The Fiction That Wrecked Me

I put my real life into my fiction. That is not a confession. That is just how I work.

The abuse I escaped. The feeling of being a neurodivergent woman in America. The hunger. The poverty. The constant, low-level survival that leaves no room for rest.

Here is the trick: when I wrap it in dystopia — like in my work Parallax — people can stomach it. They call it imaginative. Brave. Speculative. They do not realize I am not speculating but remembering.

And that is the part I am afraid to write about. Not the memories themselves. I have already turned those into stories. What I am afraid to write about is what it costs me to put them there.

There are scenes I have written that left me wrecked.

Not because they were hard to imagine. When it came back, it did not feel like fiction. It felt like a flashback I chose to have.

I sat at my desk. I typed. And when I was done, I could not get up. My hands were cold. My chest was tight. I had been gone — not into a story, but back into a room I had fought to leave.

That is the part no one sees.

The reader closes the book and thinks, what a powerful scene.

I close the laptop and try to remember what year it is.

I am saying it because I think other writers need to hear it.

If you have ever written something true and felt hollow afterward. If you have ever put a piece of yourself into a character and then could not recognize your own reflection. If you have ever wondered why the "good" scenes drain you instead of filling you.

You are not broken. You are not weak.

You are just not pretending.

Fiction is supposed to be a bridge. But sometimes, for the writer, it is also a wound. And we do not talk about that enough.

I am neurodivergent. That means my memory works differently. Some things are too loud. Some sensations never fade. When I write a scene about poverty, I do not just remember being hungry. I remember the sound of my own stomach. The shame of pretending I was not. The math of how many days until the next meal.

That does not go away when I hit "save."

It stays. It builds. It becomes part of the dam I wrote about last time — the flood of stories and sensations and memories all pressing against the same thin wall.

Some days the dam holds.

Some days I hold the dam.

And some days, I write a scene that breaks us both.

Here is what I am learning: readers can handle my truth better when it is dressed as fiction. That is fine. I am not angry about it. Dystopia has always been a mirror we pretend is a window.

But I need to stop pretending that writing those scenes does not cost me.

It costs me sleep. It costs me peace. It costs me hours of staring at the ceiling afterward, wondering if I am healing or just bleeding on the page and calling it art.

Maybe it is both.

I am not going to stop writing the hard scenes. They are the truest thing I have to offer.

But I am going to stop being afraid to say what they take from me.

This post is not about the abuse. It is not about the hunger. It is not about the specifics of being a neurodivergent woman in a country that was not built for me.

This post is about the after.

The wreckage. The recovery. The quiet act of closing the laptop and putting myself back together before anyone notices I was gone.

That is the piece I was afraid to write.

I wrote it anyway.

When I write a scene about hunger, I am not being clever. I am not reaching for a metaphor. I am reaching for a memory. And memories do not have an off switch.

When I write about oppression in Parallax, I am not imagining a future. I am describing a past that people still call "sensitive" or "resilient" or "brave" — as if those words make the reliving any easier.

They do not.

Bravery does not stop your hands from shaking. Resilience does not keep the nightmares away. And sensitivity is not a shield. It is the reason the work cuts so deep.

I am neurodivergent. That means I feel things in full color when others see in black and white. A small slight lands like a punch. A loud noise lingers for hours. A memory does not fade — it loops. And when I write, I am not narrating the loop. I am inside it. That is why some scenes leave me wrecked.

Not because I am weak. Because I am honest. And honesty, when you have survived what I have survived, is not a gentle craft. It is excavation. It is surgery without anesthesia. It is sitting inside the thing you ran from and deciding to describe it anyway.

So yes. I put my experiences into my work. My escape from abuse. My neurodivergence. My womanhood in a country that does not always listen.

And readers stomach it better because it is fiction.

That used to bother me. Now I understand. Fiction is a doorway. Some people can only enter through a story. That is fine. I am not here to judge how anyone receives the truth.

But I am done pretending the doorway does not lead back to my own living room.

I wrote Parallax from a place of survival. Every dystopian scene about hunger and poverty and oppression — I lived a version of it first. Not the same. But close enough that the line between memory and imagination blurred a long time ago.

Some days I do not know if I am writing fiction or translating my life into a language people can bear to hear.

Maybe that is what art is.