One Page at a Time Rhythm Is Not Random

She was born in 1970, a latchkey kid in the most literal sense—a key on a string, a silence waiting behind the door. She shared space with sisters, lost access when she broke the rules, and learned early that survival was tied to obedience, not understanding. That lesson never left her. But neither did her need to understand.

She was not random. That’s the first myth to clear. Her thoughts came fast, connected by invisible wires, speaking to each other in the language of memory and instinct. Others called it chaos. She called it rhythm. Every tangle had a thread.

She learned young how to read a room—not because she wanted to, but because she had to. She could tell from the way someone turned how long they’d be gone. How long she was safe. Her childhood taught her to watch everything: the step, the tone, the quiet after a slammed door. That vigilance didn’t leave her. It followed her into adulthood, into workplaces, into relationships, into every room where silence held power.

She never assumed she belonged. She assumed the opposite. That she’d overstepped, misread the air, failed to notice a line she wasn’t meant to cross. She didn’t mean to miss people, but her radar was tuned to danger, not comfort. She looked for exits more than invitations. That didn’t mean she didn’t want to stay. It meant she needed to be sure staying wouldn’t cost her everything.

She worked in health care. Not in a prestige-slicked wing, but in the places where people came undone. Where pain didn’t always have a name, but it had a presence. She watched quiet suffering stretch across bedsheets, chart notes, whispered admissions. She saw how systems pretended to care. She also saw the people inside those systems—some kind, some complicit, most just tired. She learned how to listen without rushing to fix. How to bear witness when no one else would.

The writing started in notebooks. Then in letters she didn’t send. Then in essays she drafted and deleted, unsure if the world deserved her story. It wasn’t shame that held her back. It was reverence. She knew how costly it was to tell the truth. She didn’t want to waste it.

There was a moment she kept coming back to—the green light in The Great Gatsby. Not because she believed in fairy tales, but because she understood the ache of wanting something better. Something just out of reach, not because it was impossible, but because the world had never made room for it. The green light was never the dream. It was the reaching.

Men mistook her softness for surrender. They wanted applause for the bare minimum. Wanted to be told they were different while behaving like every man before them. She gave too much credit. Left when survival required it. Carried more tenderness than the world earned.

She tried to tell the truth—to therapists, to authorities, to anyone who would listen. Most didn’t. Or couldn’t. Or wouldn’t. The system asked for evidence, composure, proof. It wanted her to explain her pain in a language it approved of. When she couldn’t, it withdrew concern and replaced it with protocol.

She got older. And with age came expiration dates—the statute of limitations, not just on legal justice, but on people’s willingness to care. And she burned with a rage she didn’t want to carry, but couldn’t unload. She wanted to throw the page across the room, not out of drama, but because that’s what being unheard does. It corrodes the inside of you.

She wrote anyway.

She studied patterns like a map. Survival depended on it. Not just in her childhood home, but in the institutions that claimed to protect. She saw how churches and governments partnered in silence, their hands clasped behind curtains of righteousness. She saw the women in her family weep—not just for their own pain, but for the choices they never had. Sermons that condemned birth control. Laws that turned bodies into battlegrounds. She wrote those memories down, and they caught in her throat. Some truths didn’t want to be shaped. They wanted to be witnessed.

And so she witnessed.

She wrote about Bud Light—not for the brand, but for the backlash. For the performance of masculinity. The way outrage became costume, and fragility became theater. She didn’t mock it. She recognized it.

She wrote about Kendrick Lamar—because when he said, “You can’t fake influence,” she nodded. Because real influence wasn’t loud. It was earned. It lived in the people who stayed when the camera wasn’t rolling.

She saw how Zuckerberg turned platforms into pulpits. How visibility without safety became its own kind of violence. How women were shown off but not seen. How presence became a trap.

She built things. Quietly. Steadily. Tools, guides, frameworks to make the world a little safer for people who had also been ambushed by storylines they didn’t choose. She knew fiction could be a shelter. Or a trigger. She treated it with the care it deserved.

Even horror had a place. Especially horror. Stephen King made sense to her—not because he wrote monsters, but because he understood what it meant to live beside them.

There was one line, someone once said about her work:

“You’ve zeroed in on the quiet betrayal baked into the spectacle.”

That was her axis. The betrayal that hides in the shrug. The aftermath. The part where everyone moves on while you’re still collecting your scattered pieces.

She didn’t write to wound. She didn’t write to be praised. She wrote to stay intact. And sometimes she took things back—not because she was wrong, but because she was growing. Because she believed in letting stories breathe.

Nothing she’s done has been random.

It’s rhythm.

It’s what survival looks like when you put it in words.

It’s what gentleness looks like after the world has tried to rip it out of you.

And her? She’s still walking. One page at a time.