I’m going to be upfront with you, gang: this isn’t going to be an easy post to read or write. It talks about some heavy topics including mental health, burnout, chronic pain, stress, and the impact those things have on our lives.

So consider this a content warning if you’re not yet ready to hear about others’ experiences of them, or using writing to escape from trauma.

At the beginning of 2020, I was in so much pain, and so fatigued, I could barely move. As far as the NHS was concerned, the most I could hope for was to will myself out of bed and take liver-damaging painkillers for the rest of my life.

Call me stubborn, but that wasn’t good enough for me. I wanted to live.

Or so I thought.

That month, I started on a path I’ve been on for four years now, and that I continue to be on. It annoyed me for a long time that I hadn’t reached the end, but after reading Dr Nicole LePera’s How to Do the Work (affiliate link), I’ve realised the only end point is death. I’ll be checking myself for detrimental habits for the rest of my life.

I’m still processing that fact. It isn’t fun or comfortable. It just is.

This post, unless indicated otherwise, is about my personal experiences. I know other writers have experienced this, but their stories aren’t mine to tell. It’s up to them when, or if, they talk about this stuff. Or even if they realise they’re doing it. Many people don’t. Even if you’re not a writer, you may find you escape your trauma in other ways, like gaming, exercise, or watching TV. We all have different wants to escape from our problems, and that’s fine. To a point.

What is trauma?

Before we go any further, I want to clarify on what trauma is. Most people downplay their experiences, insisting other people have been through worse than they have. It’s not about comparisons, though.

Trauma is a situation you feel you can’t get out of. It could last seconds, it could last years. It doesn’t matter.

 What matters is that you felt trapped and like your agency or control was taken away from you.

Based on that, many of us do have experiences of trauma. Maybe it was a brief moment in a deeply challenging situation, or it was something much more long lasting and recurring.

If your response to that sentence is to make a comment about people being snowflakes, please leave. This is a safe space to discuss mental health and I’m not here for those kinds of attitudes. We all process information in different ways.

And most of the people who make ‘snowflake’ comments are of the generation responsible for the trauma faced by millennials and gen Z.

I’m not going to share what my personal situation was – some things that are best left in the past and not discussed in the public realm. All you need to know is that I was using my fiction – both the writing and the publishing of it – to escape.

Using storytelling and writing as a way to escape from trauma

When I first drafted this post almost two years ago, I’d recently finished talking therapy. In one of our last sessions, my counsellor said something that’s stuck with me: stories can be a way to escape. They’re a way for us to hide from more challenging situations or emotions in the past, present, and future.

His words really stuck with me. I thought back to when I came up with my two series ideas.

My first series, What Happens in…, came about when I was in a big transitional period in my life. I was doing my A-levels and working towards going to university.

I don’t deal well with change and hiding in a fictional world was very helpful for me.

When I published What Happens in New York in 2016, I’d finished my masters in creative writing and was feeling kind of lost and empty. Publishing it helps fulfil The Emptiness and gave me something to work towards that felt both fulfilling and productive.

The Hollywood Gossip series came as a spin-off to this so it didn’t necessarily have its own trigger point.

Being completely honest with you, I don’t think this series worked so much as an escape. It covers some really challenging topics and it was therefore more a way to confront these uncomfortable feelings then hide from them.

The second major idea I still haven’t finished. But it does have a strong world and strong characters.

It came about after my endoscopy and around the same time when my nan passed away a month later.

Hiding in a world where the main character had power that was left untapped but that helped her become a stronger person was a theme that would go on to play a major role in my life. I’d love to get back to writing the Empath series one day, but right now, I’m not ready to.

(You can get an update on Empath, and what went wrong with it, on my post about oversharing ideas.)

When I came up with Afterlife Calls in 2020, we were in the throes of the Covid pandemic.  By this point I’d been reading ghost stories for a year or two and really immersing myself in fantastical worlds full of witches and ghosts and necromancers.

It was helping me to escape everything that was going on and that was when I dreamt up this great idea with Niamh, Edie, Josh, and Maggie. Little did I realise that that worlds would become my escape and helped me through a lot of the last four years.

