You may be asking yourself why, all of a sudden, some girl on the internet has decided to start giving you advice.
Well, I genuinely have no idea how to check if anyone other than my mother has even read this, but I’ve decided to continue sharing anyway.
Back in January 2024, I started writing what would become the most important project of my life.
As a child, I was always the weirdo who looked forward to writing assignments in school. From a very young age, when the teacher asked for one page, I’d write five. If there was an opportunity to embellish a story, I absolutely took it.
Evidence of my love for fantasy writing showed up in just about every book project I could get my hands on.
But somewhere along the way, I stopped writing.
And at one of the lowest points in my adult life, reading found me again when I desperately needed it.
Six months earlier, I had picked up a copy of A Court of Thorns and Roses, and it had genuinely changed my life.
Not just because of how impossibly in love I fell with the world and its characters, but because it reminded me how much I had missed writing.
One night, while I was sleeping separately from my partner of two and a half years, I sat down on my couch with my 2014 MacBook and started writing my novel in my Notes app.
I hadn’t written anything more substantial than a text message in years.
And somehow, in one night, I went from barely writing at all to storyboarding an entire 53-chapter fantasy novel.
It sparked something in me that I hadn’t even realized was missing.
For the first time in a long time, I had something that was entirely mine. Something that made me excited to wake up, something I could lose myself in for hours, and something that reminded me of a version of myself I had almost forgotten existed.
Storyboarding my first novel brought me peace at a time when I didn’t even realize how badly I needed it.
I spent almost every free moment for the next month journaling, writing, or developing my story.
And then I took a six-month break.
You know, just to lose 60 pounds, kick my boyfriend out of the house, find him an apartment, furnish it, move him out, replace his entire second income with a second career, and become a completely different person.
Casual.
But somewhere in the middle of all that chaos, I started romanticizing my life again.
I started doing things because they made me happy. I started setting goals that had absolutely nothing to do with anyone else. I started rediscovering the parts of myself that I’d slowly stopped making time for.
And I think that’s what made the biggest difference.
Writing my novel didn’t magically fix my life. But it reminded me that I was still capable of creating something beautiful, even when everything around me felt like it was falling apart.
And once I started remembering who I was, it became a lot harder to keep living a life that didn’t make me happy.
Less than three years later, I’ve moved across the country, lost 80 pounds, doubled my salary, and completely fallen in love with my life.
And somehow, I’m still writing that same fantasy novel.
I’m not telling you that you should leave your boyfriend because, in less than three years, you might move across the country, be 80 pounds lighter, have doubled your salary, and completely fallen in love with life.
But I’m not telling you that won’t happen either.
You should probably dump your man.
All my love,
Kaitlin
