Hey, Hi, Hello!

Wow, hey!

I guess that I am officially doing the author things now that I've taken the step of creating my own website. I thought that my poems deserved to be catalogued in a place that isn't just Instagram. Now that I am a published author with two reading events/conferences in the books, it felt like I should probably have a more professional way of marketing myself.

Well, really, I should just have a better way to present myself. This is going to be a very long introductory post.

I feel that, well, if you're going to know me, then you might as well really get to know me.

I once had a blog that has since been lost to time. It's actually where my book got its title from. My old blog served as a bit of an online diary, poem catalogue, and photo gallery. I didn't share it with anyone. It was a deeply personal thing to me and I wanted it to stay that way.

I really have tried to get that original website back, but it truly is lost to me. For the longest time, I put off making a new website because, one, I was so attached to my old one, and two, I remembered how much work it was to get it formatted in the way that I wanted.

However, I am happy to report that this has actually been super fun to make!

I suppose that it is poetic that I no longer care about that anymore, the privacy aspect of it. The same goes for my poems. I was so uncomfortable with sharing them under my name for the longest time. Then, well, I decided that I didn't care what others thought. Poetry has been a dear companion to me throughout my life. It is an art style that I consistently take comfort in and enjoy. I shouldn't be ashamed of that. I'm brave enough, now, to know that. Plus, fuck, it feels so good to not care anymore. Maybe that's a symptom of age, I'm not sure.

All I know is that life is far too short not to go after the things that we want, and holy shit, do I want this. I never thought that I would be here, and not just in an author capacity.

I have two really great jobs that I enjoy. I adore the operating room (if you didn't know, I'm a nurse). I float to eight, but probably more to come, different hospitals in two jobs with two completely different charting systems-and dozens of new surgeons to work with. This has afforded me financial freedom, which is something that I haven't ever known. I grew up in extreme poverty and worked unbelievably hard to obtain my license and degree. Then, it didn't stop. I had to work hard to be good at the OR, which is a nonexistent course of study in nursing school. I learned to scrub into surgery and circulate procedures at the same time. It truly was a grueling three years to get to this point.

For the longest time, travel nursing was the dream for me. I did my three years in my first OR job and learned as much as I could. I took my CNOR and passed it on my first try. I was ready to travel.

Then, something awful happened to me.

I experienced psychosis.

I'm still not sure what triggered it, but I had an honest-to-god loss of touch with reality.

I won't get into the specifics of it (I think that that warrants its own post) but it completely rocked my life. I lost friends because of it. I lost family members because of it. I lost thousands of dollars because of it. I wrote poems prolifically during this time.

But I was convinced that I was going to be a travel nurse, so I took my first travel assignment across the country.

It was hell.

Being away from what little support system I had was torture. I tried to make the best of it by visiting several national parks, but it was no use.

I discovered the value of consistency and routine. As much as I wished that I was the type for travel nursing, I just wasn't. Maybe I can be in the future, but for now I am not, especially after psychosis.

Psychosis is an exercise in hyperactivity. During an episode, your brain is secreting epinephrine and dopamine at an alarmingly unsustainable rate. It created a pretty mean withdrawal effect to experience, coupled with being on antipsychotics for the first time to prevent another episode (which, additionally, suppresses these levels even more).

Plus, like, getting out of psychosis isn't sudden. It's slow. So slow. It's having to pick apart which parts of it were real and which were not. It's very gradual. I couldn't even admit to myself that it was psychosis until several months after the episode.

So I came back home and found, by the grace of whatever god there is, a job that makes me just as much as the traveling rate. I can now be at home, make the same money, and I have a schedule that works for me. I only work three days a week, although I usually pick up more than that.

All of this to say... I never thought that I would be here. Because of my episode, I was terrified of writing poetry. It was something that I did obsessively in my episode. I grew to fear the urge to write because I was terrified of going into an episode again. I began to regard it as a litmus test.

Well, it's not. Slowly, I learned to write again without that fear. So fucking slowly. Painfully slow.

I slowly had to work up to writing again. I slowly had to ease myself into posting my work, even more so to start writing under my own name. Even more than that to start submitting my work to magazines and, amazingly, publishing my first book.

It feels like a string of the most wonderful success after a string of the most heart-wrenching devastation and loss. I never thought that I would ever be happy again after my episode, truly.

Somehow, I am.

Somehow, I have everything that I've ever wanted. I have a house. I have a thriving career that I really enjoy. My car is paid off. I have no student loan debt. I have my fur babies. I am in good health. I have my adoring husband.

I am delighted to share my journey in my book. It truly is all of this and so much more. It is the embodiment of me. The poems are whimsical, bruising, and vulnerable.

So, anyways, this is where I'm at. You should probably know who you're contending with in regards to my work. In regards to me.

I'll (probably) still treat this as a sort of online diary. Maybe that's unorthodox, but I don't really care.

Stay tuned for more <3