I don’t understand how I’m back here. Back with the family I walked away from. After all the pain, I know I swore never again.
But this gathering hasn’t been the worst thing. I’m not alone. I have my husband by my side.
Things are going smoothly enough, despite my cousin’s weird glares.
Everyone has been mostly welcoming, despite my brother’s obnoxious comments.
After a few glasses of wine, we headed towards our family maze. We’re guided into the barn by my father and my uncle.
They point out a bunch of Halloween masks along the far wall. Some silly, some simple, and some are downright frightening, but cool as hell.
My husband points out a row of burlap animal masks with fake blood and fabric stitching. I can’t help but think about how I’ve always wanted a collection like this for my office at home.
Thunk. Clink. SNAP.
We spin around. The doors have been closed, and we can hear heavy chains being padlocked against the barn door.
Unease creeps up my spine, and my chest tightens. I can feel my heartbeat pound in my throat. I can barely swallow.
My eyes dart to my husband’s. We exchanged panicked looks as a scream lets loose deep from the maze.
The next thing I know, I’m opening my eyes. I’m lying in bed, next to my husband. My breath is quick and heavy. The unease is still settled in my spine, and my chest is still tight.
As I sit up in bed, trying to shake the dream from myself, my husband’s hand gently touches my back. “Bad dream?” A look of concern on his face.
I shook my head, then shrugged. My hands rub the sleep from my face, and I meet his gaze. “Nothing bad happened. It just left me feeling yucky.”
He rubs my leg as I recount what I can remember. Some details were fading, but the feeling stuck to me. Like fiberglass powder that gets on your skin. Not really visible, but you can feel it scratching at you.
He hugged me, and we went on with our day.
I didn’t know it then, but that dream wasn’t asking to be interpreted. It was asking to be worked with.
Later in the day, the feeling was still with me. I couldn’t shake the unsettled sensation that my dream left with me. I knew I had left a bad situation in real life, but something in my mind wasn’t letting reality sink in. There was a quiet dread lurking in my nervous system that just wouldn’t loosen its grip.
While my husband was making rice, I stood idly in the kitchen.
“What’s up, my dear?” He asked, noticing I had something on my mind.
“I think I’m going to turn my dream into a story. I can’t seem to shake it, and I want to practice my fiction writing, so I think I might fuck around with it, build it out, and just exercise my writing muscle, ya know?”
“That’s a great idea. If you ever want to talk shop or anything, let me know. I’m here. You know I’m all about supporting your writing journey.”
I wrapped my arms around the back of his waist and squeezed him. He was always super supportive of me, and as a writer himself, the idea of me writing always seemed to excite him.
I had been talking about writing books for years, but I’d always been too scared to actually try. I had trauma to unpack, and there were a lot of things mentally and emotionally blocking my way. I hoped this dream would be something I could just mess around with and not take too seriously.
It could be something that would let me get this dream and its gross feelings out of my system, and I could get the practice in for writing something that wasn’t really my ‘heart story.’ The story that I had really been itching to write. I knew that my first few projects were going to be riddled with mistakes and lessons to learn from, so I didn’t want to use any of my “passion project” ideas on the first stories I wrote.
I figured this would be a great opportunity for practice.
A few days later, I talked to my therapist about it, and she concurred. We even set a goal for it.
I spent the next few months building out the story. What started as a way to get the dream out of my system quickly turned into something much bigger. I outlined the beats, added characters, tracked timelines, and before I knew it, I wasn’t messing around with a short piece anymore. I had the bones of a full-length novel on my hands.
Many of the themes I addressed weren’t exactly small potatoes. They were the kind of themes that don’t let you stay on the surface.
That was the moment I realized this story wasn’t just fiction. It was going to make me face things I had spent years avoiding. And honestly? It scared the shit out of me.
I wasn’t ready. I was pregnant, exhausted, and already carrying enough. So, I let the project sit. I let myself be proud of what I’d built and trusted that I’d come back to it when my nervous system could actually handle it.
Fast forward six more months. It’s been about a year since I had my initial dream. I have almost twenty-thousand words of what’s roughly happening in my story. I have a new three-month-old and I’m sleep-deprived. I got an email that Reedsy is hosting its first annual November writing challenge: one month to write fifty-thousand words, with a contest at the end and some pretty awesome prizes.
I told my husband that I wanted to do it. My husband had just finished the first book in his new epic series and was going to start on the second soon, so I thought it might be fun for both of us to do together.
We figured out a schedule where we could take turns caring for the baby and being present for our two older kids, while the other wrote.
We set up our accounts and clicked ‘enroll.’ It was a done deal.
The next month was a blur. Sleepless nights and plenty of stress filled our time. We vented to each other, talked over our roadblocks, and had each other’s backs through the thick of it.
Some days the words poured out faster than I could type. Other days the well felt completely dry, and I’d spend my time just staring at the screen, bleary-eyed and empty inside.
Once we got closer to the finish line, I was starting to really get into the intensity of my book’s themes. When my main character confronted her past, so did I. When she struggled to stand up for herself, so did I. When she overcame her inner restrictions and finally faced the source of her trauma, so did I. It was painful. It was tear-filled. It was exhausting. It was relieving.
And by the end, I felt free. Truly free. Like, chains that had been trapping parts of me from ever showing themselves had finally snapped open. I didn’t feel the same weight that I did before. I didn’t feel the same unease. Something really settled in my system.
What I thought was just going to be a short story ended up being deep trauma work that I also processed every week in therapy. Somewhere along the way, the story grew, and the characters ended up facing things I hadn’t intended. My dream’s tension became a stage for exploring feelings I had spent years too scared to examine.
By the end of November, I had finished my story. I hit the deadline and finished my 50k words. My husband and I celebrated our accomplishments and submitted our first chapters to the contest.
Not only did I survive the writing challenge, but I survived my inner demons. I faced the scary things that hid in the depths of my soul, and I didn’t crumble. I cried. I processed. I released. I set down heavy things that I had been carrying for decades. I brought things to the light, and let them exist, and I conquered them.
That was when it clicked for me: dream work isn’t about decoding symbols or Googling meanings until something fits. It’s about listening to the feelings that linger and following them back into your body, your memories, and your lived experience.
This is the kind of inner work I guide people through now. Not from a textbook, but from the inside out. I know what it’s like to hit resistance, to avoid the scary parts, to think you’re “just writing a story” and realize you’re actually unpacking decades of shit you didn’t know you were still carrying. I also know what it feels like to come out the other side lighter, clearer, and more at home in yourself.
Do I think dream work needs to result in a fifty-thousand-word novel? Absolutely not. But I believe dreams ask something of us. They leave emotional residue for a reason.
For some people, working with that residue looks like fiction or poetry. For others, it might be sketching, journaling, movement, or letting an image exist on a page without trying to explain it away. What matters isn’t the medium, but giving those feelings somewhere to go instead of forcing them back down.
That’s the work I care about. Creating safe, grounded ways to explore what your inner world is already trying to show you without re-traumatizing yourself in the process.
I didn’t win the writing contest, but I won something better: relief, insight, and the release of things I’d been carrying for decades.
I don’t wake up with that same tightness in my chest anymore. The feeling that once scratched at me finally has somewhere to go.
