Winter Night
I bought a painting called Winter Night. There is a swirl in the center like a tornado, and what I learned looking at it is how you find your center again when everything is moving too fast.
Mental health is not a casserole disease.
Meg sat down at a lunch counter, opened this book, and almost broke down in tears on the first page. She’s been navigating her family’s mental health journey for years. What she said about this book stopped me.
Hope and grief are not mutually exclusive.
Some weeks of this caregiving life have held more contradictions than I knew a person could hold. A medication finally working. A new diagnosis arriving. It took me years to understand that both things could be true at once.
What early readers see.
Something I did not expect when I shared the manuscript with early readers: how often someone would say back to me, in different words, the thing I most needed to hear. A reflection on what beta readers give you, and what one early reader helped me see about who this book is really for.
What I wish I’d known.
There are things I could not have been told at the start of the hardest years of my family's life. Not because no one knew them. But because some truths can only be earned. I know that now. But I wish someone had tried anyway.