Why I wrote both books the way I did

I never planned to write one book, let alone two. But looking back now, I think I understand why they came out the way they did.

When I wrote Not All Wombs Blossom the Same, I wasn't ready. Not to hide, but to say everything plainly, in full sentences, with nothing left to interpretation. Poetry gave me somewhere to put the pain without having to explain it completely. I could write a line about a negative test, or a waiting room, or a body that felt like a stranger, and let the white space around it hold what I couldn't yet say out loud. Poetry let me be honest in fragments. It let me be vulnerable at a distance I could still control.

Girls Like Me is different. By the time I sat down to write it, something in me had shifted. I didn't want distance anymore. I wanted to tell it as it was, beginning, middle, and the messy parts in between. So instead of poems, it became a novel. Fuller sentences. Real scenes. Nowhere to hide behind a stanza break. It's the version of vulnerable I wasn't ready for the first time around.

Before I go any further, I want to stop and say something to you, whoever is reading this. Maybe you've read every page of both books. Maybe you just bought one and haven't opened it yet. Maybe you're still deciding whether to. Whichever it is, thank you. You didn't have to give my words your time, and you did. If you're one of the women who's found even a sentence of comfort in something I wrote, that sentence exists because you let it reach you.

I write about a condition so common that most of us know someone living with it, and yet so many of us have carried it in silence, quietly, apologetically, as if it were something to explain away rather than something that deserves to be spoken about plainly. I spent a long time being one of those women. Writing is how I stopped. And if any part of my story helps you feel less alone in yours, even just enough to breathe a little easier today, then it did exactly what I hoped it would do.

I think a lot of us tell our truth in the form we can survive telling it in first, and only later find the courage for the fuller version. If Not All Wombs Blossom the Same was me testing the water, Girls Like Me is me finally getting in.

Wherever you are in your own story, still circling it in fragments, or ready to say it all, you are not behind. You are just telling it the way you can survive telling it, for now.

Thank you for reading this far. Thank you for buying and for healing alongside me.