is reality.

You have no idea what your healthcare worker’s day looked like before they showed up for that shift.

You have no idea.

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ER Update

Little update. For the past few weeks, I’ve had a cough that’s been slowly getting worse and worse. Today it got so bad that it made me lightheaded, I felt like I could barely stand up anymore, and I couldn’t breathe. I had another coughing fit, and this time I just didn’t recover. I ended up folding over onto the break room table.

Thankfully for me, I’m an OR nurse, so if you’re gonna halfway collapse from respiratory distress, what better place to do it than around a bunch of surgeons, anesthesiologists, and elite RNs, right? My awesome and amazing coworkers got me some oxygen and wheeled me downstairs to the ED.

I got a breathing treatment, and that made me feel a million times better. My breathing got way better, and the pain in my lungs went away. All my labs, tests, and imaging looked good though, so they think I’m just working through a respiratory virus.

So now I’m at the pharmacy filling my meds, and then I’m gonna go back to my floor and keep working. Thank you for all the kindness and for everyone reaching out to ask if I need anything. I’m just gonna finish my shift, then get some rest and try to stay out of the cold as much as possible 😅

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Provider to Patient

Clocked in as a provider, ended up as a patient 🫠

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Peace in the Snow

Yeah, it sucked shoveling all that snow by myself today. But do you know what didn’t suck? Coming home in peace. Not walking through the door after a 12-hour shift to an angry man ready to yell at me, call me a stupid bitch, and make me feel like no matter how much I did, no matter how much weight I carried for both of us, it was never enough. I bent myself in half for a long time trying to keep the peace, trying to be enough for someone who had already decided I never would be. So yeah… I guess I really can’t complain too much.

Open
A Little Girl With A Dream

I’ve had this quiet dream for a long time now: to take one picture of all my books together, and then take that same picture again every time a new one is added to the shelf. Just watching it slowly grow. That was really the reason I started self-publishing in the first place. I wanted to hold my stories in my hands. I wanted hardcovers lined up on my bookshelf where I could see, in a real and physical way, that they existed.

I never expected anyone outside of my friends or family to read them.

Lately I’ve been thinking about all the small things that led me here. The years I spent as a kid writing short stories and poems and lyrics. Always choosing things like creative writing and film studies when I needed an elective. The games like EverQuest, Elder Scrolls, and Final Fantasy that made me fall in love with deep, interconnected storylines. The anime and eastern cultural beliefs that showed me life is far more nuanced than the black and white thinking western culture leans on. All the hundreds of THICC books and series I used to carry home from the school library like I was hauling treasure.

I keep thinking about Mr. Larson too, my fourth grade teacher. I promised him one day I would publish a book, just like he did. Back then it was just a kid saying something she hoped might be true. But now I look at these books and think about that little version of me, and that little girl actually grew up and did it.

I think about all of that a lot lately. All those little creative choices I made without knowing where they would lead. And somehow, piece by piece, it became the foundation for a universe other people actually seem to care about too.

What has your life been building in the background while you were focused on surviving it?

Title: Blood of the Wild Gods: The Silence
Author: Mileena Rayne
Cover Art: A dark, atmospheric eclipse surrounded by fiery red and orange corona, set above a misty, haunted landscape — still water, treeline fading into fog. Palette is deep reds, blacks, and muted greens.

Title: Blood of the Wild Gods: The Chosen
Author: Mileena Rayne
Cover Art: The same eclipse motif, but the surrounding energy shifts to crashing ocean waves in vivid blues, teals, and rose-pink. The water is turbulent and alive where The Silence was still and desolate. The title sits inside the black disc of the eclipse.

Now, as humanity clings to the ruins of divine legacies, something far older and more terrifying begins to stir. The Silent God, a being erased from history and feared even by the divine, is awakening. Its whispers seep into the minds of five mortals, each chosen for a purpose they do not understand.

A stoic hunter, honed in the Godscarred Wastes, finds his skills tested not only by monsters, but by the terrifying power of the curse he carries and a destiny beyond human comprehension.

A compassionate healer, gifted with the vibrant magic of the Veil, faces a devastating choice: cling to the fading light she knows, or embrace a darker power to save a world drowning in silence, even if it costs her everything.

A fiery prince, forever in the shadow of his own bloodline, finds himself drawn to a destiny that could consume him.

A sacrificial cub, flees across a crimson-stained wasteland, carrying the weight of his mother’s death and a desperate yearning to outrun his fate.

A righteous Inquisitor, his faith forged in unwavering conviction, begins to hear a voice that challenges everything he believes, a whisper of doubt in the heart of his certainty, threatening to shatter his life’s purpose.

Bound by whispers they cannot escape, their fates will intertwine in ways that will reshape the world — or doom it to an eternity of silence. As kingdoms crumble and forgotten forces rise, the whispers grow louder, threatening to consume everything.

When silence itself becomes a weapon, the fate of the realm will depend on choices that defy destiny and truths buried in blood. The gods may be gone, but their echoes remain — and the age of silence has just begun.”

[ISBN] 9798309863389

Today, she works as an operating room nurse in a Level I trauma center and writes fantasy novels that explore the territories she knows intimately: survival, autonomy, religious control, and the long road to reclaiming a self that others tried to erase. Her work draws from lived experience, transforming personal history into myth and offering a mirror to readers who have survived their own cages.

She lives in Minnesota with her two daughters, where she continues to build the life she was once told she could never have.

The Chosen is her second novel.”

Five years ago, the world went silent. Now Rivenglade is a miracle in the wasteland — a haven of food, order, and unshakeable faith. At its center stands Lucien Altheris, the Golden Prophet whose light holds back the dark. To the refugees, he is a savior. To the town, he is a king.

To Mira Roehart, he is a jailer.

She has watched her neighbors trade their freedom for safety. She has watched her father surrender his will, and her best friend’s eyes turn bright and empty with devotion. In a town that demands absolute purity, Mira’s doubts are more than sins — they are a danger to everyone she loves.

They told her the dark was dangerous. They lied.
When Lucien decides to claim her — not just as a convert, but as a wife — Mira learns what his ‘salvation’ really costs. Forced into a marriage built on coercion and stripped of her agency, she is pushed to the breaking point. And when the Prophet tries to bind her soul to his light, the ritual goes terribly wrong.

His divinity does not purify her. It recoils.
Mira isn’t just a skeptic. She is immune to Lucien’s power — because something ancient lives in her blood, something the ‘gods’ are afraid of. Now the Prophet is hunting the only thing he cannot control. To survive, Mira must run toward the very darkness she was taught to fear — and decide what she’s willing to become to reclaim her own soul.

He demanded her devotion. He got her darkness.

Author’s Note: This novel contains dark themes, including religious extremism, gaslighting, and detailed depictions of intimate partner violence and sexual assault. It is intended for mature audiences.”

[ISBN] 9798279150960

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Recognition

I’m autistic. I’m weird and unusual. And that’s something I’ve learned to accept as my truth.

I’ve always known I wasn’t quite like the people around me. Since childhood, I’ve been trying to answer three questions: Who am I? Why am I feeling this way? And how do people actually see me?

I have over 14 years of data on myself: journal entries, poems, daily mood reviews, song lyrics, dream journals, esoteric ritual documentation with observations, analytical research papers on my own psychology, social media posts, transcriptions of conversations, and much more. What started as handwritten journals has turned into GitHub repositories meticulously catalogued for future reference.

And when I love someone, when I truly lock in on a person, I take that entire system and aim it at them.

Because to me, understanding someone is the highest form of intimacy.

I want to know what makes my person hurt, so I’m never the cause of that pain. I want to know what makes them feel safe, so I can understand why they flinch and make sure I’m never the reason they do again. I want to know what makes them light up, so I can do those things on purpose instead of by accident.

That’s how I love. Not with grand gestures, but with attention, with data, with the quiet, relentless act of studying someone until I know them better than they know themselves, and then using everything I’ve learned to take care of them.

Most people love with feelings first and figure the rest out later. I love with understanding first, because feelings without understanding are just guessing. And I don’t want to guess with someone’s heart.

I think what I’m really trying to say is that people want to be known. Truly, deeply, specifically known. Recognition is one of the most powerful things we can offer another human being. And I believe the more we understand ourselves honestly and rigorously, even when the answers are ugly, the more we can understand the people we love. And the more we understand the people we love, the more we can understand the strangers carrying the same things in silence.

And that’s how we make a better world. Not by pretending we’re all okay, but by getting brave enough to figure out why we’re not, and then handing that understanding to someone who needed the blueprint.

Here are the six images included in the post described in order:

Image 1 — Portrait Photo
A close-up selfie of a woman with long, dark hair falling loosely around her face. She has one arm raised behind her head. Her eyes are dark and framed by dramatic, smoky eye makeup with bold brows. Her lips are a soft nude-pink. She’s wearing a black graphic t-shirt. The photo has a heavy purple-magenta color filter over it, giving the whole image a moody, saturated tone. The background is plain and light-colored, likely a wall or ceiling.

Image 2 — Poem titled “Hara-Kiri”
A screenshot from a notes app dated Monday, June 4, 2012 at 11:28 AM. The note contains a poem:

Stanza 1:
“The sweet sound of silence / Unpleasant thoughts are born / Planted in my mind like a ticking bomb / Showing me visions of deceptive relief / They whisper softly in my ear / Making me feel suffering and pain. / Slowly tying strings to my limbs / Making me their puppet / Sucking the life out of me / And leaving me dry.”

Stanza 2:
“Staring through blank eyes / No more emotion to make me alive. / Stolen right from under me / And this is what I am now. / They whisper to me how to feel / What is real and what is a dream? / At the point where it all feels the same. / I live the nightmares of my dreams / And dream of a life that doesn’t exist. / Trapped in their embrace…”

Image 3 — Journal Entry, “Daily Self”
A screenshot from a journaling app dated Monday, April 10, 2023 at 4:01 PM. Under the heading “Daily Self” and the prompt “HOW DID I FEEL TODAY?” the entry reads:

“Sad, lonely; I want to die. I want all this emotional pain to stop. I don’t want to keep losing everything. I’ve never had a consistent home. I can’t seem to choose lovers who love me back as much as I love them. I feel like I’m being punished for something, but I don’t know what I did wrong. How much more loss and heartbreak will I have to experience? Will I get some legitimately golden years of happiness that outweighs the sadness?”

Image 4 — Journal Entry, “Daily Self”
A screenshot from the same journaling app dated Friday, January 20, 2023 at 1:08 PM. Same “Daily Self” format with the prompt “HOW DID I FEEL TODAY?” The entry reads:

“Depressed; I’ve been struggling so hard lately. I feel like I’m clawing my way through every single day that comes to pass. My life is not where I wanted it to be by now. For so long I set myself on fire to keep others warm, and now I’m burnt out and lost myself in the process.

All I want is to rise from the ashes a new person. For my kids and for myself. I can see who I want to be, and I can see the dreams I want to make come true.”

Image 5 — Dream Journal Entry
A screenshot from a notes app labeled “Dreams,” dated Wednesday, December 26, 2018 at 9:29 AM. The entry describes a dream:

“I was on a beach and it was getting dark. I was with a lady and we had some tents. There was a thing about this beach. People loved camping out on it with floating tents. I think it was called Crescent Moon Beach, and the lady asked me why I thought it was named that. I had no idea. She replied that the tide was extremely high because somehow it was a beach affected by the moon more intensely and people would get swept away into the ocean as they slept in their tents because they thought the water wouldn’t reach them. So she drug the tents back farther, and there was a fence along the beach. That’s where you’d tie your tents so when the tide came in, you’d start floating but you wouldn’t drift off into the ocean. People from all over would go there to experience it.”

Image 6 — Document Title Page
A formal document title page. The main title in bold reads “The Guardian’s Teeth” with the subtitle “On the Four-Year War, the Darkness That Lives Inside Devotion, and the Governor That Held.” Below that is a revision line (partially redacted with black bars) referencing “the Evolution of the Engine, and What Happens When the Guardian Finally Finds Home.” Further down it reads “DEEP DIVE VII — REVISED” and identifies it as a “Companion to Psychological Profiles, The Strategist’s Mind, Deep Dives I–VI” with a reference to an “Operation” (name redacted) and “File Integration.” A paragraph in italics explains the document was originally prepared in February 2026, revised and integrated into an archive in March 2026, preserving the original account of the “Four-Year War” with updated references. The page indicator reads “Page 1 / 45.“​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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Never In A Million Years

I started my Blood of the Wild Gods universe as an escape from my reality.

It was the place where I dug up the bones of my past and tried to make something living out of them. It was where I figured out what I really wanted from love by writing through everything love had failed to be. It was my lifeline when I was homeless and dissociating in that underground shelter room with no windows. It was where I disappeared to when I was being called a stupid bitch by someone who was supposed to love me, comfort me, and hold me, but instead yelled at me when I cried. It’s where I ran when I was alone and had no one to talk to. It’s where I put all my thoughts and fears while I watched the real world stop making any sense, all my horror, anger, and helplessness at the corruption, greed, and unchecked power that keeps destroying lives.

I never expected anyone to care about this world I created. I never expected anyone to ask where they could buy my books, or tell me they wanted to make art from this universe, or say they were invested and wanted to see how it all evolves… I’m blown away by it. I still do not fully know what to do with it yet.

So thank you to everyone who has taken an interest. It honestly feels unreal to me. What started as me wandering alone through something I created to survive is slowly turning into a place where I’m finding fellow travelers along the way. And that is one of the coolest things I have ever experienced.

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Independence

I couldn't figure out how to get my car hood open.

I was out there fighting for my life for absolutely no reason. Finally gave up and texted the person I’ve been sharing all my ridiculous little life updates with lately like, how the hell do you open this thing?

Then of course I figured it out two seconds later. Because that is apparently my whole brand. Struggle violently, panic, and then solve it right after asking for help so the help arrives just in time to watch me not need it.

Naturally, I texted him that too. Because I'm a quadruple texting heathen.

I'm standing outside with this giant jug of windshield wiper fluid, pouring it into what I sincerely hope is the right spot, texting him in real time like, if this is wrong, I guess my car and I are about to learn together.

He's busy. He's doing stuff. He had no real reason to stop what he was doing because I was outside at seven at night having a minor emotional event over windshield wiper fluid.

But he did.

He Googles the cap. Sends me a picture. Makes sure I did it right. And when I tell him I did, he says:

"Good job :)"

And when I tell you I started crying…

Because people treat independence like it's a compliment. Like being the person who can handle everything is something to be proud of. And I understand why they think that. I do. And it is.

But when you’ve spent your whole life with no choice but to figure it out on your own, and almost no one has ever stopped to say, “Hey, you did that. I noticed. I’m glad you got it right,” it stops feeling like a compliment after a while.

It just starts feeling lonely.

He didn’t have to help me. He didn’t have to stop what he was doing. He didn’t have to look it up, send the picture, check on me, or tell me I did a good job after something as stupid and small as pouring windshield wiper fluid into a car. It was nothing.

But he showed up for the nothing. Like it was something. Because it was something to me, and somehow that was enough for it to be something to him too.

