Writing isn’t a choice for me.  It’s survival.  When the world goes quiet at night, my mind doesn’t follow.  Memories stir, trauma digs in its claws, and emotions morph into characters that won’t stop speaking until I let them breath on the page.  Without writing, there is no sleep.  Only the constant echo of everything I’ve endured, everything I’ve imagined, everything I’m still trying to understand.

The act of writing silences that storm.  It gives shape to chaos and turns pain into something I can hold in my hands instead of something that holds me hostage.  My stories aren’t born from convenience or casual whim.  They come from necessity.  They come because if I don’t write, I drown.

For years, that was enough.  To write for myself.  To fill notebooks, scraps of paper, digital files that no one else would ever see.  The words were a lifeline, and that was all they needed to be.  I didn’t imagine anyone else might one day read them, let alone find something of themselves inside them.

And then came Nikki Leigh—my sister-in-law, and an indie author.  A single conversation with her shifted everything.  I asked how she did it, how she put her words into the world.  She didn’t promise it would be easy.  She didn’t claim it was glamorous.  She only showed me that it was possible.  That I didn’t have to wait for permission from a gatekeeper to make my survival into something visible, tangible, real.

Indie publishing wasn’t my backup plan.  It was my beginning.  It gave me a way to take the stories that kept me awake and place them in other hands.  Readers I’ve never met.  Strangers who might recognize a piece of their own struggle, their own longing, their own scars in my words.

I still write so I can sleep.  That hasn’t changed.  But now, when I publish, I do it so that my stories don’t just soothe my mind—they reach someone else’s.  Indie publishing made that possible.  It turned private survival into shared connection.

I write to silence the storm.  I publish to make sure the echoes aren’t mine alone.