THE HEALING POWER OF WRITING WHAT YOU WISH HAD HAPPENED

Where My Trauma Gets a Rewrite and the Villains Actually Lose

Everyone knows writing is cathartic—blah blah, cue the cliché. But here’s the thing: you don’t get it until you actually feel it for yourself. Until that one day you sit down with a pen (or a keyboard, because let’s be real, it’s 2025, who writes anymore), and suddenly, the weight you’ve been dragging around feels… lighter.

For me, memories from my childhood still bubble up like gas, and every time they do, writing has been the one thing that kept me from sinking under them. I always flirted with writing-as-therapy, but I didn’t fully commit until life shoved me up against a wall and said, “Pick up the pen or go under.”

(No seriously, cervical spine surgeries took “arting” away, so I needed a new outlet…)

Now? I can’t go a day without writing something. Doesn’t matter if it’s a rant, a scene in my novel, or a line I’ll delete tomorrow. It’s the act. The slowing down. The way it corrals my stampede of thoughts into something tangible. Writing is like breathing exercises with more swear words. You take the chaos, you line it up into sentences, and suddenly the storm in your chest starts to break. It’s like standing at the edge of a cliff and tossing your baggage over the side.

(And if you’re me, maybe throwing a middle finger up after it, too.)

That’s why I love escaping into Quinn’s story and the world of Dreylon.

It’s mine. I get to call the shots.

I slip in pieces of my trauma, but I rewrite the ending. I give her victories I never had. And somehow, that heals me more than any therapy session I’ve ever sat through. It’s like my trauma becomes seasoning: just enough to make the story richer and sharper, like cream and sugar in bitter black coffee, a spoonful of “oh hell no” stirred into every fight scene.

I write Quinn defending herself when a man tries to take what isn’t his. I write her facing down a crap mother who’s mastered the art of fake smiles and lies. I pour my fears into her fears, my turmoil into her turmoil, and then I write her clawing her way out, because that’s the ending I needed. Watching her fight back—sorry, writing her fight back—is like re-stitching wounds I thought were permanent.

And then there’s Quinn’s father, Able Axelson.

Absolute menace to society.

Manipulative, cunning, a master of circles so tight you forget where the conversation even started. He is my father through and through. I didn’t even need to exaggerate him. Writing him is like staring at a monster under the bed and finally daring to shine a light on it.

The truth?

My father should’ve been behind bars years ago. Instead, he still roams free, spreading misery, pushing people—including my stepmother, who’s been more of a mother to me than my own—into such despair death seems to be the only way out.

That’s what real-life villains do.

They don’t wear costumes or twirl mustaches.

They manipulate, lie, and drain the life out of people.

So sure, Able Axelson is fiction. But he’s also therapy. He’s my rage in ink, my grief sharpened into plotlines. I haven’t written his fate yet, but let’s just say… I plan to. And while I can’t control what happens to the man in real life, I can promise you one thing:

in Dreylon, justice isn’t polite.

It isn’t pretty.

And it’s coming for him.