I’m strong enough to do things on my own, and here is a man gently reminding me that I don’t always have to. I cannot stress enough what a relief that is.

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Lore Dump

⚠️ SPOILERS FOR BASICALLY MY ENTIRE DERANGED FANTASY UNIVERSE ⚠️

⚠️ SPOILERS FOR BASICALLY MY ENTIRE DERANGED FANTASY UNIVERSE ⚠️

ok so Arcadia as a nation is built on the world’s worst possible starter pack because the gods had a divine war so violent they were out here using GALAXIES like cosmic folding chairs and then their blood rained onto the mortal realm like a divine OSHA violation and from that blood you get Beastborn, which are nightmare monsters, and Bloodmarked, people carrying godlike power in human bodies that might corrupt them into the very monsters they're meant to fight cool cool GREAT foundation for a civilization. It is basically “what if Chernobyl but make it holy.” literally every problem in this universe traces back to divine bodily fluids. you're welcome. love that for them

ANYWAY then we’ve got Elodias, moon god, celestial sadboy, who goes to a temple seer named Malritha and says hey can you help me find the woman from my dreams, and Malritha is like sure :) while internally experiencing the kind of psychological collapse usually reserved for black hole documentaries. because no one has ever loved her once ever in her entire life, not romantically, not platonically, not even in a “you seem nice” way, and then this gorgeous moon man shows her one ounce of kindness and she immediately goes from spiritually hollow to clinically unwell. she helps him find Senia, the sun goddess, his soulmate, and then has to stand there and watch the love story happen in real time like the universe personally logged in just to spit in her face and because she's always the tool that connects other people's love stories but never gets to BE in one and it escalates from unrequited pining to full FBI surveillance behavior to stuff I genuinely cannot say on this app and she tries to seduce him with an entire fake prophecy scheme to get Elodias alone and he’s basically like “did you invent an apocalyptic emergency to trick me into sleeping with you???” and when he rejects her that is unfortunately the moment the boss music starts.

so she goes to the literal EDGE of reality and casts the most hateful curse imaginable: Senia gets stripped of her divinity and is reborn as a mortal over and over with no memory, and Elodias stays immortal and has to keep finding her, loving her, and then losing her within seven days of her remembering who she is. forever. eternally. repeatedly. because apparently Malritha said reduce, reuse, recycle trauma. and the best part is every time Senia dies, Elodias’s grief causes storms so violent they flatten coastlines, drown villages, and force entire cultures into generational survival rituals just to cope with what is essentially one moon god having an emotional support apocalypse every few decades. entire civilizations are getting weather-alerted by a man with attachment wounds. I made that. no I won’t apologize

THEN there’s Thainos, and while everyone else is out here making cool shit like Leika with her nature spirits and Archadeus with his beastmen and Atonia with her terrifyingly competent elves, this dude looks at the cosmic lineup and goes "I'm gonna make anxious meat sacks with abandonment issues and the ability to make bad decisions" and the other gods are like WHAT and he's like no trust the process and they very much do NOT trust the process. the gods are like that is the dumbest shit we have ever heard in our eternal lives. Leika literally crushes a human child's skeleton in her fist like SEE? BAD BUILD. and Atonia calculates their exact extinction probability and is like bestie they're speedrunning self-destruction but Thainos is over here defending humanity like a dad defending his kid’s shitty macaroni art even though the macaroni art is actively on fire and screaming.

so Atonia hits him with the ultimate dare: fine, give up your godhood, become one of them, and find ONE single soul untouched by cruelty, and this man says BET and just YEEETS himself out of divinity then gets born as a human baby named Aren with zero memory of ever being a god and wanders around for years as this sad healer feeling weirdly haunted by existence for years, then one night collapses in a field having a full identity crisis and screams at the sky for answers, at which point the gods start LAUGHING from the heavens because they are, frankly, haters, and all his memories slam back into him at once. and he realizes ohhhh no. oh no no no. I made a bet I can't win and now he has to find this one pure soul and at first he's optimistic and then a hundred years go by and he's nervous and then FIVE HUNDRED YEARS go by and humanity is still doing greed, war, betrayal, cruelty, and avoidable nonsense on loop like it’s their national sport. and he's fully in his what have I done era but he's a THOUSAND YEARS deep and cannot quit now so he just keeps walking and keeps meeting genuinely wonderful people but nothing ever lasts because that's the whole point and THEN a military governor named Verin sees this guy healing people with no profit motive and is like sounds fake. sounds illegal. sounds heretical.

so Thainos gets dragged before religious authorities because apparently helping people for free is sus behavior, and they exile him for the crime of not being manipulative enough. so they tell him to go the fuck away so he does and then some forest nomads do a smoke vision thing with him and a child points at him and whispers "he's made of light" BUT SURPRISE Verin's soldiers followed him and see this and go absolutely-fucking-not, we are NOT letting symbolism happen on our watch. and they spike iron through both his palms and tie him to a dead tree on a hilltop to die from sepsis because humans remain undefeated at missing the point. and while dying he realizes the tragedy is not that humans are incapable of goodness. it’s that they keep choosing comfort over courage. they could rise. they simply do not care to lock in. and with his last strength he’s basically like I loved you anyway, idiots, and dissolves into light that scatters into every living person on earth so every time someone is randomly kind for no reason that is literally a dead god's love still stubbornly refusing to give up on you and if that doesn't wreck you I don't know what to tell you

AND THEN there's Azrael the God of Guardian Angels who deleted his brother Cain from the search history of life because Cain would not stop assaulting mortal women and making monstrous hybrid offspring, which is already a sentence that should make the whole family reunion weird forever. and Azrael spends ages trying literally any other solution first and every single option somehow gets worse, so he finally takes Cain out of the cosmic group chat permanently. and for this, instead of being thanked for preventing further horrors, he gets exiled because his divine parents care more about preserving family image than stopping violence. elite parenting. TEN out of TEN. absolutely no one is doing dysfunction like the gods are doing dysfunction. and the extra insult is that once Azrael is gone, the protections around the mortal world basically collapse, which means the exact thing he was punished for stopping gets even worse. incredible work everyone. tremendous team effort. so now he’s in the woods, demonized in campfire stories as some monster that devours women, because history in this universe is powered by lies and bad PR

enter Rynn, a tavern girl with the self-preservation instincts of a decorative spoon, who gets saved by Azrael once and immediately decides this terrifying forest cryptid man is now her personal problem. so she keeps bringing him food, keeps coming back, keeps ignoring every warning sign, every confession, every “please leave me alone before this gets worse,” because she has apparently never met a red-flag she couldn’t interpret as ‘I CAN FIX HIM.’ and then because this universe has active beef with women, she prays for divine protection and gets answered by a corrupted angel who does the exact thing Azrael was exiled for trying to stop. she ends up dying in childbirth after begging Azrael to raise her daughter Hope, and this ancient exiled god who has spent generations being treated like a monster actually does it because he loved her that much. so yes, his entire character arc is basically “feral ancient murder man gets emotionally adopted by one persistent mortal woman and then becomes a single father against his will.” beautiful. horrific. hate that for me

MEANWHILE because apparently divine monstrosity wasn’t enough, the mortals decide they too would like to enter the suffering Olympics. enter Princess Jade of Moradim, which becomes Solara later but hold that thought, and she befriends a river healer named Khali who is secretly a WHOLE ASS GODDESS just out here cosplaying as local wellness support. Jade’s fiancé, Prince Eshuah, catches feelings for Khali because he and Khali are operating on wavelengths Jade has never even had access to, and then Jade walks in on them kissing in the rain. now does she process this in any mature or emotionally regulated way? absolutely not. don’t be ridiculous. she lures Khali to ancient ruins, beats her to death with a rock, then stabs Eshuah when he finds the body. and her father, King Aldric, sees all this and goes wow. awful. anyway let’s fix the narrative. so he buries the truth, buys the history, commissions a whole ass mural at High Pass painting his murderous daughter as the hero and a scholar who digs all this up centuries later writes "History is not written by the victors. It is written by the wealthy… Truth is a luxury the poor cannot afford, and justice is a fiction the rich need not purchase." and those lines alone should probably fistfight every monument on earth

SO THEN the Divine War kicks off and this is where EVERYONE suffers. it starts because Astrid convinces her best friend Natalia to stay five minutes longer to watch a fucking sunset. five. minutes. and a god takes Natalia after dark and fucks her shit up permanently and Astrid's guilt eats her alive so she accepts divine blood from Silas the Trickster god thinking power will fix what grief broke but her boyfriend Eamon dumps her over it and she panics and begs Silas to take the power BACK and he just laughs in her face because that man is every red-flag situationship with a god complex and access to nuclear launch codes. and THEN the same god who killed Natalia catches Astrid out after dark and assaults her and the divine blood detonates and she becomes the first mortal to ever kill a god and she rips him apart and drags the corpse into the village square like HERE. THIS IS POSSIBLE NOW. FIX YOURSELVES. and honestly that is one of the most insane and iconic crashouts I have ever assigned to a woman. that is peak unhinged behavior in the most iconic possible way

from there it is just dominoes falling into a woodchipper while the woodchipper is also on fire. Azrael and teenage Hope plead before the First Gods for intervention and get hit with basically “sounds difficult, thoughts and prayers.” and Silas is actively TRYING to start divine civil war because he thinks business as usual is worse than apocalypse which is certainly a take, Zenith the God of Gods switches sides to fight WITH the Bloodmarked which sounds heroic until you realize every battle just sprays divine blood everywhere like a busted fire hydrant of corruption and the Bloodmarked think their creepy eclipse rituals are unmaking godhood but actually they're just poisoning the entire continent and everyone is too busy girlbossing through war crimes to notice. and Titans start waking up and one DIES and its skeleton becomes the Hollow Spire library which is the hardest worldbuilding flex I will ever produce, the sun god Solarius detonates over Moradim creating Solara, the Bloodmarked start losing their minds to divine blood corruption, Astrid, the girl who started this whole thing over five minutes and a sunset, completely snaps and Jeffrey Dahmers her own people, Zenith clocks out of life and crystallizes into an entire island, and Hope ( RYNN'S BABY from earlier, the living proof divine and mortal could coexist ) dies at seventeen in the war she chose to fight and Azrael loses the only good thing exile ever gave him and is like actually fuck all of this. the homeland becomes a cursed wasteland. the surviving gods just nope out of existence choosing to be hated as absent rather than keep accidentally destroying the world. everyone loses. I wrote a war where the prize is trauma

ALL OF THIS is being chronicled by Tanneus G'Raja a scholar born in those very Wastes, who finds a statue of Astrid in CHAINS with an inscription that says "may our children forgive us for what she became" because his own people rewrote their heroes into villains within a single generation and after spending his entire life excavating divine tragedies he realizes the silence of the gods IS the love. they didn't abandon humanity they removed themselves so they'd stop accidentally destroying it and his final testament is basically “I would do it all again,” which is not mentally healthy but it is very sexy of him unfortunately

after the gods dip out a blind seer named Athea starts channeling prophecy through SIREN BONE NEEDLES pulled from ocean depths gifted to her by motherfucking mermaids and builds an entire divination system out of prophecy, grief, and the human need to believe the sky is saying something back. one of her constellations, the Dragon, is actually a prison for something so catastrophically awful that the beings who understood it chose death over risking its release. so that’s FUN. love a whimsical horoscope with an eldritch weapon of mass destruction hidden inside

THEN this beautiful disaster of an elf named Alaquinn Althaea blows her entire life savings on a fancy journal and decides she's going to study nature spirits despite having zero training zero funding zero institutional support and honestly zero common sense because apparently self-preservation is not a strong cultural value in my world. and she finds a water sprite that's completely forgotten its purpose and is now just squirting people in the face and giggling which is peak comedy until it freezes mid-squirt and whispers "The Silence is coming" in a voice that is NOT ITS OWN and the government hits Quinn with a literal CEASE AND DESIST for doing unapproved research because apparently uncovering an existential threat without proper administrative approval is frowned upon. bureaucracy remains undefeated

then a warden named Dani helps her get into the Hollow Spire, the aforementioned Titan skeleton library, and Quinn starts discovering that nature spirits everywhere are glitching out. and I know Quinn seems like a side quest right now but she is the entire main quest in disguise WATCH

she befriends a relic hunter named Mordain whose wife literally dies whispering about the Silence and grief takes this formerly decent dude and turns him into a paranoid authoritarian nightmare and Quinn brings him into the Hollow Spire thinking she’s helping him find meaning, but instead he becomes the guy who gets her KICKED OUT because she presents proof that something ancient is waking up and the institution doesn't silence her for being wrong—they silence her for being RIGHT—and Mordain leads the charge to ban all void knowledge so the one person who could have warned everyone gets destroyed by the friend she brought inside and THAT is why humanity is completely blindsided when the Silence actually hits. so yes, humanity gets fucked sideways by the apocalypse because one woman had the audacity to be correct before everyone was emotionally ready to hear it. which is the most devastating institutional failure I've ever written

THE SILENCE rolls in whispering to five people including Mordain who has spent years executing the very people the gods designed to fight this thing and Mordain discovers his entire righteous crusade was actually serving the enemy the whole time. elite work. phenomenal strategy. no one is doing self-sabotage like this man is doing self-sabotage. a jealous prince gets possessed. an entire civilization starts collapsing. there’s a race for the Eclipse Pendant. Mordain finds out the price of stopping this entity is complete erasure from existence

not death, WORSE!!!

being unwritten from reality so nobody remembers you ever existed and he does it anyway and years later Quinn finds his blank journal and feels grief for someone she cannot name because he has been erased so thoroughly that only the ache remains. which is disgusting of me actually. horrible behavior from an author

FIVE YEARS LATER we get Lucien, half-elf half-angel, walking into a coastal town with psychic mind control and enough charisma to start a full-blown cult where baptism rewires your brain and dissent gets you murdered by your own neighbors. and then there’s Mira, violet-eyed, traumatized, deeply not having a good time, whose baptism fails because something in her blood basically says lol. no. and Lucien sees this and is like interesting. terrifying. I need to own that immediately. so he blackmails her into marriage and systematically dismantles her life piece by piece. Mira eventually reaches the point where she takes his dagger into the woods intending not to come back, and then a void creature with her exact eyes touches her and something ancient in her blood wakes up and she chooses to run instead of die

NEXT she falls in with Forsaken resistance fighters, finds out she's pregnant, a soldier named Mordekai basically becomes her dad and then dies from Beastborn venom getting her to the Verdant Veil because in my universe no one is allowed to experience stable emotional support for longer than ten minutes, and that’s where Kaelen and Elowen from the Silence take her in and QUINN shows up because yes everything is connected and yes I am personally a threat to corkboard manufacturers, and she’s returning the void texts that got banned because of HER OWN RESEARCH decades ago and drops the bomb that Mira is actually NIMWE, a void warrior entity who volunteered to be born mortal to restore cosmic balance, and her child is half void half light, which has literally never happened before. no pressure queen. and she names the boy Kai after the man who died getting her there because I believe in emotional damage with continuity and when Lucien sees three-year-old Kai's eyes and realizes he’s indeed the father, he goes absolutely nuclear like a baby daddy on Maury