At the time of course, I had no idea that I was hiding in fictional worlds to escape.

Publishing as a way to run from problems

A really long time ago, before I published my first book, I was listening to an episode of The Creative Penn with Mark Leslie Lefebvre

He mentioned using publishing a book as a way to escape from an unfulfilling a day job. I took that to heart and at the time it really helped, because I felt like I didn’t get much of a say in my day job and my opinions weren’t hugely respected. Certainly not to the people who were in charge, anyway.

For the first time in my life, I felt like I had true agency and control over my own destiny. Every decision and every consequence was on me and no one else.

At the time I loved this and it was a huge part of why I chose to be an indie author. I would still choose to be an indie author every day of the week but there are definitely times when having to do as much as I do can be detrimental rather than working in my favour.

When my nan passed away in February 2019, I really amped up my publishing schedule. My goal had always been to publish four books in a year. At one point I hit five or six books in a year.

At the time I was really proud of myself and I felt perfectly capable of doing all of that. And I was capable.

But the problem was that I was using my books to mask my pain and as a way to not fully process how I was feeling.

Publishing What Happens in Paphos really helped me process my grief after losing Nan, and it’s why grief is such a big part of that book.

I became really angry after her loss and I don’t feel like a female anger was explored quite as much at the time, at least not from a nuanced perspective.

As someone whose grief primarily manifested as anger I really wanted to change that narrative. Obviously I couldn’t completely change the world, but if nothing else I could deal with some of my own issues.

I carried on like this through the pandemic and towards the end of 2021. I found it fun and satisfying. But then Hollywood Gossip didn’t do as well as What Happens in… – despite it being a spin-off – and it was emotionally draining to write. This left me feeling fatigued and wondering if I wanted to keep going.

On top of that, a regular podcasting schedule was making me feel like I was really pushing myself to my limit and not prioritising the things that left me feeling fulfilled or that paid the bills.

Because of my chronic health issues I don’t have as many productive hours in a week as another person might, which means I have to be really careful how I spend my time and what I use my energy on.

The feeling of emptiness

After finishing What Happens in New York, What Happens in London, The Witch’s Sacrifice, and The Mean Girl’s Murder, I felt empty. I’m pretty sure I experienced this with other books as well, but it was definitely stronger after finishing those.

I think it was because, when writing those books in particular, I really pushed myself as a writer. I was hyper focused on getting to those endpoints. Once I’d achieved them I was left wondering, ‘what next?’

Thing is, I did know what I wanted to do next. None of them were the ends of a series.

But when I finished The Witch’s Sacrifice and The Mean Girl’s Murder, I found myself not quite ready to dive into the next book as quickly as I might have done previously. While I did keep working on their sequels, I just couldn’t bring myself to edit them as quickly as I had.

The Mean Girl’s Murder, in particular, also needed much more extensive edits, which might’ve played a role, but the truth was that I was feeling burned out and again left wondering if I wanted to keep going.

Realising your dreams aren’t what they’re cracked up to be

Telling stories had always been my great love. But the harsh reality was if I kept going at the speed that I was going at, I was going to come to resent the very thing that have been such a huge part of my entire life.

I’d lost sight of the part of the writing process that I actually enjoyed, which is the writing itself. It’s exploring what makes us human; using things like ghosts and celebrities as metaphors for exploring our own issues.

I see everything I write as a form of fantasy, even if, from a book marketing perspective, they’re not labelled that way. It’s all escapism and metaphors and masking.

So, as uncomfortable as it was, I slammed the brakes on, put the podcast and hold, and decided to focus on my content marketing business instead. It still feels kind of like a pair of jeans that aren’t quite the right size or shape for me but that’s because it’s so deeply outside of my comfort zone. 

I’m not used to the focus being on me – I’m used to it being on my characters. To get over the feeling of self-consciousness has required a lot of internal work that has had surprising results on my physical and mental well-being as well.

A while back when I first embarked on this journey, I saw a LinkedIn post that basically said that to be a business owner, you have to overcome a lot of your own issues. That really resonated with me. But it also annoyed me because I felt like I’d done so much work and still had a really long way to go.

