The Emotional Cost of Writing Truth
The Emotional Cost of Writing Truth: Behind “The Inheritance of Patterns”
When people ask me about writing The Inheritance of Patterns, they often focus on the technical aspects—the structure, the voice, the publishing process. What few understand is the invisible toll that comes with excavating your deepest wounds and displaying them on the page for strangers to examine.
Reopening Old Wounds
There’s a profound difference between having processed trauma in therapy and deliberately reopening those wounds day after day at the keyboard. Each morning, I’d sit down to write about moments I’d spent decades trying to heal from—the emotional volatility in my childhood home, the belt buckle marks on my brother’s skin, the paper bag “gunshot” my father used as psychological manipulation while I watched. These weren’t just stories I was telling; they were experiences I had to re-enter to write authentically.
Some days, I’d finish a writing session and find myself shaking, disoriented, caught between 2023 and 1977. My nervous system couldn’t always distinguish between recounting trauma and reliving it. There were weeks when I could only write for an hour before needing to stop, when the emotional backdraft became too intense to continue.