Mira grabs Kai and runs to a hidden village where she trades with MURMELEKS, half-goat gossip merchants whose entire economic system is just monetized tea. these creatures monetize secrets. they are capitalism in hoof form. then she trains with Kirisha’na, the First Baelak, this ancient white tiger warrior who is the last speaker of an entire dead language because apparently I enjoy doing full academic side quests for fun. Kirisha’na absolutely refuses to let Mira remain broken and drags her through healing the hard way because she herself has survived worse and came out stronger. and then one day bandits show up with suppression stones, bonk Mira in the head, threaten to do unspeakable things to her, and eight-year-old Kai casually reduces them to pink mist with his void powers and goes “it’s okay mama, it’s not my blood.” which is the kind of line that should make every adult in a ten-mile radius immediately start vomiting from dread. and THEN Mira discovers the Eclipse Pendant reacts to Kai because he's Bloodmarked like his father so she yeets the most dangerous artifact in existence into the ocean because at this point the sea in my world is basically just God’s junk drawer

so they FLEE to Nareen, the island nation of eternal spring, which has its own soft flowing language called Naru because I do not know how to worldbuild like a normal person with hobbies and a social life. there are siren pacts. cherry trees planted for every birth. wishes carved into bark. for one brief shining second I let beauty exist without immediately lighting it on fire. and Kai falls in love with a girl named Amina under a cherry tree by the sea and whispers in Bae’Ravah, calling her beautiful in a dead language she will never understand, and it is the gentlest scene in this entire cursed universe

WHICH OF COURSE I THEN BODY-SLAM THROUGH A TABLE because Kai later kills a man who hurt Amina with a calmness that should have everybody hitting the emergency alarm, refugees arrive saying Lucien has conquered everything, and Kai decides they have to go back. Amina tells him she’ll wait under the cherry tree. he never returns

because Kai kills his father but does not stop there. he turns his power on every single follower, looks at Mira with nothing but love, and says “this is for you, mother.” and she holds him, tells him she loves him, and drives a sword through his heart. he asks why. she says “because you don’t belong in this world… but neither do I.” AND THEN STABS HERSELF. and they rise together as the Guardians constellation while years later Amina writes letters to a dead boy she doesn’t know is dead and sends them into the sea not knowing he is literally above her now, not knowing the letter will never reach him and also already has. which is such an offensively cruel concept that honestly I should be arrested

and on quiet nights people still hear Mira’s lullaby:

The river weeps, the mountains sigh,
The stars slip loose from ashen skies…

like hello??? excuse me??? who approved this emotional terrorism. certainly not me. except yes it was me. repeatedly. with intent

AND THEN there’s an entire book dedicated to answering the question:

WHAT THE HELL DID KIRI DO???

because Kiri, this ancient white tiger warrior woman who trained Mira by basically roundhouse-kicking her through the concept of healing, once said “you not know what these claws have done… what these eyes have seen” and naturally I heard that and thought wow. sounds like a problem for Future Me. well Future Me unfortunately delivered. because according to official history, Kirisha’na is a monster. a butcher. a kingdom-killer. a feral beast who wiped out an entire civilization for no reason. and everyone just accepted that for centuries because if enough dead men write something down apparently that becomes facts

SO a scholar-physician from the Hollow Spire and a bounty hunter whose inner life is spiritually just “coin purse with legs” head into the ancient forests where the Fus’Ravahn used to live, because legend says Kiri is still alive. the Hollow Spire wants proof. the bounty hunter wants money. no one involved is making good choices

and they FIND HER. and she’s living alone in the ruins of her people’s homeland, listening to Mira’s lullaby on the wind because Mira and Kai are constellations now and the song is all Kiri has left of them. so already we are starting from an emotional place I would describe as deeply illegal

and the scholar is like tell me what happened. and Kiri, against all common sense, actually does. and this is where the whole nice tidy historical narrative bursts into flames

because yes, she destroyed a kingdom. yes, she killed people. yes, the records got those parts right. what they LEFT OUT, what they conveniently forgot to include, just a tiny little omission, no big deal, was that that this kingdom conquered her people when she was a child, enslaved her, kept her as a captive, and used her in ritual sex magic because Baelaks are so rare and divine that they decided her body was worth more as a mystical resource than as a person. so the “monster who destroyed a civilization for no reason” was actually a brutalized child who survived years of torture and finally burned her abusers to the ground. but naturally the kingdom wrote the history because history always hands the pen to power first and asks questions never

and the scholar is sitting there having his entire academic framework peeled off like wet wallpaper, while the bounty hunter, whose soul is apparently made of wet cardboard and misogyny, hears all this and goes wow. sounds fake. and calls her a lying bitch who’d say anything to save herself, because some men could watch a woman crawl out of hell still on fire and ask for documentation. and then he slaps suppression stones on her. THE suppression stones. the same kind used on Mira. because this universe does not believe in retiring harmful tools when it can instead lovingly pass them from one set of violent hands to the next like a cursed inheritance. generational trauma but make it reusable

and they start dragging Kiri back but she does not fight. she begs the scholar to kill her because she would rather die than ever be captive again. and the scholar, for one shining day in his miserable little historian life, chooses not to be useless. he kills the bounty hunter. frees Kiri. goes back to the Hollow Spire. and lies with his entire chest

says they never found her. says the bounty hunter died to wilderness hazards. files the whole thing away under tragic expedition loss, thoughts and prayers, very sad, moving on. and Kiri stays where she is: in her forest, alone, free, grieving, listening to the lullaby of a dead woman carried on the wind. cool. awesome. very normal material to write. definitely the work of a mentally stable and well-adjusted author

OH and there is ALSO another book where a scholar named Eren loses his wife to plague and follows a map hidden in a melody that grieving people have heard for millennia and ends up cracking open that Dragon prison constellation from earlier, and inside is something that can resurrect anything that has ever died, including some extremely furious Old Gods, and he has to choose between the woman he would destroy the world for and the world he would have to destroy to get her back, but I haven’t finished writing that yet so for now just sit there and marinate in the threat

anyway this is my universe. this is what I do instead of being normal

if you read all this, first of all what is wrong with you
second of all I love you deeply
third of all perhaps marry me
JK. unless?
but genuinely if you made it this far that is unhinged behavior and I respect it because caring this much about my worldbuilding is absolutely insane

which is perfect because so am I

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Traumatized

I think I honestly feel a little traumatized right now.

Today at work was a good day overall. It went well. I saw a lot, and I learned a lot.

But I also saw some really fucked up shit.

The kind of shit that stays in your head. The kind of shit that feels like it belongs in a horror movie, not in real life right in front of you. There are some things I really don’t think most people should ever have to see, because once you do, they haunt you like a ghost.

It was an honor to be part of what I was part of today, and I truly mean that. But it was also extremely dark. Extremely heavy. And right now, I’m just so grateful to be alive.

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Drowning

I feel like I’m drowning.

Not in the violent, desperate way people always picture. Not in panic, not in chaos, not with frantic hands begging the sky for one more breath.

In the quiet way.

The kind that comes after the struggle.
After the fear has exhausted itself.
After every part of you has fought for so long that there is simply nothing left to give.

So you go still.

Completely still.

And little by little, you let go.

Not because it doesn’t matter.
Not because you never wanted saving.
But because you are so unbearably tired that surrender begins to feel kinder than fighting.

And for one brief moment, just one, it feels almost merciful.

Almost peaceful.

Like the world has finally stopped asking anything of you.
Like the noise has gone silent.
Like the pain has loosened its grip just enough for you to rest inside the hush of it.

Just for a moment.

Just one more moment.

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Red Flags

I think one of the best things I’ve done is document everything.

Every conversation. Every interaction. Every post. What I said, what I did, how I responded, how I reacted. All of it. Written down, timestamped, and meticulously filed. To a degree that would probably sound a little concerning if I fully admitted how obsessive I’ve been about it.

But that’s the brutal thing about documenting everything: eventually, it stops being a record of what other people did to you and starts becoming a record of what you keep doing to yourself.

Because once it’s all there, you can’t lie anymore. You can’t twist it into something prettier. You can’t blame bad timing or bad luck or the universe or the wrong person showing up at the wrong time. The pattern is right there. Receipt after receipt after receipt.

And when I looked back at mine, it was humiliating.

Different people. Same cycle. Same spiral. Same version of me walking straight into the same fire and acting shocked when I’d get burned.

I can see where I’m the problem.

Not always the only problem. But enough of one that I can’t keep hiding from it.

My red flags were never subtle. They were waving directly in my face. I just kept choosing not to see them because denial was easier. Denial let me keep the story I wanted.

But I’ve touched the stove now. I’ve felt the heat. And I’m not putting my hands back into the comfort of pretending I don’t know better.

I still have a long way to go. It sucks. It’s uncomfortable. It’s the kind of honesty that makes you want to close the notebook and shove it in a drawer and never look at it again.

But at least I can see the path forward now.

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Kuh Koo

I was pissed off about something and was like, okay, I need to chill out for a second. So I went and laid down.

A little while later, my 4-year-old, Zelda, starts going, “Kuh-Koo!” So I go, “Kuh-Koo!” back. Then my 8-year-old, Mara, joins in and goes, “Kuh-Koo!” too.

And then Zelda goes, “No, you can’t say Kuh-Koo!”

So I’m like… okay, whatever.

Then Zelda says “Kuh-Koo!” again and looks at both of us smiling. So once again, I go, “Kuh-Koo!” and Mara immediately joins in with her own “Kuh-Koo!” and AGAIN Zelda goes, “NO, YOU CAN’T SAY KUH-KOO!”

At this point I’m like, okay, fuck you, because you literally wanted this. Why are you getting mad at me for doing the thing you keep baiting me into doing??

Then this little menace laughs, goes, “Kuh-Koo!” again, and looks at both of us like she’s just waiting for us to fall for it one more time.

And now I’m like, no, absolutely not. Shame on me the first two times.

So in pure 4-year-old frustration and impatience, Zelda starts jumping up and down yelling, “KUH-KOO!! KUH-KOO!! KUH-KOO-KUH-KOO-KUH-KOO!!”

I’m laying there keeping a straight face, refusing to make eye contact.

Then she escalates and starts jumping, throwing her hands in the air, folding over like she’s doing the wave at a football game, screaming, “RaWrRrah!”

And I just look at her, gesture both hands toward her, and go, “Why? Where did you even learn this?”

Then Mara starts yelling, “I eat chairs! I eat chairs!”

And now they’re both going at the same time, and I’m laying there thinking, what the hell is happening in this house right now.

P.S. I probably should’ve used emojis to convey more emotion, 😅 so that’s my autistic bad there. But rest assured, I was laughing my ass off the entire time this was happening. I was just in such complete disbelief that I needed to write it down.

Open
Fear of Hope

I’m terrified of being hopeful.

Every time I start to think, “Maybe this is the one,” I end up being shown, over and over again, that I was wrong. And I am grateful, truly, for all the amazing souls I’ve met on this journey. But every time, there’s been something that makes the fit just not quite right.

Sometimes it’s me not feeling the spark, even when the good qualities are obviously there.

Sometimes the communication brushes up against a wound without meaning to, and it becomes something that just can’t be worked through.

Sometimes life throws something in the way, and the other person just isn’t ready, or willing, to face it with me.

Every single time, my “maybe” has been met with, “No, not this time.”

And then the very day I finally decided to stop gripping so hard, to stop white-knuckling my destiny and just let go, I opened a DM on TikTok from a man 1,800 miles away. And once again, I felt that hope rise up in me. Once again, I caught myself thinking, “Maybe this is the one.”

And that is terrifying.

Because the logistics of this one are different from everyone else. This one feels heavy. Serious. High risk, high reward. It feels like everything is on the line, because finding a person who feels like home is rare. And if it’s true, if it’s real, then it would be worth the risk.

But God, to be wrong again… I don’t know how many more times I can walk into something new with hope before there’s nothing left.

Open
Sovereignty

I’m about to do something I’ve been incapable of doing since I was seventeen years old: I’m surrendering to sovereignty.

Typically, at this point, the old me would cling to someone—anyone—who was “good enough,” just so I wouldn’t have to be alone. Because truly, my worst fear is being alone in my darkness.

Metaphorically and literally.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been afraid of sleeping alone. There were so many nights as a kid when I cried myself to sleep because I couldn’t bear the crushing nothingness. I don’t know if I’ll ever stop carrying that wound.

But I don’t want “good enough.”
Not anymore.
This time, I want to be absolutely certain I am making the right choice.

So it’s time to face my greatest fear head-on. And in my sovereignty, I will be able to recognize—and accept—what I’ve been looking for all along.

Open
Unhinged LOTR

I'm completely unhinged. Instead of fighting it, I'm going to accept it—let it be borne into the foundations of Orodruin itself where Sauron wrought the One Ring in the fires of the Second Age, forged with the full measure of his will and cunning so that it could not be unmade by any craft save the flames that gave it form, for it was wrought in the same flames that shaped the world's bones, and like Sauron before me I pour into it my cruelty, my malice, and my will to dominate all life for it is my burden and my inheritance and it will outlast the Ages of this world.

Anyway, does anyone want to get coffee sometime??

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Teaching Nursing Students

I genuinely don’t understand why so many nurses hate nursing students.

I’ve had a couple students with me now, and it always feels like an honor. I love asking what their plans are and being able to give them insight on different specialties, especially if they’re still trying to figure out what path fits them best. I share the tips and tricks I’ve picked up so far in hopes it helps them later. I love explaining what I’m doing and why I’m doing it, because understanding the “why” is what makes the whole process click, along with repetition.

I’m not into pushing anyone harder than they’re willing to push themselves. I’ve had students who just want to sit at the computer or stand back and observe, and that’s their choice. But for the ones who want to challenge themselves, I keep them right next to me—looking things up together in the chart, talking through the plan, and doing direct patient care side by side.

There’s just no reason to be mean to people who are trying to learn. Now that I’m on the other side, I can’t find a justification for hazing. You don’t need to be so hard on someone that they end up in tears or ready to give up just to teach them how to be a nurse. If we want good nurses, we have to act like we actually want them to make it.

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Curveball

Ok listen. This is basically where I’m at currently in my life.

I really thought I’d moved on from my ex. I was confident in it. But there was this little voice in my head that kept saying, the universe is going to throw you a curveball.

And boy, did it.

He starts messaging me, and at first it’s just a nasty fight. I’m telling him to leave me the fuck alone, because he’s not even supposed to be talking to me.

But then he switched up on me. He started being very nice.

I couldn’t help it, I had to lower my shield and peek over it to see what he was up to…
and before I know it, we’re exchanging conspiracy theories and talking about working out like it’s normal. Like we’re normal.

All the progress I made over all those months was immediately undone.

And every day it’s another little piece of the man I fell in love with showing up again. It’s him asking how my day went. It’s him sending me a video of birds singing their beautiful songs.

