For most of my life, I believed I was writing about other people.

I wrote about broken hearts.
About loss.
About courage.
About children searching for hope.
About people trying to forgive themselves for things they could never change.

Whenever someone would ask where the ideas came from, I always had the same answer.

“Real life.”

These stories were inspired by people I had known. Their struggles. Their victories. Their pain.

Or at least…that’s what I thought.

It wasn’t until I began outlining Free from the Looking Glass that I realized something I had never allowed myself to see.

The pain wasn’t only theirs.

It was mine too.

Not every event happened to me. Not every tragedy belonged to me. But somewhere along the way, I had quietly tucked pieces of myself inside my characters.

The longing to be heard.

The fear of not being enough.

The desire to simply be accepted for who I am.

The hope that someone would choose to stay.

Those emotions found their way onto the page long before I ever admitted I carried them.

Writing has a funny way of doing that.

It becomes a mirror before we even realize we’re looking into it.

As I’ve been working through Free from the Looking Glass, I’ve found myself revisiting moments from my own life—along with the memories of people I love who have walked through unimaginable hardships.

Every chapter forces me to ask questions I had buried years ago.

Why did that hurt so much?

Why did I carry that for so long?

Why did I convince myself my voice didn’t matter?

This isn’t a story about sadness.

It’s a story about healing.

Because healing doesn’t happen when we pretend the wounds were never there.

Healing begins the moment we’re willing to look at them.

One of the lines from Far from Oz has stayed with me since I wrote it:

“I can no longer sleep. I can no longer dream. I have to walk in the Real.”

When I first wrote those words, they belonged to my character.

Now I realize they belonged to me as well.

Sometimes we have to stop hiding inside the stories we’re creating and allow ourselves to walk into our own truth.

In Falling from Neverland, Hamish whispers one simple sentence:

“I could not save them.”

Those words carry the weight of guilt so many people live with.

Not because we failed.

But because we convince ourselves we should have been able to fix everything.

Healing begins when we realize we were never meant to carry every burden alone.

And then there is Free from the Looking Glass, where I continue asking what may be the biggest question of all:

“The desire to be heard, to be seen, to be brave… to be loved simply for who we are.”

That may be the heartbeat of the entire novel.

Because I don’t think it’s only my characters asking those questions.

I think many of us are.

Today, countless tools can generate stories in seconds.

Technology can help us organize ideas, brainstorm scenes, and even overcome writer’s block.

But there is one thing it can never replace.

The heart of the storyteller.

Readers remember the moments that feel true.

They remember the scenes that make them stop reading for a moment because they suddenly recognize a piece of themselves.

Those moments happen because somewhere behind the keyboard, the author allowed a little of their own heart to bleed onto the page.

That’s what I’m learning.

Every story I write carries a little more of me than I ever intended.

And maybe that’s exactly what makes them worth telling.

If you’re a writer, artist, musician, or creator of any kind, don’t be afraid to let a little of yourself live inside your work.

You may discover, as I did, that while you thought you were helping someone else heal…

your art was quietly healing you too.

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