A behind-the-scenes note on how certain essays came to be, and what writing them took from (and gave to) me.
There are books I wrote because I needed to.
And there are books I wrote because I didn’t know how not to.
A Home for All My Leaving and Halfway to Whole belong to the second category.
Both came from places I couldn’t stay in—but had to write through. They’re different in tone, but they circle the same question: What do we carry when we walk away from something, and what part of us stays behind?
🏠 A Home for All My Leaving
I started writing this book in the thick of too many goodbyes. Some intentional. Some not. I wasn’t trying to be profound—I was just trying to process what it means to be a person who outgrows things you still love.
This line came early and never left:
“Some exits are so quiet you don’t realize you’ve left until someone tries to hand you the key again.”
Writing this book asked me to look at patterns I usually glance away from: the way I ghost myself before I ghost others, how I mourn places before I leave them, how I turn absence into narrative. It took months before I realized it wasn’t a book about endings. It was a book about the spaces we live in between.
🌙 Halfway to Whole
This one is messier.
More tender. Less polished. It was written during a time when I didn’t have answers, only observations. It’s about living in the middle of the sentence, where the verbs haven’t settled yet. Where the healing isn’t linear and the clarity hasn’t arrived—but life is still happening anyway.
One of the hardest lines to write was this:
“I thought healing would feel like becoming myself again. It didn’t. It felt like becoming someone else I could live with.”
Writing this book didn’t fix anything. It didn’t bring a grand epiphany. But it helped me accept the unfinished parts of myself. And that, in its own quiet way, was a kind of wholeness.
📚 These books are personal.
Not because they tell my secrets, but because they helped me keep them.
They let me say things I’d only ever whispered in my head.
They helped me name things I thought were too small to matter, too soft to count.
If you find yourself in the middle of something, not quite beginning and not quite done, these books might feel like company. Not a guide. Not a cure. Just company.