My mind is screaming at me to run. Don’t let him in again. This only ends one way, and it’s pain.

But my heart? My heart would run into his arms without a second thought if he stood in front of me right now.

I was so, so wrong.

And I don’t know how to make it right.

P.s. I want people to understand that this is an addiction I’m fully aware of, and I wish I could get rid of it.

It’s like being in a car on an icy road. There’s a wall in front of you, so you put all your weight into the brake, trying to stop the car from moving. But you keep getting pulled closer anyway. Closer to the wall you’re about to crash into.

And there’s that feeling of horror and disbelief because you’re doing everything you can. You’re putting everything you have into that brake, holding on for dear life, and it’s still not enough.

It’s that helpless, sinking feeling that you’re at the mercy of forces outside your control, and you don’t know how this is going to end.

P.s.s. In the most simple of terms, I am watching myself lose a fight I know how to win, and I cannot make my body listen to my brain.

Open
Attention vs. Connection

I keep seeing this comment: “How can you be lonely when your posts get so much attention?”

I’ll tell you how.

People are conflating attention with connection.
Attention is visibility. Attention is engagement. Attention is numbers on a screen. Connection is being known, being safe, being met, and being understood.

You can be in a packed room, have a full inbox, have a comment section popping off, and still not have a single person who actually gets you. A room full of people doesn’t automatically equal belonging.

And the “you have so many options” line needs to die.
Because wanting real connection doesn’t mean you’ll take whoever is available.

Think of it like a missing puzzle piece. You can be handed a thousand pieces and it doesn’t matter if none of them are the right shape. And if you start forcing whatever piece you grab first, it doesn’t magically become the right one—it just wrecks the edges. Now the piece is mangled, the spot is messed up, and the whole picture gets trashed because you tried to shove something in where it didn’t belong.

That’s what “just pick someone” is. That’s what “you have options” is really asking you to do: force a fit, break yourself down, and call it love because it’s there.

So yeah. I can get a lot of attention and still be lonely.
Because being seen is not the same thing as being known.

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Feeling Content

I realized I’ve been feeling content lately, and that made me… anxious? I think I finally understand why: my nervous system was trained on a different dataset.

Everything in my history taught me that good things escalate into dangerous things. My ex-fiancé “truly saw” me, and that seeing became violence. The intensity that draws people to me has historically been the same intensity that eventually makes them hurt me or leave. My brain has built a very reasonable prediction model based on the available evidence: if it feels this good, the drop is coming.

So every day that I feel happy, feel content… my system braces for the version where it falls apart. Not because anything is wrong. But because nothing is wrong, and nothing being wrong is the thing I have the least practice surviving.

I know how to survive chaos. I’m elite at it. I know how to survive abuse, betrayal, mental illness, homelessness. I have proven, repeatedly, that I can take the worst thing that happens and make it into something beautiful.

What I don’t have much practice with is Tuesday. Just… a normal Tuesday where a man texts me and it’s fine and nothing breaks and I go to bed and wake up and he’s still there and it’s still fine.

That’s what’s hard to wrap my head around. The absence of catastrophe. The quiet, persistent okayness of a thing that just keeps being okay.

I’m learning a new language. I’m already fluent in crisis. Now I’m a beginner in steady. And steady feels wrong the same way a foreign language feels wrong—not because it’s incorrect, but because my tongue hasn’t learned the shapes yet.

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Not Yet

Have you ever met someone you couldn’t pretend not to notice? Someone who pulls your attention like gravity. Your eyes find theirs from across a room and something in you reacts before your mind can catch up, like recognition without a name. A need to know who they are, even if you don’t understand why.

A wanting so complete the rest of the world blurs. But they say—not yet.

So you do the slow thing. The careful thing. You take what they give you and you don’t reach for more. You study the pieces of them, puzzle piece by puzzle piece, until the picture starts to click into place. And you realize it’s beautiful.

And not just the good parts. The broken ones too. The anxieties, the old scars, the dark and fragile things that make a person whole. Especially those parts—so you know what needs to be held gently, so it doesn’t break open again.

And then one day, not yet becomes yes, tonight.

So you show up at their door with your eyes closed and your arms outstretched in the dark, because for once you want to believe in something simple. You want to believe you can trust another person with your body, with your softness, with your hope. You want to believe they’ll guide you and not let you fall.

And they don’t let you fall.

When you finally hold their face between your hands, you smile—not with possession, not with conquest, but with reverence.

And when the time comes to ask if you’re overstaying your welcome, they say—not yet.

So you stay a little longer. You let your nervous system relax. You let your mind get quiet in a way it hasn’t been in a long time. You let yourself believe, just for a moment, that you’re safe. That you’re wanted. That you can exist without bracing for impact.

And then those moments become memories—because some people leave marks on you that stay, whether they do or not.

Because that’s the part no one warns you about. That some people don’t just pass through your life. They leave something behind in you that doesn’t leave when they do. A before and after. A standard your body will keep reaching for long after your logic tells you to move on.

And now you’re left with the memory that proves it existed, and the ache that nothing that good is permanent.

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Self Sabotage

I’m realizing I’m doing it again. I’m self-sabotaging.

I think part of me is scared to actually be happy. Struggle has been such a cornerstone to my life—who am I if I’m not surviving something? Why does peace feel so threatening?

It’s weird. It doesn’t make sense. Yet here I am.

I think maybe deep down, when I push someone away, I’m hoping they’ll push right back. That they’ll fight for me and say, “I know what you’re doing, and it’s not going to work on me.” That they’ll refuse to abandon me even when I’m at my most difficult.

And, god, do I know I’m difficult. My issues aren’t lost on me. I’m painfully aware of my shortcomings.

To have someone see me at my worst and love me anyway, and refuse to let me push them over… it feels like such an impossible dream. It feels like so much to ask of one person. It feels like I don’t deserve it.

And another part of me is angry that it’s so easy for me to push people away. That it actually works. That most people don’t push back—they just… go.

I can’t even imagine what it would be like to meet someone as stubborn and fiery as me, but in a way that reassures me instead of destroying me. Someone who can hold their ground without trying to break mine. Someone so absolute in his wanting me in his life that once he knows me, he can’t even imagine me not in it.

I’m starting to believe that kind of man doesn’t exist.

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Old Self New Me

The night he strangled me is the night my soul finally died.

But it didn’t happen all at once. It happened slowly, over years. I think about the person that I was before him, and I don’t recognize myself anymore. That version of me?

He killed her.

She was a good woman. A kind woman. Full of hope and trust.

She was the kind of person who called her friends when they were going through it, just to check in. Not to be polite. Because she actually cared and wanted to know how they were holding up.

She had better habits. She still believed that if you didn’t quit, you’d eventually get where you were trying to go. She believed life could still turn out right if you kept showing up and trying.

But now she’s dead.

She’s gone.

And I miss her like you miss a person. I lost the part of me that made me better. I lost someone I depended on. I lost a friend.

And I don’t think she’s ever coming back…

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Touch Starved

I’m touch starved.

I realized it while I was tying up the back of a surgical gown on one of the surgeons and my fingers gently grazed his back. Just that small, accidental contact, and my brain went quiet for a second. It felt good to be that close to another person.

I’m still thinking about it now, laying in bed at home. I grazed a stranger’s back and my body lit up with longing—but not for him. For the concept of him. For that version of closeness where someone knows the weight of your head on their chest and wants it there again tomorrow.

The person who doesn’t get tired of you.

The one you instinctively turn to after you read something, because you need to know what they think. The one you look at when you laugh, because you want to see if they thought it was funny too.

Do you know how rare that is?

And once you’ve had that kind of intimacy—once you’ve known what it feels like for two people to fit together like that—you can’t unsee it.

You know it exists. And it makes everything else feel like nothing.

Because that’s the only kind of touch that would mean anything.

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Scared To Move On

I’m scared to move on from my ex.

I think part of me believes that if I really let go, then it’s final. Like it confirms that it’s actually over, for real.

And what confuses me is… why does that scare me so much?

What if some people just stay with you in a certain way. What if you always miss them a little when you think about the good parts—the parts that made you fall in love in the first place. What if there’s a place in my heart that will always belong to him, even if I never go back.

I’m afraid I’ve been broken so many times that I won’t be able to love someone new the way they deserve. I gave myself so fully before. How do I do that again? What if I can’t? What if I’m ruined for good?

How does one person break another so completely? And do I really want to risk being broken again by someone new?

Even if I tried… would I be capable of being the best version of myself? Or even a better one? I don’t know.

The weight is getting easier to carry. But it doesn’t make it any less heavy.

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Underage Marriage

The first time I got married, I had just turned 17 years old.

We’ll call him DR.

He was almost 19 when we started dating and I was freshly 16, so the age gap wasn’t quite three years. It was close enough to feel normal when you’re young and don’t know any better. But here’s the thing about DR: he didn’t just want me. He wanted girls younger than me, and the youngest I found out about was 12 years old.

I didn’t see them as victims back then. I saw them as competition. We were all so close in age that if we’d lived in the same town, we would’ve gone to the same high school—except for the ones who would’ve still been in middle school. I didn’t understand how wrong it was because I was a child too, trying to make sense of something that should never have been my reality.

DR made me drop out of high school after 10th grade because he didn’t want me around other guys my age. He was isolating me, and I thought it was love.

Then the State of North Dakota charged him with statutory rape, and his sister found a loophole: if he married me, they couldn’t prosecute. So he convinced me to say yes, and I convinced my legal guardian to sign the papers, not understanding that the love bombing had an agenda. I didn’t understand that I wasn’t the love of his life. I was his escape route.

The marriage lasted one year.

After the divorce, he found someone else and had two kids with her. I remarried and had my first daughter. Life moved on the way it does when you’re trying to outrun the trauma of your past.

But his now ex-girlfriend—we’ll call her MA—stayed in contact with me over the years. An act of solidarity between two women who had survived the same man.

Years later, she called me. DR was hitting her. The kids were watching. And he was still showing concerning behaviors with minors. She was in a custody battle, and she asked me to testify.

They asked what my marriage to DR was like, and I told the truth. All of it.

He lost custody of both children. He didn’t fight the ruling. He just packed up and moved to Texas, leaving his kids behind like they meant nothing to him.

I carry two regrets from this story.

The first is that I couldn’t testify in person. I had a newborn and couldn’t travel, so I gave my testimony over the phone. But I wish so badly that I could have said every word while looking him in the eyes.

The second regret is harder to say out loud. I was so broken by the time I escaped him, so traumatized by everything he did to me, that I didn’t push to get him charged for the other girls. I just wanted to survive. I just wanted to get away from the monster who had almost made me take my own life.

And I did. I survived.

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Cheater In The Park

Right now I’m sitting in bed, staring at nothing while some music plays in the background, and I’m not even trying to think about anything in particular. I’m just letting stuff float in and out the way it does when it’s late and your mind won’t pick a lane.

And I remembered this one time I found out I was being cheated on.

The thing is… I already knew. Not “had proof” yet knew—just that quiet, sick knowing you try to talk yourself out of. But you always kind of know. So I started digging. And eventually I found something that stuck out in the phone records.

One number kept showing up. Over and over.

So I texted it.

I told her who I was, and she was mortified—like genuinely horrified. And weirdly, it wasn’t awkward between us. It snapped into place fast: we weren’t mad at each other. We were mad at him.

Same realization, same disgust.

And this is the part that still makes me laugh a little, because it’s so ridiculous.

She sets up a date with him at a park.

And he goes.

Of course he does.

And what a coincidence… I end up at that same park at the same time they’re there. I pulled up, got out, and walked right over to them. And when I got closer, me and her both lit into him. No polite conversation. No “let’s talk.” Just pure, earned yelling while he stood there like the idiot he is.

No charm. No magic words. No excuse that could save him.

Just that blank, caught look people get when they realize there’s nothing left to spin and nowhere left to hide.

Sometimes I wonder where she is now. I hope she’s having a great day today.

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This Too Shall Pass

I will never forget the night I decided to kill myself.

I was 18 years old. I found out I was getting cheated on again, and he wasn’t even trying to hide it anymore. There was a lot more that led up to it, but by then I had made up my mind. I was home alone, and I knew I’d be alone for hours, so it felt like now was the time.

I found every knife in the apartment and tested them on my forearm, one after another, trying to see if any of them were sharp enough. They were all dull. So I broke an empty Grey Goose bottle on the floor and started searching through the pieces like it mattered which one I chose, like there was a “right” shard. I remember picking them up, turning them, testing the edges until I found the sharpest one.

I decided I would do it in the shower so I wouldn’t leave a mess when I was found. I turned on the water. And then, standing there with the sound of it running, my mind started pulling people in. My dad. My mom. My grandparents. My pets. One by one. And I told myself they would be sad at first, but they would move on. They would laugh again. They would smile again. And I’d still be gone. I made my peace with that.

I sat in the shower and I put the shard of glass up to my throat, and it finally sank in that this was real. I was actually going to do it. And then something I still can’t explain happened.

I looked up at the ceiling and I had one last plea to the universe. I didn’t expect an answer. I think part of me was waiting for the silence—because if it stayed silent, then I’d have my answer. I’d know I really was alone. With tears in my eyes I said, “Please… give me a reason to live…”

And instead of being met by silence, I was answered.

A beautiful voice, clear as if he had been standing right next to me, said, “This too shall pass.”

I’m not religious. I’m not claiming I heard God or an angel. Maybe it was my brain forcing some kind of survival mechanism to kick in. I don’t know. I just know it worked.

I dropped the shard from pure shock and surprise and started crying hard in that running shower.

It was the only time I ever heard the voice, and I’ve never heard it again. But whatever it was, it was right. The struggles I was going through did pass. I found happiness again. Struggles and sadness found me again of course, but they passed too.

So even though I’m going through some of the hardest times of my life right now and I’ve been in a dark place, I think of that night. I think of that voice. And I hang onto the hope that I will find happiness again.

That this too shall pass.

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Who Am I

I know I keep saying things that make people uncomfortable. I know I’m loud about things most people keep quiet.

But the truth is, every single day I want to scream. I feel like if I don’t get it out, I’m going to explode. I am sad. I am angry. I’m trying to be happy, but I’m not there yet. I feel broken. I feel lost. And I don’t know who I am anymore.

I know the things I say and do can be annoying or frustrating. And on the other side of it, when people misunderstand my words or my intent, it’s frustrating for me too. It’s a double-edged sword. So if you need to step back or cut me out because of it, I understand. Go.

And I need to be clear: I’m not ready for a relationship. I thought I was, but I was lying to myself. I will hurt you. That’s a warning and a promise. If you’re thinking about dating me right now, don't. I am not safe right now.

But thank you to everyone who has stayed to listen to my story. I really do appreciate it.

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I Miss My Ex

I miss him. I miss my ex.

And I know that’s the kind of sentence people think you shouldn’t say out loud, because it makes you look “unhealed,” like you’re doing grief wrong. Like missing someone is proof you’re still stuck. But healing isn’t neat. It doesn’t tie itself into a bow just because other people are uncomfortable with the loose ends.