I’m still accepting the fact that this is a journey with no destination and that it’s something I’m going to be dealing with probably for the rest of my life. It’s really hard to accept when you’re constantly wanting to check things off your to-do list.

But overcoming your own issues to run your own business is imperative.

Audience first

You have to learn to let go of your ego – and sometimes your personal feelings – aside to put your clients first.

Like for example, some clients have a style guide that isn’t necessarily the way that I’d write, but it’s the way that they need.

Is it really logical for me to not work with someone based on if they do or don’t use the Oxford, when I believe in their mission and what they’re putting out into the world? As much as I love the Oxford comma, I think some things are more important.

The truth is that one of the things that went wrong for me was the fact that I was relying on my creative endeavours to pay my bills.

I always wanted to make money from my fiction, but I’m by no means a big-list author who can handle when sales are down for several months because of an algorithm change or different weather. Random things affect book sales that are totally outside of authors’ controls.

Perhaps if I hadn’t gone into such a challenging second book series and the covers have matched the tone of the books more, I might not have been in this situation.

But those books helped me confront some things in my life that I hadn’t thought I was ready to face.  They taught me a lot about myself and they pushed me to the limit when it came to what I was capable of writing from an emotional standpoint.

In hindsight, if I were to do them again, I’d probably do them differently, but that’s not what this post is about.

Like a phoenix

I’ve been called resilient a lot. I don’t particularly see myself that way though. The truth is, in those moments where it looks like All Is Lost I have two options: I can give up or I can keep going.

Except I can’t really give up. I only have one definition of giving up, and that’s not an option because death terrifies me, which is probably also why I write about it. (And, coincidentally, why the creator of Ghost Whisperer created the show.)

So I’m left with one solution: keep going and solve my problems.

Sometimes that means a convoluted solution that doesn’t make sense to other people, But it’s not their life so it doesn’t really matter if it makes sense to them or not, what matters is that it gets me the results that I want.

Onwards!

Since writing this post, I’ve slowed down my publishing schedule to remind me of why I started on this path in the first place. For me, it’s about spending time with my characters and my readers. It’s about connection. It’s about understanding what makes us human and using writing as a way to process what’s happening in my life.

To do that, I also have to be mindful of my negative habits and how they can hold me back.

For example, I often use my writing as a way to not live in the moment and to hide from the problems going on in my life.

Now, I’m learning to be comfortable with the uncomfortable and find ways to ground myself and have an outlet for those emotions that’s both productive and helpful. 

So for instance, exercise doesn’t create something that matters to other people but it has made me physically stronger than I was. It’s helped me deal with some of my emotional issues and grounds me in the present and is deeply helpful on days when I’m feeling stressed out or scatterbrained. It also grounds me, particularly when I’m doing yoga, and I found that that’s improved my quality of sleep and my ability to fall asleep at night.

Everything I’ve been through I’ve had to go through to get to this point. People tried to warn me, but unfortunately, sometimes you do have to experience something yourself to truly understand it.

In my case, I learned the exceptionally hard and physically painful way the lengths our bodies will go to to protect us from ourselves and the world around us.

My body is trying to throw every trick in the book at me to stop me from living my life. I’ve had the aching muscles, the soreness, the debilitating fatigue, the brain fog that makes it hard to understand basic instructions or enjoy a story, but none of that is going to stop me.

Yes, I’m going to have to change how I do things so that my future is happy, healthy, and sustainable. But that’s not a bad thing. I would much rather cut out something that gives me a short-term dopamine fix if I find that it’s detrimental to me long term.

There are lots of other changes I’ve made in my life to help with my physical pain and mental health issues and burnout. Had I not made those changes, I may never have gotten to this point.

But that doesn’t really matter.

What matters is an open mind.

What matters is curiosity.

What matters is kindness, to yourself and those around you.

 What I need now maybe well be very different to what I need a year from now. It’s certainly very different to what I needed a year ago.

Acknowledging and being aware of these changes can be challenging or it can be empowering. It’s up to us to decide which.