I have a book deal. I'm finally ready to talk about it.
what it means to reach a dream while your world is falling apart...
Welcome back writers.
If you’re writing through personal pain, or you have a belief that going through shit = cannot be successful, then you’ll want to read on because in this piece, I’ll share:
what happens when your dream comes true while you’re still mid-healing
why emotional repression is one of the biggest barriers to real connection
how writing helped me confront my pain
what I’ve learned about continuing to write, even when everything hurts
The day I got my book deal was supposed to be the best day of my life. And it wasn’t.
My relationship was falling apart. A few months prior I had moved 300 miles away from my home of 7 years. I wasn’t sleeping. I was taking blood stopping and pain relief medication for my heavy periods. And then these words landed in my inbox:
“I am extremely pleased to let you know that I'm getting in touch to offer you a contract to publish your first book with us”
But I didn’t jump for joy. I dissociated. I couldn’t feel the excitement I knew was within me, even if I tried. It felt strange, because getting a book deal was the thing I’d dreamed about my whole life. But when it finally came, I wasn’t able to live in any state other than survival. And so any sort of celebration for my book deal felt overshadowed by the dark cloud within which I lived.
My book writing journey begun before I got sober, and it started because of one simple thought:
“if I’m going to kill myself [with drugs and alcohol], I at least want an attempt at fulfilling my childhood dream of writing a book”
And that was it, that was all my book was ever supposed to be; a way to say goodbye to the world, one final time. Because back then—when I was snorting cocaine and drinking beer on the reg—I really thought that I would end up dead. I didn’t care, part of me wanted it all to end. The book wasn’t about success or healing. It was a way to say goodbye.
But writing the book unexpectedly transformed me. It was a memoir, and there was something about writing my personal story that propelled me deep into awareness and understanding—heck, even compassion—for myself, and thus, a way out emerged between the 2am notes app tapping and stints of re-visiting past trauma.
Even though writing my book brought me face-to-face with every part of darkness I’d been through, it wasn’t the pain that concerned me—I was used to pain. What tore me up more than facing my trauma was having to keep hiding it any longer.
Hiding was something I felt forced into; by well-meaning family members and friends who gasped, shook their heads—cried, even—at my experiences. Because it never felt like they were trying to understand or support me, I always felt judged—like my expression was too big for a culture built on emotional repression.
What’s always confused me about humans is this: we all go through shit, but we’re shit at talking about it. In fact, we try desperately to appear that no shit has ever occurred in our lives. And I fucking hate it. I hate small talk, and saying “I’m fine” just to manage other people’s reactions to my troubled mind. I hate social media facades, and the way we've built platforms that reward pretending to be immaculate. Which is why I found myself continually turning to the page.
Because every time I shared something real—brutally honest and deeply personal—it felt like my life had become a trauma showreel for my friends entertainment, and I was just a puppet performing pain. I didn’t get the connection I deeply desired, I got either side-eyed or silence. I don’t think I had bad friends, I think our culture’s relationship with witnessing pain is broken. We jump straight to fixing or judging—as if we know what’s best, or as a way to control discomfort—but rarely ask, what do you really need?
I used to think my openness made people uncomfortable because it mirrored the chaos within themselves. But now I think it’s something deeper: fear. Not of their own hidden pain—but of pain itself. My story is a reminder that bad things exist, that nothing can stop them, and one day, it might happen to you too.
The relationship I was in—one that had felt so free, so safe—hit a wall. Out of respect for my partner, I won’t share details (I’ve never had to hold back in sharing when it came to my own story before, but I have to consider that this isn’t just my story to tell). But what I will say is that it broke something open in me. I felt like I was back in the chaos I’d spent four years healing from. Not because of him, necessarily. But because of what it triggered in me.
Old fears started yelling through a megaphone in my head: “bad things happen! pain is real! you need to run and hide!” But this time, I didn’t run. Sure, I cried, I raged, I spiralled. But when I was done with those things, I returned to myself; to my writing, to therapy, to dating myself and taking a break. Eventually, I returned to the man who, albeit flawed and doing his own work, never judged me. I had to learn to sit with my pain instead of trying to escape it. Which was made easier when confronted with a partner who sat through it with me. And when I did that, alongside the grief, I found a deeper sense of joy, gratitude, compassion—love.
The child inside me was skipping in utter joy whilst the adult was barely able to walk.
I finally understood the meaning of bittersweet
I signed the contract, feeling simultaneously expanded and dwindled by the multitude of my experience. I’ve never felt so intensely pulled between two opposing emotions before. I was grieving for a version of myself—and of my relationship—that is no longer there, of all the things I had to let go of and re-structure in my mind. And then there was the awe, excitement and pure joy for the child inside me who felt seen in books and who dreamt of writing her own (but didn’t really think it would actually happen). But most of all when I clicked send on the email with my contract I felt relief. That I was here. That at least, despite everything, I had made it.
If you’re writing through pain here what I want you to know:
you can write through the mess instead of waiting until everything is neatly resolved
what is painful one moment can simply be “a memory” the next; if only you welcome the process of transformation—through writing, therapy, meditation (whatever your thing is)
the social cost of honesty is that it tells you who your people aren’t—so you can find the ones who are
you can be successful and sad, but the real success is in how you approach the journey, not the end goal
writing is a path through, not around, the complexity: think of writing as the question, not the answer—if the answers are revealed, great, and if they’re not, great (because you now have some beautiful writing)
If you’re in the middle of it right now: keep writing. You don’t need to be healed to begin, just honest enough to keep going.
To end, here’s one for your journal: what does “success” look like to my inner child? VS what does it look like to the version of me now?