The painful part is how my mind still reaches for him without asking permission. I catch myself comparing—not always on purpose. Sometimes it just happens. How he did certain things better. How his presence was different. How familiar he was. How my body knew him like a habit I haven’t fully broken. I notice what’s missing before I notice what’s new. I hate that I do it. And then I hate myself for hating it, because it’s not even about wanting him back. It’s about how love carves grooves into you, and your brain keeps tracing them long after you’ve decided you’re done.

There’s another truth I don’t like admitting: when I picture him with someone else, something in me still claims him. Like he’s mine. Like he isn’t for the taking. Like the life we built gave me some kind of permanent right. But it didn’t. That’s not how this works. The relationship ended, and the world kept turning. He’s his own person now. I know that. I understand it logically. It just hasn’t fully landed in the part of me that still remembers what it was like to be chosen by him.

So I stay busy. I stack my days with people and noise and movement. I go places. I make plans. I keep momentum, because slowing down is when the quiet gets loud. Quiet is when my mind starts digging. Quiet is when the darker thoughts crawl up from wherever I’ve been shoving them, and suddenly I’m back in it—missing him, resenting him, longing for what we had, grieving what we were supposed to be, all at the same time.

I know this won’t last forever. I know there will be a day when the memories don’t have sharp edges. I know there will be a version of me that can think of him without unraveling. I know better days are coming.

I just also know I’m not there yet.

And maybe that’s what moving forward actually looks like right now: telling the truth without dressing it up. Missing him, and still choosing distance. Missing him, and still refusing to go back. Missing him, and still building a life that doesn’t require him to exist for me to survive.

It’s not clean. It’s not pretty.

But it’s real.

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His Food Was Poison

People ask why I stayed. Why I went back. Why I loved someone who hurt me.

Because he saw me.

My whole life I’ve been too much—too intense, too deep, too all-consuming. People either back away like I’m dangerous, or they try to smother it down into something that won’t pull them under. They want my love in “reasonable” amounts. They want me manageable.

He didn’t run. He didn’t flinch. He met my flood and asked for the whole ocean.

When I poured myself into him, he didn’t recoil—he leaned in. Where everyone else told me to slow down, he pulled me closer and said: more. For the first time, my intensity didn’t feel like something I had to apologize for. It felt wanted.

And he didn’t just want my good days.

When I cried, he hunted me down. Found whatever room I’d hidden myself in and wrapped his arms around me until the shaking stopped. When he missed me—even if I was only in the next room—he’d come find me. Pull me into him. Like being apart for even a few minutes was unbearable. He never got sick of me being around.

We had our own language—jokes no one else would ever understand, little moments that only worked because it was us. Now I have no one to speak it with. And some part of me has gone silent forever.

Do you know how rare that is? To be wanted like that? To have someone match your depth instead of drowning in it?

Do you know what that does to someone who’s spent their whole life feeling invisible?

It makes you feel chosen.

So when people say, “you’ll love again,” they don’t understand what I’m mourning.

I’m not mourning him.

I’m mourning the only time I’ve ever felt completely known. And I’m terrified that seen and safe don’t exist in the same person—that being fully understood is just handing someone the exact map of how to hurt you.

I didn’t stay because I was weak. I didn’t stay because I didn’t know better.

I stayed because I had been starving my entire life, and he was the first person who ever actually fed me.

Even if the food was poison.

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Mexican Food

I’m eating Mexican, drinking a Coke, and I’ve got my show on in bed—and it’s exactly what I needed right now.

I keep getting this really good feeling washing over me. Contentment? Peace? Safety? Whatever it is, it feels so damn good.

Normally I wouldn’t have been able to do this. Something that was meant to be innocent and peaceful would’ve turned into a fight. I’d get guilted for “hiding away” in the room and eating in bed, like I was doing something wrong just by trying to relax.

But now I don’t have to feel anxious for doing what I want. I can just do it and actually be happy. I’m allowed to have quiet moments that stay quiet.

I’m never giving up this feeling again.

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From Anxiety To Nurse

Once upon a time, my anxiety was so severe I couldn’t leave my own house. I’d cry and have full-on anxiety attacks—hyperventilating so hard my body would contort and lock up on itself. One time it got so bad 911 was called, and I ended up hospitalized for two weeks.

I was terrified of other people. I could barely hold onto jobs for more than three months at a time. Sometimes I’d miss work because I couldn’t get myself to walk out my own door for my shift.

I was trapped by my own fears. And then I got sick of being scared.

My anger grew stronger than my fear.

I made a decision that felt insane but honest: I was going to go straight into the deep end. I decided to become a CNA. I was going to force myself to be around what I feared most every single day—until my fear finally stopped running my life.

And it worked.

Slowly, I learned how to talk to people. How to comfort them. How to be there for them in crisis. There were setbacks. There were times of regression. But I kept pushing through, and that choice led me to where I am today.

I graduated as an RN and immediately started on the Resource team—which means I work on every adult specialty unit. I walk into new floors, new patients, new situations, and I figure it out. And now I’m transitioning into the controlled environment of the OR.

I can hold a full-time job now. I’m confident and comfortable around people. And while I still don’t leave my house often, it doesn’t send me spiraling anymore.

I’m thankful every day that I finally said, enough is enough—then dove straight into the deep end of my greatest fears and came up conquering them.

I proved to myself that if I have to burn myself down to rebuild who I am, I will light the match.

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Being A Nurse

Being a nurse is so much harder than I ever imagined. There are nights I question why I worked so hard, why I pushed myself through years of school and exhaustion, only to feel defeated and beat down. But then there are moments like tonight.

Sitting beside a patient who’s breaking under the weight of everything, who feels hopeless and ready to give up, I see a kind of pain that words can’t fix. All I can do is stay. So I hold their hand, and after a few tears, something shifts. They take a shaky breath, look at me, and ask, “Do you got me?” And I say, “I got you.”

Watching someone walk through hell and still find the strength to rise… it reaches somewhere I can’t explain. Their resilience becomes mine. And in that moment, I remember exactly why I became a nurse.

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Fairytale

I don’t know how to continue in this life anymore. I dismantled the life I had built in pursuit of true love, only to discover it was nothing but a foolish fairytale. The cruelest part is that I found someone so close to perfection that, for a time, I truly believed the story could be real. Having stood that close to someone so extraordinary, I know I’ll never meet anyone who comes as near again—and that realization has destroyed me.

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Choosing the Shelter Path

My last post caused some issues I didn’t intend, so I want to clarify a few things. I never said no one offered help. I saw deep compassion from people during that time, and I’m truly grateful for that.

But I still stand by my decision to stay in a shelter instead of with family. While shelter life had its challenges and uncomfortable moments, it provided something invaluable: privacy, independence, professional support, resources, and structure that I couldn’t have found elsewhere. Living with family can sometimes lead to tension, crossed boundaries, or burned bridges, and by choosing the shelter, I was able to avoid that and focus on rebuilding.

The experience taught me that homelessness isn’t the personal failure I once believed it was. I thought staying in a shelter meant I had failed as a parent and as a person, but that’s simply not true. Shelters are community resources designed to help people stabilize and rebuild, and that’s exactly what happened for us. I don’t regret choosing that path, and I’m grateful we had access to it.

My original post wasn’t meant to seek pity or cause conflict. It was meant to process my experience, to educate others about the realities of homelessness, and to challenge the stigma that still surrounds it. I shared it to tell the truth about a journey that, in the end, led to growth and stability.

I don’t know if this post will change anything. Some people will probably still find fault in my words, no matter how carefully I try to say them. But I’m just trying to be honest about my experiences—because I’ve always been this way. Maybe it makes me naïve, but I’ve never been good at hiding how I feel. I’ve always been willing to set aside my pride and say the things most people wouldn’t dare say out loud. That honesty gets me in trouble sometimes, but I don’t know how to be any other way. If being vulnerable helps even one person feel less alone, then maybe the discomfort is worth it.

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A Quiet Place To Rest

Homelessness is something I thought I’d never experience, but sometimes life creates a perfect storm that sweeps you away.

I never thought I’d see some of the ugliness that came out of people being in that situation. I also never thought I’d see such deep compassion.

Three months. Only three months, but it felt like years. Years of being adrift, sleeping in strange places with thin walls where unfamiliar voices echoed through the night.

And here’s the strange part: when you’ve already lost almost everything, some people still try to take more. They go after what little you have left, the things that kept you grounded, the people you held onto just to stay standing.

This experience opened my eyes even more to the quiet, complicated nature of this world. But more than anything, it humbled me.

I’ve learned the value of persistence. Sometimes you wash your scrubs in the sink before work because that’s the only choice you have. You keep showing up. You keep moving forward, no matter how difficult it gets or how many times someone tries to knock you down.

I’ve learned that sometimes love gets difficult, and it’s better to stay and fight for something real than run from the problems just because it isn’t always easy. I’ve learned to look deeper into how people end up where they are and not to judge them for it. Most of all, I’ve learned to be truly grateful for what I do have, because what I have is mine, and there’s a quiet kind of beauty in that.

Sharing this is uncomfortable, and part of me wanted to keep it to myself. But I think it’s important to be honest about what life can really look like sometimes. I believe there’s value in naming those struggles, especially if it helps someone else feel less alone or reminds them that even the hardest seasons can be overcome.

There’s still a long road ahead of me.

I know that.

But for now, I have a quiet place to rest my head, a home to call my own, a moment to breathe. I have a family I fought hard to keep, and a really beautiful view that reminds me just how far I’ve come.

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From the archive · undated
Undated A Specific Kind Of Ache

There’s a specific kind of ache when it doesn’t work out with someone you really, really wish it would have worked out with.

Yesterday, I ran into someone I haven’t seen or talked to in a while. We made eye contact, and I smiled at him. He just kept looking at me, then looking away again, until we passed each other without a spoken word or a reciprocated smile.

It’s so weird when you talk to someone every day, and then one day they’re just…

faded into silence.

Someone who used to be your first thought when you woke up and your last before falling asleep. Someone you held, and they held you back. Someone whose lips you know against yours. Someone whose taste you still remember. Someone whose secrets you still hold tight to your chest.

And now you’re passing each other in hallways like ghosts.

There’s something so strange and quietly painful about that. How a person can be close enough to look at, but somehow too far away to reach. How someone can know parts of you other people never got to touch, and still become someone you don’t even know how to say hello to anymore.

I had written a poem for him after we spent a night together. I still think about that night sometimes.

Because even though you could never quite believe it, you did make that big of an impression on me. And yes, I will always remember you.

I will continue to look for the qualities I saw in you, the ones special enough to want in the next person I’m with. I hope you find what you’re looking for, and I hope you find trust and happiness.

Because you’re genuinely a good person, and you deserve the world.

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Undated Codependency

I can’t tell if this is codependency…
or if this is just what happens when someone finally makes your nervous system stop begging for mercy.

Because the truth is, I do think I could be alone forever. I could build a life with my own hands and sleep in my own bed and pay my own bills and carry every terrible thing by myself because, honestly, I’ve already had to do that for so long that loneliness doesn’t scare me the way it probably should.

But it would always feel uncomfortable and wrong somehow..
Like walking into a room and forgetting why you went there, except the room is your whole life, and the thing you forgot is how to feel alive inside of it.

And then there’s him.

After a 12-hour shift, there are times I am so exhausted I can’t even make myself drive home. I’ll sit in the parking lot with my hands on the wheel, body drained, mind empty, staring through the windshield like maybe the car will eventually decide for me.

Then his name pops up.
That little white heart..

And I send him a picture of me sitting there in my car, sulking in absolute despair because I cannot find one single ounce of willpower left inside me.

And he says,
“Go home, sweetie.”

And suddenly…
I can.

Not for me. I couldn’t do it for me. But I’ll do it for him.

Then he says,
“Now.”

And there it is.

No more bargaining with myself. No more maybe in five minutes. No more sitting there until I become part of the parking lot pavement. The choice has been made for me, and God, it feels so good to not have to decide for once in my damn life.

It feels good to obey someone who never leads me to harm.

It feels good to let my body unclench after not even realizing how tightly I had been holding myself together.

It feels good to have someone step into the spinning of my head and hold me still.

And then he says,
“Good girl.”

Do you know that feeling when someone brushes their fingers lightly over your skin and every nerve in your body wakes up at once?

He makes me feel like that, except it’s all through me. Every time. Just as intense. Just as warm. Just as devastating as the first time.

Of course I want to feel that again. Because it doesn’t feel like dependence. It feels like relief. Like trying to breathe through a tightened chest and suddenly something opens.

And once you remember what it feels like to breathe easy…
you never want to go back to living without it.

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Undated Dear Diary

Dear Diary,

I thought I had lost him.

And somewhere inside that fear, I broke the promise we made. We said we wouldn’t say those words until we could look each other in the eyes. Until there was no phone and no distance between us.

It wasn’t how I wanted him to hear it. We wanted it to happen in a way that felt worthy of what it meant.

Instead, I told him I loved him with tears running down my face, pleading into the phone like my voice was the only thing I had left to reach him with. I told him I loved him because I truly believed there might never be another chance.

Because the thought of him existing in this world without knowing how I felt was something I could not live with.

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Undated Every Day We Spend Together

Every day we spend together,
I remember less and less
what life felt like
before you were in it.

Not because I’ve forgotten,
but because you have become
so naturally woven into my days
that your absence feels unnatural now.

Like looking up
and expecting the moon
to be where the dark has always kept it…

and finding only sky.

Something feels wrong
on the nights I cannot see you there.

You have become the person
I trust like gravity.

Not because I never fear the fall,
but because we have been through enough now
for me to know
you will catch me every time
like it is simply part of the physics
of who we are.

I tell you the big things,
the impossible things,
the things that press against my chest
and ask to be held by someone
who knows how.

But I tell you the little things too.

And all the things in-between.

Because why wouldn’t I tell you
how beautiful the stars are tonight?

So if it’s alright,
I’d like to stay, please.

Not because I have nowhere else to go,
but because it is beautiful here.

And I like it very much.

I like the way loving you
feels effortless.

It feels like coming home
to a light left on
by someone who always knew
I’d make it back.

And I cannot find
a single reason
that would ever make me
want to leave.

Open
Undated Everything I Post

Everything I post on here is basically a poetic diary entry pulled straight from my deepest thoughts, my real experiences, and now this entire universe I built from daydreaming too much. I never thought anyone would care about any of that, but somehow it brought me this little community. And some of you have become people I know I’ll always want to check in on for the rest of my life. I don’t really know how that happened, but I’m forever grateful that it did.

