I have been trying to write an “about me” for my author website.

This should be easy. I am, theoretically, the world’s foremost expert on the subject of me.

I’ve been here the entire time.

Unfortunately, I am also long-winded, complicated, emotional, occasionally contradictory, and incapable of answering a simple question without providing seventeen years of supporting context.

“Tell us a little about yourself” feels less like an invitation and more like a trap.

How little is a little? Which self are we discussing? Are citations required?

The Armored Self

The version of me I initially wrote for my website was all teeth and blood and warnings from the woods. Tea witch. Chaos harbinger. Cheerful woodland goblin with potential bloodlust.

That person is real.

She just isn’t all of me.

She is my armored self; the version who appears when I feel dismissed, exposed, underestimated, misrepresented, or responsible for protecting something vulnerable.

She is highly competent, hyperprepared, and already holding the relevant documentation.

My armor is competence.

When I am frightened or overwhelmed, I research. I organize. I make lists. I read the policy. I learn the software. I find three backup plans and then worry that three may be insufficient.

I want to know how everything works because understanding gives me something solid to stand on.

If a system will not protect me, I will learn enough about it to protect myself. If I cannot find the thing I need, I will figure out how to make it. If I do not know how to make it, congratulations: I have a new hobby.

This is how I became a writer who also designs book covers, builds websites, makes graphics, plans marketing campaigns, binds books, and opens Procreate “for just a minute” before disappearing into an entirely new skill set.

I don’t really dabble. I collect. Hobbies. People. Stories.

I become curious, and then curiosity becomes research, research becomes supplies, and the supplies become a designated area of the house.

Eventually, I emerge from the creative fog carrying something I made myself and several strong opinions about typography.

I like being capable. I like knowing that I can take an idea out of my head and make it exist in the world. It gives me agency. It makes me feel less helpless in a world that has, at various points, made helplessness feel inevitable.

My armor is also ferocity.

I can tolerate an astonishing amount when I am the only person who will suffer from it. I can rationalize, excuse, accommodate, and convince myself to try a little harder.

But the second someone I love is threatened, dismissed, ignored, or treated unfairly, all that uncertainty burns away.

Suddenly, I know exactly where the boundary is.

I know what needs to be said.

I know where the metaphorical bodies can be buried.

This is where the threatening woodland creature comes from. She is a defensive form. A final evolution. My Charizard come to life.

She crawls out when something important needs protecting and everyone else has mistaken my patience for permission.

She is useful.

She is also exhausted.

The truth is that I am deeply sensitive, but I do not particularly enjoy being perceived as fragile. I have spent a lot of my life translating sensitivity into things that feel safer: wit, competence, research, decisiveness, sarcasm, and the occasional suggestion of bloodlust.

I make the warning funny before anyone can notice how much the wound hurt.

I explain things carefully because I care intensely about being understood correctly. I can survive being disliked. I struggle much more with being confidently misunderstood.

If you dislike me for something I actually said, fine. Horrible. Devastating. I will think about it in the shower for the next eleven years, but fine.

If you dislike me for something I did not say; or for a version of me you invented without bothering to check the source material; I will arrive with context, footnotes, timestamps, and a PowerPoint presentation.

It is not that I need everyone to approve of me.

I need the record to accurately reflect what happened.

I am fine being the villain of the narrative. But that narrative had better be reliably written and fact-checked.

Why I Write

This is probably part of why I write.

Stories allow me to provide the context. They let me crawl inside a person’s choices and ask what happened before the moment everyone else decided who they were.

What frightened them?

What did they lose?

What did they misunderstand?

What were they trying to protect?

What would they have done differently if someone had loved them more gently?

I am fascinated by the distance between who a person is, who they believe themselves to be, and who they become when the world backs them into a corner.

I suppose I am also fascinated by that distance in myself.

Because underneath the competence and the evidence and the extremely organized threat display, I am terribly sentimental.

I attach meaning to everything.

Stories. Songs. Objects. Traditions. Old photographs. Book covers. A cup of tea someone remembered I liked. The version of a song that played during a particular season of my life. Tiny domestic rituals that would look insignificant to anyone watching from the outside.

I don’t merely like things. I build constellations around them.

A book is never only a book to me. It is where I was when I wrote it. It is who I loved. It is what I feared. It is the person I was trying to become and the person I did not yet realize I had already outgrown.

Some of my stories have lived inside me for decades.

They were written by earlier versions of me; girls and women who did not yet know what their lives would become.

Releasing those stories now is not simply publishing a backlog. It is reaching backward through time and telling every former version of myself that she mattered.

That the things she made mattered.

That I did not forget her.

I am nostalgic, but not because I believe the past was better. Much of it demonstrably was not.

I am nostalgic because I can still see the people I used to be standing there.

I want to gather them up. I want to show them what survived. I want to tell them that even the parts of their lives that felt wasted eventually became material.

I am also funny. At least, I think I am funny. My husband, however, thinks I’m hilarious.

My humor tends to appear at emotionally inappropriate moments, usually because the alternative is screaming.

Sometimes it is absurd. Sometimes it is sharp.

Sometimes it is just me describing a completely ordinary situation as though it were an ancient curse placed upon my bloodline.

I am earnest, but I get embarrassed about being earnest, so I usually put a joke next to it.

That way, if the sincerity is not received safely, I can pretend I was only kidding.

I care deeply about people feeling safe, included, delighted, and understood. I notice the person standing just outside the circle because I know what it feels like to be there.

I want to pull out a chair.

I want to hand them tea.

I want to tell them the strange parts are welcome here.

The Newness of Refusing to Disappear

For a long time, I confused love with usefulness. I believed caring for people meant anticipating every need, absorbing every inconvenience, and remaining endlessly available.

I thought patience was proof of goodness.

I thought boundaries were something you needed a sufficiently dramatic justification to deserve.

I am learning otherwise.

I am learning that care without boundaries becomes self-erasure. That love does not require me to make myself smaller, quieter, easier, or endlessly useful. That saying no does not transform me into the villain of someone else’s story.

Some of what looks like hardness in me is simply the newness of refusing to disappear.

I am not always graceful about it.

Sometimes a boundary that should have been a calm wooden fence arrives as a flaming barricade because I waited far too long to build it.

I am working on that.

I am, in fact, working on many things.

I am a lifelong work in progress with an unreasonable number of browser tabs open.

I am curious, sentimental, anxious, creative, protective, funny, intense, and easily delighted. I romanticize thunderstorms, candlelight, old books, quiet kitchens, mysterious doors, soft blankets, and the moment when a character realizes someone has chosen them.

I collect tea faster than I can drink it.

I consult tarot when my own thoughts have become too loud to hear clearly.

I start projects because the possibility of making something beautiful briefly overrides my understanding of time.

I believe stories can find people at exactly the moment they need them.

I believe softness and strength are not opposites.

I believe kindness should be given freely, but access should not.

I believe almost anything can become meaningful if you pay enough attention to it.

The Light Is On

I am not harmless.

But I am also not walking through the world with my teeth permanently bared.

Most of the time, I am not the creature warning you away from the cottage.

I am the woman inside it, moving books off a chair so you have somewhere to sit. There is tea steeping. Something is baking. There are seventeen unfinished projects on the table and a story I have been waiting to tell you.

The woods outside may be haunted.

The mushrooms may be growing from something we have mutually agreed not to investigate.

And yes, the cottage is very well defended.

But the light is on.
Come in.