Open
Undated Follow Up Strangulation

My ex strangled me hard enough to leave bruises on my neck. He was arrested, and then walked out on a $500 bail—even though they knew he needed a mental health evaluation and I told them in my police report that he was planning to leave the country.
He has a prior assault for strangling another woman—a felony pled down to a misdemeanor. He has an active warrant in Colorado for fleeing that state. They had all of this information. So why was his bail basically the cost of a Costco run?
I’ll tell you where he is now: Mexico City.
[Image 1: A screenshot from his social media story tagged "Mexico City, Mexico." It shows a pot of food boiling on a stove with the caption: "I cooked up something delicious today."]
[Image 2: A photo of a new, expensive-looking white microscope set up on a desk. The text overlay reads: "Now I just a periodic table to go on the wall over my bed." His caption reads: "It all really coming together. I finally have the microscope I wanted."]
[Image 3: A photo of a wooden sign hanging on a bathroom wall above a towel rack. The sign reads: "It’s never too late to live HAPPILY EVER AFTER." The location is tagged Mexico City, Mexico.]
That’s his fresh start. Meanwhile, I’m standing in the wreckage—healing, rebuilding, trying to move forward—while the system that was supposed to protect me decided that a man who strangles women was worth $500 and a wave goodbye.
This is what “justice” looks like. Why are we letting violent people walk out of jail so easily?

COMMENT SECTION
Jennifer Sell Malusky · 10h I am sorry you are going through this, Mileena. It's disgusting how the consequences are so minimal for someone with a prior violence record. I wish you peace and healing. 👍 1
Mileena Rose · 1h · Author Thank you so much 💕 it will be a long journey to healing, but I'll get there.

Ethan Rae Bariso · 2h The justice system is completely fucked up! 👍 1
Mileena Rose · 1h · Author It really is! I want to try to change it. Someone has to try. 😢 1

Dayne Herber · 5h All too often in the world today, if you want justice, you have to make justice for your self. Play the long game, connect, make up, play the part, when the time is right, serve up your plate of justice with a side of karma. Good luck and God bless. 👍 1
Mileena Rose · 5h · Author 100%, there's a lot going on behind the scenes currently. I'm not going down without a fight. Thank you for your encouraging words ❤️
Dayne Herber · 5h If nothing else, when you really need some mental peace, close your eyes, meditate and let your imagination create the peace you deserve. I've had certain people that have hurt me get their karma in my chill zone many times. 😁 🤗

Jeremy West · 4h Oh has priors and you chose him?
Mileena Rose · 3h · Author Yeah, I did. Unfortunately, people like him are very convincing. They build a false reality and pull you into it until their lies start to sound reasonable. I was tricked. Have you ever been deceived before? It happens. It makes you feel stupid and embarrassed, but it's also a lesson you don't forget. 👍 1

T Raie Dsr · 5h I have the same story its disgusting what they get away with 👍 1
Mileena Rose · 5h · Author I'm so sorry that you can relate. I can't even believe this is real life. Something needs to change.
T Raie Dsr · 5h exactly. I still cant believe it. The cops said I left the bruises myself. I waited 9 days for the cops to arrest him. 9 days of pure hell. He got on a bus back to Mexico amd they quashed his warrants cause he left like wtf 😡 1
Mileena Rose · 5h · Author That is a disgusting failure of the system put in place to protect. Wow. What a sham of a legal system. There are too many stories just like ours and it makes me sick.
T Raie Dsr · 5h me too. All we can do is tell our story and be an advocate for the ones who haven't left their abusers and need to.

Kari Swalinkavich · 4h Because the entire system was built and run by men. Society does not value women. 👍 1
Mileena Rose · 3h · Author a very unfortunate and disgusting truth. 👍 1

Chazy Olson · 1h pretty much par for this kind of behavior

Open
Undated For The Orphans

For the orphans with living parents—

Who grew up in houses that were never homes. Who learned to tiptoe before you learned to dance. Who became fluent in the language of closed doors and turned backs, of love with conditions you could never quite meet.

You who searched every adult's face for the tenderness that should have been your birthright. Who watched other children run to their parents while you calculated the safest distance from yours. Who carry a homesickness for a place that never existed, the sanctuary you never got to have.

This is for those still searching for the ones who will see you shivering in your adult body and recognize the child who never got warm enough. For the fierce protector who will stand between you and the world's teeth, not because they must, but because they cannot imagine doing otherwise. For the one who will call you theirs with such certainty that you finally believe you belong to someone good.

I am searching too. For the one who will teach me to hold a sword steady when my hands shake with old fears. Who will sit with me through the poison of old wounds, refusing to let go even when the healing hurts worse than the hurting. Who will see me flinch at nothing visible and understand I'm dodging ghosts they'll help me fight.

For the gruff voice that will call me stubborn and impossible and mean it as endearment. For the weathered hand on my shoulder that says “you're mine now” without words. For the parent who chooses me not from obligation or blood, but from recognition: “this one needs me, and I have been waiting to be needed like this.”

We are all searching for the family that will find us in the forest of our exile and say: “come, child, you've been alone long enough.”

I refuse to believe they aren't out there—these collectors of lost children, these menders of broken wings, these fierce guardians of the abandoned. They must exist. They have to. Because surely the universe wouldn't make so many of us orphans without somewhere making the parents we were meant to have.

Until we find them, or they find us, we have this: the knowledge that we are not the only ones looking. That somewhere, maybe, someone is also searching for a lost child to love properly, completely, without condition or caveat.

And maybe, maybe, the searching itself is a kind of belonging. All of us orphans, walking through the world with our arms outstretched, looking for home.

—For every inner child still waiting to be found

Open
Undated Full Of Words

As someone who is normally full of words, I can’t seem to find them lately.

My journey started 6 months ago when a post of mine went viral because my ex strangled me and walked out of jail after paying $500 for bail. I went on my local news station to bring awareness to bail reform, and after that, I started documenting my healing journey.

At first, I had so much to write about. There was so much I was still trying to process through my writing. So much pain. So much fear. So much anger. So much confusion. There were pieces of myself I was picking up in real time, and writing became the place I laid them all out so I could see what still needed to be put back together.

But lately, I’ve been… dare I say… happy?

Content?

And I don’t think I know what to do with that yet.

I’m housed, and I’m slowly reclaiming this space as my own. I’m erasing the evidence that my ex was ever here. Little by little, I’m making my home feel like mine again instead of a place where I survived someone else.

I’m slowly feeling more secure in my new job position. I’m not where I want to be yet, but I’m not as afraid as I was. I can feel myself growing into it.

And somehow, in the middle of all of this, I found a truly wonderful man who is kind to me. A man who makes me feel safe in ways I didn’t even know were possible. A man I fully claim as mine, and I don’t want anyone else.

But a part of me still feels a little lost. Like I’m not sure who I am now.

Who am I if I’m not the sad, broken girl on the internet?

Who am I if I’m not constantly trying to survive the next horrible thing?

What if I finally did this life thing right?

What if I made the right decisions?

What if everything is actually going to be okay?

Part of me feels relieved, and another part of me is still anxious because nothing ever goes this well. I’m still waiting for the catch. The bad news waiting behind the good. The reason I shouldn’t relax into any of this.

But what if there isn’t one..?

What if this isn’t the calm before another storm?

What if this is just peace?

What if everything I did to get here was actually worth it?

Open
Undated Have You Ever Had A Soul Connection

Have you ever had a soul connection with a pet before?

I was 16 years old when I had recently been hospitalized in a psychiatric facility for severe anxiety attacks and depression. At the time, I was living with my grandpa, and every morning he would give me my medication. The rest of the time, he kept it hidden so I wouldn’t swallow it all at once and try to end my misery.

My grandma begged him to let me get a pet of my own so I wouldn’t feel so lonely. So I would have something to love. Something to stay for.

My grandpa finally agreed…
under one condition.

It had to be a Siamese cat.

So I scoured the internet forums until one day, I found him.

He was white and red with the most beautiful blue eyes I had ever seen, and before I ever held him, before I ever brought him home, something in my heart already knew.

He was mine.

I named him Mosif, but everyone knew him as Mo.

And that cat saved my life.
More than once.

One thing I will never forget is how he made sure I went to bed. He would wait for me to lie down, then plop his massive frame against my back like he knew exactly what I needed. Because he did. Somehow, he just knew.

That pressure against me gave me more relief than any pill ever could. For a long time, it was the only way I could sleep. And if I woke up and Mo wasn’t there, all I had to do was call his name.

He would come back, press himself against me again, and stay there until I was sound asleep.

I loved that cat more than I loved most people.

He was so special to me. We understood each other in a way I don’t know how to explain without sounding a little crazy, but maybe people who have loved an animal like that will understand.

It really was just a girl and her cat against the world.

It has been six years since his soul passed on, and I truly thought I would never love another animal the way I loved Mo.

Until Milo.

Open
Undated Healthy Relationship

I don’t think I’ve ever been in a healthy relationship before…

Until now.

And honestly, I don’t think people talk enough about how uncomfortable that can feel in the beginning. You would think getting the love you’ve always craved would feel good.

And it does.

But it’s also deeply unsettling.

It reminds me of when your arm or leg falls asleep because the circulation got cut off. In the moment, the numbness doesn’t even bother you that much because you got used to having no feeling there. You adjusted to the absence. You accepted it as normal.

But then you move. And the pressure releases. The blood starts flowing again. And that’s when it hurts. Every nerve ending starts screaming back to life, and suddenly the part of you that was numb for so long is awake again. Painfully. All at once.

But slowly, the pain starts to fade. The discomfort loosens its grip. Your nerves stop overreacting to every new sensation, and little by little, your body starts learning how to come back into balance instead of living at one end of the extreme.

Not numb.
Not overwhelmed.
Just steady.

I’m still at the part where the blood is flowing back.

I’m still trying to understand why someone can be so kind to me without eventually knocking me down a few pegs. Why I can tell this person my darkest secrets and they don’t make me feel ashamed for having them. Why the give and the take finally feel equal. Why I’m not begging to be considered. Why I’m not shrinking myself to keep the peace.

It feels wrong to be treated so right.

And that realization makes me weep for how I got here.

Open
Undated I Flinch At Friendship

I flinch at friendship the same way I flinch at love.

And it's a different equation depending on who's across the table. With women, you don't always know where you stand until the knife is already in your back. Especially as a nurse, I'm surrounded mostly by women, and I've watched it happen in real time more than once. A group of them tearing into someone who wasn't in the room, and the second one stood up to go check on a patient, they turned on her before she'd even made it down the hall. I remember sitting there thinking… how am I supposed to trust people who can do that with no remorse?

Men are easier for me. I'm autistic, so I'm direct, I say the thing, and I tend to understand their operating system. But there's a different math waiting there. I never know if a man values me as a person, as a friend, or if he's just banking time, waiting to cash in later for something I never put on the table. I hate being the one who has to turn down a man I thought was a friend. Because the "no" reveals I never had one. The friendship was never the point.

So I find it hard to invest in people. I don't want to hand you the knife you'll turn on me later. I don't want to wait around for the day you get bored and find someone new to be close to. I don't want to watch you slowly disappear until my texts are ignored indefinitely.

Isolation starts to look like the smarter trade, because then I don't have to worry. I don't have to guess. I don't have to be hurt when the truth inevitably finds its way back to me and I finally know what you said and did behind my back.

Humans are social creatures and need companionship to properly thrive, but gosh, we make it so hard to connect with each other. I can't help but wonder where we went wrong.

Open
Undated I Used To Be Mean

I used to be a really mean, negative person.

I was so unhappy and miserable that it made me angry to see other people happy. I hated watching people have the things I wished I had. Whatever it was, if I felt like I was starving for it, seeing someone else have it made something bitter rise up in me.

And I did not handle that bitterness well.

I’d talk down on people behind their backs. I’d see a social media post and grimace with jealousy, then swipe away without liking it because some broken part of me didn’t want to give their happiness even that tiny bit of support. Sometimes, worst of all, I’d check in on people hoping something bad had happened. Hoping life had knocked them down a little. That they had been dragged closer to my level so I wouldn’t feel so alone down there.

Misery loves company, as they say.

But underneath all that anger and jealousy was pain.

And it was extremely uncomfortable to finally hold a mirror up to myself and realize how ugly-hearted I had become. I was hurting so deeply that I had started mistaking other people’s joy for an attack on my own lack.

Once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it.

And I didn’t want to be like that anymore.

That old version of me still tries to resurface sometimes, especially when life gets difficult. It is a conscious choice every single day to choose kindness, forgiveness, and patience when bitterness would be easier.

And sometimes I fail.

Especially when I recognize that same deep pain in another person and they’re aiming it straight at me. Sometimes it feels good to be mean back. It feels good for a second to prove I can hurt them too.

But I don’t think pouring gasoline onto the fire is what this world needs.

I think a lot of us are walking around with pain we don’t know where to put, so we hand it to each other in the only ways we know how. Maybe if we could gently recognize each other’s pain without excusing the damage it causes, we could all finally set some of it down.

At least for a little while.

Open
Undated I Used To Wonder

I used to wonder what kind of love could make a person stay devoted to someone even after death.

What kind of love could make someone stand still while the world kept telling them there were still people left to meet, when all they could do was kneel at the altar of a name no one else could touch, and know that nothing after would ever feel that sacred again.

I think I understand it now.

Because sometimes they are the only language your heart ever knew fluently. They are so perfect for you, specifically, that the thought of finding them again almost feels insulting. Sure, maybe you could find pieces of them scattered across other people—

but not all of it…

Not the whole person.
They would have set the standard so high it became unreachable.

We talk so much about how good it feels to be seen, but I don't think we talk enough about how it feels to see someone else just as clearly.

And maybe people don’t talk about that part because it’s actually rare.

Because most of the time, love is work. You learn someone slowly. You study them. You try. You misunderstand. You ask questions. You squint hard to figure out their tells, trying to make sense of what they cannot say yet.

But then sometimes, someone comes along and understanding them feels like second nature. You don't even have to think about what you need to do, you just know.

And when being with someone feels that effortless, choosing them over everyone else in the world feels like watching the sun rise.

It feels obvious.
Because of course it will.

It always does.

Open
Undated I Will Grieve You

I am not the jealous woman, dripping with regret, that he will have you believe I am.

Whatever testimony he has given about me—the unfaithful one, the unstable one, the lying woman who set a good man's life on fire for no reason he could ever name—you can keep her. Because you do not return to the cage you barely escaped.

No, I will not envy you.

I will grieve you.

For he will not come to you as the devil. The devil never does. He will come disguised as the light. He will feel like salvation, like being seen at last, like a prayer finally answered in a single human face.

And for a while, you will believe that is what he is.

But eventually, you will see it. A darkness behind his eyes, looking out at you through a saint's face. And you will look away in disbelief, because it cannot possibly live in the same body as the man who holds you like something sacred. That will be the first lie you tell yourself on his behalf.

—It will not be the last—

He is his own first and most devoted believer. He cannot see the blood drying beneath his own fingernails. The lie ate so deep into him that it became his only true religion, and a man who believes his own gospel can make a convert out of anyone.

And he will make one of you.

You will learn his moods like doctrine and his silences like scripture. You will take his approval as the only heaven you were ever promised, and your own knowing as apostasy.

He will preach you a future from the pulpit of his mouth, and you will walk toward it for years, only to realize too late that the prophet never meant to arrive.

You will burn at the stake to keep his wrath at bay and call it love while he stands there holding the match. You will call yourself unlovable long before you ever call him cruel.

When he sins against you—and he will—he will not fall to his knees. He will widen his eyes, devout in his innocence. He will swear he was framed. And he will mourn that betrayal so beautifully that by the end of the night you will not be hunting him at all. You will be hunting her. The jealous ex, the demon who must have done this.

He will even help you look.

The two of you, searching the dark together for a sinner who was never there. You will defend his innocence against the truth of your own eyes. That is the only real miracle he has ever worked: to sin in front of you, and convince you a demon did it.

So, no…

I will not envy you.

But I will grieve the woman who, before the end, will no longer recognize her own face in the mirror. I will grieve the woman who will make herself small to fit inside his festering wounds and call every one her own fault. I will grieve the woman who will become fluent in his excuses before she ever becomes brave enough to name what he did to her.

Because that will be you. Just as it was every woman who came before.

And somewhere far enough away that you will never catch sight of me, I will be on my knees before your tombstone, reciting the eulogy for the woman you still believe will survive him.

Open
Undated I Will Not Inherit Your Silence

Facebook post by Mileena Rose created on December 6th, 2025:

I’m so sick of being told to “move on.” I share things that should ignite righteous anger, and instead I’m met with pity. It’s disappointing. People want to believe bad things happen to bad people and good things happen to good people—that if we sit on our hands and wait, karma will sort it out. This is a lie people must tell themselves in order to sleep at night.

Here’s the truth: no one is coming to save you. Safety is an illusion. Wake up. You don’t want to face that the same system that failed me could one day fail you, so you shove it down and tell the ones screaming to shut up and be quiet.

Stop telling me to stop disturbing the still water just because the waves rock your boat. Your comfort is not more important than my truth. I will not inherit your silence. I will not surrender. I will fight until real changes are made that make YOUR world safer—for you and your children—and not because of anything you did to “deserve” it.

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Undated I Will Wait For You

I will wait for you.

I’ll wake at 2 AM, and my hand will reach across the sheet finding only the cool of fabric that no one has warmed. My fingers will stop in the middle of the mattress like they’ve arrived at a border they’re not allowed to cross.

I will wait for you.

I’ll get out of the shower and catch my own reflection, steam still clinging to every part of me, wishing for hands where the water just was. I’ll wrap myself in a towel instead.

I will wait for you.

Someone at work will ask if I’m seeing anyone, and I’ll say yes. They’ll ask where he is, and I’ll explain that I’m in love with someone I can’t yet reach. They’ll look at me the way people look at someone they think is foolish. And I’ll let them.

I will wait for you.

Night will come again as it always does. I’ll lie awake, staring at the ceiling while questions pace through my mind, asking me what I think I’m doing. And I will not argue back, because the answer was never an argument.

The answer is morning. The answer is getting up and choosing the same thing I chose yesterday.

That I will wait for you,

always.

Open
Undated I Wrote This Song

I wrote this song based on a real experience I had.

This story came back to me today, and I wanted to share it because I’ve always felt that one of the most sacred parts of being human is meeting people in their most vulnerable moments and making them feel safe enough to be seen there. I collect human experiences. I pay attention to them. And I really do believe that this kind of connection, the kind that makes another person feel less alone for even a moment, is part of how we save the world.

A long time ago, I was at a local bar and ended up sitting next to a man who was there alone, having a drink. We started talking, and I learned he was in town from Texas on a business trip, so he was far from home. We were very different people in a lot of ways, but that was what made the conversation so interesting. We didn’t need to be the same to connect. We were just two strangers sharing our perspectives, listening to each other, and letting the conversation go where it wanted to go.

At some point, he told me that I looked just like a childhood friend of his. He said it was the way I smiled, the way I laughed, even the way I talked. He showed me a picture of her, and honestly, he was right. We really did look strikingly similar. Then he started showing me more pictures, telling me little things about her, and I remember thinking to myself, “Oh. He loves her.” I just smiled and kept asking him questions about her, and he answered every one of them so easily, like he had been carrying her around in his heart for a very long time.

By then, he had been buying me drinks along with his own, and little by little we were both getting more intoxicated. As the night went on, more of the story started to come out. It turned out I was right. He did love her. He always had. But he never told her. Eventually life pulled them in different directions. They married other people. Time kept moving. But even after all of that, he still carried that love for her. She was the one that got away. Then he told me she had died in a car accident only a few weeks earlier.

My heart dropped.

This big, burly man from Texas, wearing a black cowboy hat, completely fell apart in front of me. He started crying, telling me how much he missed her and how badly he wished he had told her the truth, how much he had loved her all along. So I just held him while he cried. And because I looked like the woman he had loved, because something in me reminded him of her, he said goodbye to her through me.

He left not long after that, but I still think about him sometimes. I wish I could remember his name. This happened a long time ago now, and I truly hope he’s doing well. That experience stayed with me so deeply that I wrote a song about it. I’ve never released it.

But maybe I should.

Open
Undated I'm Sorry I Text You So Much

I’m sorry I text you so much.

Every time my phone goes off, before my eyes even dart to the screen, I’m already hoping it’s your name with the little white heart I put next to it.

Even through a phone screen, I can feel your energy. I don’t know how you can be both so fiery and yet so grounded, but I love it. The heat in you when you put yourself between me and anyone who means me harm. The steadiness in you when my mind starts spinning and I can’t find solid ground inside myself. You make me feel completely safe to open myself to you…

So I text a lot.

Because when we go back and forth, I get to feel your presence again. The warmth. The steadiness. That perfectly strange contradiction in you that somehow fits so specifically with me.

And when you go quiet for the night, I assume sleep has finally claimed you.

So then I lay there in my own bed, awake, missing someone I still haven’t had the privilege of falling asleep beside. I imagine what it will feel like to have your chin resting on my head while I bury my face in your neck. I think about memorizing the way you smell mixed with your cologne. I think about the shape of your silhouette in the darkness, and how I’ll never want to forget it once I finally know it.

I think about how unfair it is to miss your body before I’ve even had it near mine.

Eventually, the wanting quiets, the anxiety loosens, and sleep finally claims me too…

🤍TR

Open
Undated Is It A Ghost

So apparently my four-year-old decided tonight was the perfect time to psychologically ruin me for the rest of my life.

I’m standing in the kitchen, minding my own business, when Zelda walks up to me all urgent and waving me over like, “Mama, come look. Let me show you.”

And I’m like… show me what?

Then this child curls her little hands into claws, looks me dead in the face, and goes, “RAWR!” Then she makes this low-pitched creature noise that slowly turns into a high-pitched siren sound straight out of a haunted VHS tape.

So naturally, I’m standing there like… what the actual hell.

Then she leads me down the hall into the office, peeks through the blinds, and goes, “Nope, not there.”

NOT WHERE, ZELDA? Why are you saying this like sometimes there is something there??? 😭

Then she opens the closet door, turns around, curls her little hands into claws again, does the demon rawr one more time with a ghostly little “WoOoOo,” and asks me, “Is it a ghost?”

I’m sorry, wh-WHAT? 🥹

Why are we doing ghost investigations at bedtime? And why do you sound like you already know something I don’t?

Then later, she goes back in there by herself because there’s a bucket of snacks in the office, and from down the hall, I hear her yell, “Mama… who is that?”

Oh Lord have mercy on my soul. WHO IS WHO? 🥲

Then I hear Zelda answer me from the darkness with, “Is it 6-7?”

Like what does that even MEANNN?? Why are you responding to my ghost-related panic with a cursed number riddle?!

I am spiritually packing a bag.

If Zelda crawls down the hallway tonight whispering “six seven,” I’m leaving the house to her. She can have the snacks. She can have the office. She can explain the lease to the ghost.

I’m out.

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Undated It Happened Again

It happened again, didn't it.

You wanted to stay. When it got hard, when it got real, you dug in, ready to fight for the thing you'd built. And they left like it was the easiest thing in the world. Like you were a tab they closed.

Here's what nobody will tell you: it wasn't about you. You're living in a world that trained them to do exactly that.

We swipe now. There's always a next profile, a next DM, a next “better” sitting one thumb-stroke away. And when better is always one motion away, the person in front of you stops being a person and becomes a placeholder—something you keep until the upgrade arrives. We've started using people the way we use things.

And we don't even use things well anymore. Something breaks, we don't fix it. We throw it out and order the new one by Friday. No one repairs, we just replace. And that instinct didn't stay in our shopping carts. It bled into our beds, our friendships, our families.

So we've gotten lazy with loyalty. We've lost the meaning on what love was even meant to be.

Because love was never supposed to be the absence of other options. Love is choosing someone in the presence of every other option. It's the “better” profile showing up in your feed and you not even opening it, because what you have isn't a placeholder, it's the thing. It's choosing them again on a disaster of a day when nothing is romantic and they're not at their best and leaving would genuinely be easier. You choose anyway. Then you do it again tomorrow.

It's sitting in the hard conversation that has no clean ending and neither of you running for the door, because the door isn't an option. You're not going anywhere until you find the way through together. That's the part the swipe-world will never sell you, because there's no product in it.

And it's the thing almost no one gets to have: being known completely. Being seen down to the most terrible parts of yourself and chosen anyway, on purpose, every day.

That's the love you've carried into every relationship. You're the one who stays. The one who fixes. The one who fights for the people you love long after it stopped being easy, long after a smarter person would've cut their losses. You just kept handing something rare to people who'd been taught everything was disposable.

So no—staying was never the weakness. And one day you're going to find the person who stays and fights to keep you, for once in your damn life. That's when you'll know every time it didn't work out with someone else was all worth it.

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Undated It Was Just A Normal Thursday

It was just a normal Thursday, and neither of us were looking for anything.

We were both giving up on love.

Who knew 8 words in a TikTok DM and 1,400 miles could bring us this close?

One more month. 🤍

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Undated It's Easier To Talk

It’s easier to talk about the people who hurt us than it is to talk about the times we were the one doing the hurting.

It’s easier to sit inside our own pain and name every place someone failed us. Who abandoned us. Who misunderstood us. Who made us feel small. Who mishandled our heart when we finally trusted them with it.

That’s easy…

The hard part is turning the mirror around.

Seeing where we were careless. Where we were selfish. Where we let fear make decisions for us. Where we wanted grace for our own wounds but forgot other people were bleeding too.

That kind of honesty feels awful.

I hate knowing I caused another person pain. I hate knowing I could have been more considerate, clearer, kinder, braver, more accountable, and I wasn’t. I hate realizing I had a chance to be part of someone’s healing, but instead I became part of their hurt.

It feels terrible to be told you screwed up. It feels even worse when you know they’re right… but that’s where the lesson is.

The lesson is learning how to take inventory of the parts you’d rather excuse. To sit with the damage you caused without making it all about your shame. To understand that guilt is only useful if it teaches you how to choose differently next time.

Because sometimes healing is learning what someone did to you.

And sometimes healing is realizing you have also been the painful chapter in someone else’s story.

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Undated It's Happening

It’s happening!!!

—

Salvation is a cage, and the lock is on the inside.

Five years ago, the world went silent. Now Rivenglade is a miracle in the wasteland—a haven of food, order, and unshakeable faith. At its center stands Lucien Altheris, the Golden Prophet whose light holds back the dark. To the refugees, he is a savior. To the town, he is a king.

To Mira Roehart, he is a jailer.

She has watched her neighbors trade their freedom for safety. She has watched her father surrender his will, and her best friend’s eyes turn bright and empty with devotion. In a town that demands absolute purity, Mira’s doubts are more than sins—they are a danger to everyone she loves.

They told her the dark was dangerous. They lied.

When Lucien decides to claim her—not just as a convert, but as a wife—Mira learns what his “salvation” really costs. Forced into a marriage built on coercion and stripped of her agency, she is pushed to the breaking point. And when the Prophet tries to bind her soul to his light, the ritual goes terribly wrong.

His divinity does not purify her. It recoils.

Mira isn’t just a skeptic. She is immune to Lucien’s power—because something ancient lives in her blood, something the “gods” are afraid of. Now the Prophet is hunting the only thing he cannot control. To survive, Mira must run toward the very darkness she was taught to fear—and decide what she’s willing to become to reclaim her own soul.

He demanded her devotion. He got her darkness.

Author’s Note: This novel contains dark themes, including religious extremism, gaslighting, and detailed depictions of intimate partner violence and sexual assault. It is intended for mature audiences.

—

About the Author

Mileena Rayne was raised in a high-control religious environment as a Jehovah's Witness. She left at eighteen—walking away from the only community she had ever known to build a life on her own terms.

Today, she works as an operating room nurse in a Level I trauma center and writes fantasy novels that explore the territories she knows intimately: survival, autonomy, religious control, and the long road to reclaiming a self that others tried to erase. Her work draws from lived experience, transforming personal history into myth and offering a mirror to readers who have survived their own cages.

She lives in Minnesota with her two daughters, where she continues to build the life she was once told she could never have.

The Chosen is her second novel.

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Undated Look For The Magic

There’s magic in the world.

Not the kind of magic people think about on television, but the real magic that lives in the energy between all living things.

During a time in my life when I studied esoteric beliefs, there was a daily practice I learned, and I want to teach it to you now.

Every day, no matter where you are, no matter how you’re feeling, no matter what battles you might be fighting, find one thing where you are and find the beauty in it. Just one thing. Maybe it’s the way the light falls across the room. Maybe it’s the sound of wind moving through the trees. Maybe it’s the color of the sky, or the way someone smiled at you, or the simple fact that something soft and beautiful still exists in the middle of a hard day.

Be still in the beauty. Stay with it for a moment. Let yourself fully see it. Let yourself feel what it is doing to you. And then feel grateful for the beauty you found in this world, and grateful that it exists at all.

Do this every day, and it will change your life. Not because it will erase your pain or make the world easier, but because it will slowly teach you how to remain open to something sacred inside of it. It will remind you that even in the middle of struggle, there is still beauty here. There is still energy. There is still magic in the world.

Posted Photo/Text Version: April 7th, 2026 at 13:54
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Undated Loving Someone With Depression

Loving someone with depression when you also have depression isn’t as romantic as most people think.

When two depressives meet, the cliché is that they understand each other better. And that’s partially true, but it’s also partially a trap. The understanding is real. You know the difference between “I don’t want to talk to you” and “I don’t have anything to give right now, and I don’t want you to mistake my emptiness for something personal.”

But what’s harder is that depression eats reciprocity.

Not love.

Reciprocity.

The ability to return at the same temperature is one of the first things depression takes, and it’s also one of the things love is most often measured by. So when you’re low, you need a steady incoming signal to stay tethered, but you can’t always produce one yourself. And when they’re low, the same is true for them.

So the math of two people both running on a deficit is that whoever is slightly less depleted in that moment ends up carrying the thread.

And that person notices. And they can try to explain it away:

“They’re grieving.”
“They have a hangover.”
“They have a lot of work to do.”
“Their cat just died.”
“They’re overwhelmed.”
“They’re empty.”
“They’re doing their best.”

But the registry still happens somewhere in the back of the mind. And it accumulates.

The trap inside the trap is that the carrying starts to dress itself up as devotion. You tell yourself, “I’m okay being the one who reaches, because I love them and they’re having a hard time.”

But then you’re pouring from an empty cup and calling it patience. And eventually, the question starts forming:

Who fills you back up when you’re the one always trying to keep the connection alive?

That’s where the guilt creeps in, because you know they don’t mean to neglect you. You know they’re not choosing to be empty. But knowing that doesn’t make your own needs disappear.

And how long can you keep being the understanding one before you start needing someone to understand you back?

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Undated Milo

I told him I like the name Milo.

Because it reminds me of Milo and Otis—that movie about the cat and the pug. I can’t even really remember the whole plot anymore. I just remember Milo all alone in that box on the water, at night, in the rain, and how scary it felt as a little girl watching him drift there by himself.

But he made it through the night.

And then, when Milo and Otis finally found each other again, the world didn't suddenly stop being scary. They were still lost. They were still trying to find their way home. They still almost got eaten by a bear.

But at least they were together.

They could both still be scared, but they didn't have to be scared alone. And I think that's what kept them going. Not because everything was fixed right away, but because they had each other while they were trying to survive it.

And in the end, that's what helped them find home again.

So let me be in the box with you.

Let us be scared together and keep moving forward anyway, even with the rain pelting us in the face. Let me fight the bears with you, because you don’t have to fight them alone anymore.

And I’m stubborn. I won’t leave your side unless you look me in the eyes and tell me to go.

Because for a girl who has never really felt like she had a permanent home, it feels like I finally found one in a person.

And I don’t want to move again.

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Undated My Dark Thoughts

My dark thoughts may not be kind, but they are loyal. When everyone else leaves, my demons stay.

And a hand to hold, is a hand nonetheless.

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Undated Once Upon A Time A Boy And A Girl

Once upon a time, a boy and a girl had a baby.

They were just too young, and it wasn’t the right time to know how to hold a life that small without dropping pieces of themselves in the process. They tried, in the ways young people try, but love was not enough to make them ready. So they let her go and told themselves she would have a better life without them.

And in some ways, she did.

She was loved. She was taken to see parts of the world she might never have seen. She was given opportunities she wouldn’t have had otherwise if they had kept her.

But a better life does not erase the wound of being left.

It did not stop her from crying into her pillow at night, trying to understand why she was the one who had to be given away. It did not stop her from wondering what was so wrong with her that loving her meant letting her go.

And when they kept the ones who came after, even the ones not bound to them by blood, something inside her broke open.

Because how do you tell her it wasn’t because she was unworthy when all she can see is everyone else being chosen?

She tried to outrun the ache.

She drank it down.
She smoked it quiet.
She talked about it until her throat went tired.
She tried to understand it, name it, forgive it, and fold it neatly into a story that made sense.

And while she could numb it temporarily, while she could grow to understand that people do their best with what they know at the time, nothing was enough to stop the pain. It kept festering, no matter how desperately she wanted it to heal.

So it stayed.

And in some ways, she is still that little girl.

Still curled beneath the covers.
Still asking the dark what made her not good enough to be kept.
Still trying to become someone no one could leave behind.

Still hoping somebody will look at all the broken pieces within her, take her face in their hands, and say,

“You deserve to be kept.”

And finally mean it.

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Undated One Whole Year

It’s been one whole year since I was homeless.

Two months in a hotel room, and one month in a shelter.

I still sleep with the blankets the shelter gave me. The pink tie blanket in the front of the picture and the orange quilt in the back. I’m not really sure why I haven’t gone back to sleeping with a regular comforter. There’s just something about those blankets that comforts me.

I think part of it is because I used to curl up on the cot in that windowless underground room and pull the blankets over my head until I made myself a little den. Those blankets became my shield between me and my reality.

Because I couldn’t believe I was actually in a shelter. I couldn’t believe my life had gotten to the point where I needed that kind of help. It was too much to think about for too long… so I’d hide under the blankets.

But to be honest, sometimes I miss it.

I miss having help all around me. I miss being able to rest because there was less for me to carry by myself. I was allowed to break down completely because there was so much structure around me holding me up. I had a safety net underneath me.

I am very grateful to be housed again. I’m grateful to have my privacy back. But I am also very tired of doing everything on my own.

So in a little bit, I’m going to shut the lights off, fluff my pillows into the little circle nest I build every night to feel held by something… and then I’m going to hide under my blankets.

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Undated Own And Be Owned

I don't want to see you with anybody else.

My toxic trait is that I want to own and be owned. Not in an unhealthy way—

okay, fine. Maybe a little.

Maybe I'll always be a little unhealed, because I can't help the fire that rises in me when another woman drifts into your orbit. I can't help the voice that says, “he's mine, back off, go find your own.” I can't help guarding what's mine like something feral, because I know exactly what it feels like to lose what I love.

But that's only half of it.

I want to be claimed just as badly. I want to feel owned. Not controlled, but held. The kind of owned that finally feels like belonging somewhere. Like a stray that's finally allowed to stop running. There's a particular safety in being held firmly by someone whose warmth never burns the house down.

Part of me still isn't sure I'm allowed to claim you the way I want to. But I can't help it. You found me beaten and bruised and you let me in anyway. And when I bit you, you didn't throw me back out into the cold. You crouched down and held out your hand. That was the moment I understood I'd found home in a person.

And god help anyone who tries to make me a stray again.

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Undated Please Let Him Be The Last

Please let him be the last man to treat me like that.

I don’t like being called names.
I don’t like being hit.
I don’t like being lied to.

I don’t like feeling the circulation in my neck stop.

I just want to feel safe.
I want to feel protected.
I want to feel like I matter.

Please. Let him be the last.
…you promise?

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Undated She Was A Girl He Was A Boy

She was a girl who never felt seen. He was a boy who never felt chosen.

She had learned to make herself useful and call that enough. If she couldn’t be the one somebody wanted, she could at least be the one they needed. She got so good at staying through what hurt that, after a while, she started to believe the hurt was just the cost of being kept at all.

He had learned to show up with everything he had and watch it still not be enough. To plan futures inside relationships that were already hollow. To love loudly in places where no one was really listening. He kept choosing, and no one ever chose him back.

So she stopped expecting to be understood.

And he stopped expecting to be kept.

Then one night, she wrote something honest. Something people would probably say she should have kept to herself. And from 1,800 miles away, he read it and recognized the ache in her words because it was already living in his chest.

He saw her.

And she looked back.

She showed him everything she'd been carrying, and instead of walking away, he asked to help carry it. He showed her the wounds, and instead of calling it a burden, she stayed.

She was a girl who chose him with her whole heart.

He was a boy who saw her with his whole understanding.

And together, they started to believe the ending they had only ever written for someone else might finally be theirs.

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Undated Thank You For Checking In

Thank you to everyone who has checked in on me. I’m sorry I’ve been so quiet lately.

I’ve been spending a lot of time working on the soundtrack for The Silence, and honestly, sometimes it feels good to disappear into my world and live there for a little while.

It means more than you know to be missed. I don’t always realize that my presence can make someone’s day a little better, so hearing that has been really touching. Thank you for reminding me that I matter.

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Undated The Dating Landscape

I honestly don’t understand the dating landscape anymore.

It used to feel simpler. You met someone, you got to know them, and if there was a real connection, you eventually became their boyfriend or girlfriend. There was at least some kind of shared understanding of what you were building toward.

But now, everything feels intentionally undefined.

No one wants the label. No one wants the responsibility. People want exclusivity without commitment. They want emotional access, loyalty, intimacy, consistency, and all the actual parts of a relationship, but without having to actually call it that.

And that’s the part that confuses me.

Because you can’t ask someone to act like they’re yours while refusing to claim them. You can’t expect the comfort of a relationship while keeping the door cracked open in case something better, easier, or less demanding comes along.

It feels like everyone has one foot out the door now. So the second things get uncomfortable, or vulnerable, or inconvenient, they disappear.

Poof.

They throw away the whole person and go find a new one. And somehow, because there was never an official title, everyone acts like it shouldn’t hurt as badly because it was never “technically” anything.

But it does hurt.

It hurts like something real because, emotionally, it was real. The attachment was real. The time was real. The hope was real. The intimacy was real. The confusion afterward was real.

People want to keep everything casual in name, but serious in practice, and then act surprised when someone gets hurt or there’s a misunderstanding. I don’t understand how anyone is supposed to build something stable in that kind of environment.

How do you build a solid foundation with someone who keeps digging an exit every step of the way?

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Undated The Reality Of What I've Survived

The reality of what I’ve survived in my life is so ridiculous that sometimes it sounds fake, and asking for help has never come easily to me.

I survived a cult. I survived child marriage with an abuser. I finally got accurately diagnosed and treated for ADHD and autism. I survived homelessness with two young children. I escaped another abusive man who strangled me and threatened to end my life with his bare hands.

And God, I wish I was lying.

Asking for help is hard because, a lot of the time, even when help is offered kindly, there ends up being some unseen cost later. So even writing this feels difficult.

I work full time as an RN, but after my last relationship, the financial abuse devastated me, and I’m still living with the aftermath of it. I’ve started making money through my books and my Facebook posts, and I’m so grateful to everyone who has supported me by buying my books, reacting to my posts, commenting, or simply reading what I write. Truly, it has brought me to tears.

If you want to support me, interacting with my posts helps more than people realize. Reactions, comments, and shares all help my writing reach more people. For anyone not on my Facebook, you can follow my personal account under Mileena Rose (Rayne). My real account is verified with the checkmark, so please be careful of fakes.

I also added my Cash App to my Linktree in case anyone ever wanted to help directly, but please know I do not expect that from anyone.

When I was homeless, I lost most of my belongings, and then even more was destroyed by a mouse infestation. Right now, I’m using the money I make from Facebook to replace furniture, make my home cozier, cleaner, and more organized for me and my kids, and get a few more things for the shelter kitties I brought home. Eventually, once the material things are covered, I want to use it to keep repairing the financial crisis I’m still living in.

Any help means more than I can explain, whether that’s buying a book, engaging with my posts, sending something directly, or just being here.

I don’t check my DMs much anymore because it has become too overwhelming, and I’ve had some bad experiences there, but I do see so many of your comments, and I’m thankful for the kindness you’ve shown me.

I promise that whatever money I make here is being used responsibly, and I hope it feels like a worthy cause in your eyes.

Thank you so much.

TLDR: I’ve survived a lot, including abuse, homelessness with my kids, and losing most of my belongings. I work full time as an RN, but I’m still rebuilding from financial abuse and everything that was lost or destroyed. Supporting my books, reacting/commenting/sharing my posts, or using the Cash App in my Linktree if you want all genuinely helps me rebuild a safer, cozier home for me, my kids, and my shelter kitties. I don’t expect anything, but I’m deeply grateful for every bit of support.

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Undated This Ends With Me

I wish I could say my ex was the only one who ever put their hands around my neck. But that wouldn’t be true.

I was 14 years old,
…and I think his name was Carlos.

He’d been held back a few years, so he was quite a bit older (and bigger) than little freshman me. He’d see me in passing, and without fail, he’d come to me. He enjoyed describing, in vivid prolonged detail, all the things he wanted to do to me.

I did not want him to do those things to me.

And I told him that. Over, and over, and over again. But he did not take my no’s as an answer. Only as a sign to escalate.

Then…
one day I ran into him on the outskirts of the school cafeteria. I don’t remember what he said when he walked up to me. I just remember him putting his hand on the front of my neck and applying upward pressure.

I remember how it made me not be able to breathe.

And this was not an empty cafeteria. There was a whole group of my own classmates gathered around us, watching.
…but only watching.

I remember looking into each one of their eyes and wondering, “why is no one telling him to stop? Why are they just watching?”—as my head got lighter, and lighter.

Do you understand how scary that is?

And do you understand how healing it is when someone finally steps between you and what intends to harm you and says, “no. You don’t get to hurt her.”

“This ends with me.”

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Undated Today Bent Me Over

Today bent me over and spanked me hard.

I’m just kidding 😆… but NOT entirely!!

I genuinely had a physically hectic and emotionally turbulent day, and I’m just now finally getting the chance to relax and read comments for a while.

I keep being blown away by what you all write to me.

It still doesn’t feel real. Part of me is still waiting for someone to jump out and say, “Haha! It’s all a joke. Nobody actually cares. No one ever did.”

Because I’m not used to this.

I’m not used to so many people saying such nice things to me. I’m not used to people believing in me. I’m not used to being noticed and understood. I was the weird, creepy emo girl growing up with like three friends, so to have this many people showing up with kindness, encouragement, and genuine care feels very strange for me.

But I hope you all know you’re doing a really kind thing for a random sad girl on the internet.

And she really appreciates everything you bring to her life.

And it makes her smile every day. 🙂

(And thank you to everyone that complimented me on my hair today)

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Undated You Knew Her Didn't You

"You knew her, didn't you. Before... y'know. Before she ended it."

The barkeep asked it in a hushed voice, working a rag through a pint glass in slow circles. Last call had come and gone, and there was only one man left, bent over a drink gone warm while the rain crawled its way down the window behind him.

"Yeah," the drunk said without looking up. "I knew her. Before she turned into a cold bitch." He spun the glass on its edge, leaving small watery rings on the wood.

"She used to listen for hours. You could put every piece of your pain right into her hands, and she'd hold it. Every time. And the way she answered you back… you could tell she'd actually heard you. Like she could reach down into you and find the words you didn't even know you were trying to say."

The barkeep held the glass up to the light, his face giving away nothing.

"Then she started going quiet. Pulling back, little by little. Saying she couldn't carry it anymore." The drunk let out a hard, humorless laugh. "And I'm thinking, what do you mean? How do you make somebody feel that seen and then just—poof. Gone. You can't do that to a person. You can't give them something like that and then take it back."

The barkeep set the glass down and didn't reach for the next one.

"Did you think you were the only one?" he asked, though it didn't sound much like a question.

The drunk's head came up, color climbing into his face. "The hell's that supposed to m—"

"Ah, ah." The barkeep gave him a look, and it was enough to stop him cold. "Answer it in your own head if you have to. But don't sit there pretending you were the only one who came walking up out of the dark with the weight of the world in your hands."

The drunk's mouth closed.

The rain kept tapping at the window.

"You ever see a river after a long rain?" the barkeep asked. "The kind of weather that settles in and refuses to quit. Days of it. Every drop weighing next to nothing on its own, but all of it running to the same low place, feeding the same river, until the river starts to rise."

He threw the rag onto the counter.

"Then comes the morning the water climbs higher than the bank, and there's nothing slow about it anymore. No warning. It just gives, all at once, and everything it was holding back rushes through."

He picked the rag back up, but he didn't use it.

"Did you ever think maybe that's why she did what she did, in the end? That she finally got crushed by the weight she was expected to hold?"

He looked at the drunk then, but the drunk had nothing to say to that.

"You all keep asking why she stopped carrying it," the barkeep said. "Not one of you ever stopped to ask if she could."

Then the barkeep reached for the next glass, and outside, the rain kept falling like it had no end in mind.

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