Two days ago, on my thirty-seventh birthday, I published a new book called Another Way Through.
It’s the most personal thing I’ve ever written. And if you’ve read The Resilient Living Systems Playbook or worked through Rooting & Rising, it’s the story that was underneath both of them all along.
Where It Came From
This book began in journals I kept for years. They came with me into hospital rooms, early mornings, and whatever in-between moments I could find to write. For a long time, they were just a place to put what I couldn’t carry.
Then, in therapy, I was invited to notice the parts of myself that kept showing up, give them names, and write them into a kind of fable. Over time, that fable became a valley. It has a creek, a ridge, and weather that arrives from somewhere else entirely. And it has a pack living inside it: a bear who never needs to know why you came to her den, and a small lookout on the high rocks with a lantern and a whistle, whose whole job has always been to notice trouble first.
None of them turned out to be the enemy. Every alarm, every flinch, every refusal to rest had kept a life going under conditions that made sense at the time. The question was never which part of me was broken. It was which conditions had changed, and which strategies hadn’t caught up yet.
What This Year Held
This past year, since I published the Playbook, has felt like a decade of care. Each layer of my health revealed another, and then another. I finished this book in the clearer moments between fog, symptoms, treatment, and not much sleep, using every bit of capacity I had. Even now, a new season of care is beginning, with more questions ahead than answers.
That’s partly why I wanted it finished now. Not because the story is over. It was never going to be over. But this chapter is complete, and I wanted to close it, at least for now.
Why I’m Sharing It
Honestly, I went back and forth about sharing this book at all. It’s a vulnerable, strange thing to put into the world. It moves through chronic pain, brain injury, endometriosis, coercive relationships, and a time when I did not want to be alive. Some days I couldn’t tell whether it was any good, or whether it would help anyone but me.
First and foremost, it is for me. Writing it has been a way to process, to honor what happened, and to move through it. After so many rounds of editing and rereading, I noticed I no longer need to go back and revisit some of these stories. They feel processed. And as imperfect as this book is, the biggest gift it has given me is the recognition of how much I have to look forward to, and how much love is here.
But I also wanted a printed copy in my hands to bring into conversations with people living with chronic illness, endometriosis, or anything that echoes what’s in these pages. People who are tired of being told that not healing faster means not trying hard enough. People who have been praised for pushing through and are starting to wonder what all that pushing cost.
My job right now is my health, and it deserves that care. But it doesn’t have to be my whole life. If something here reaches someone else, it won’t make the pain worth it. It just means what I’ve learned doesn’t have to stay inside my own walls. As capacity allows, I’m also opening a few spaces to coach select clients who want to explore what another way through might look like for them.
Sharing It Quietly
So there’s no big launch. I’d rather this book travel the way mycelium does: quietly, thread by thread, toward whoever needs it.
Maybe one day I’ll come back and revise it. Maybe what comes next becomes its own book. I don’t know, and I don’t have to know right now.
What’s Inside
The book moves in three parts. The first is the valley itself, a story you can read and leave whole. The second goes beneath it, into the body, the medical history, and the relationships the story grew from. The third carries the Playbook’s living-systems ideas into a real, unfinished recovery, ending with results so far, not a finish line.
A note before you begin: this book does not soften its hardest chapters. If any of it touches something live in you right now, please take care of yourself first. The book will still be here. If you’re in crisis, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline (call or text 988 in the US) is available any time.
Where to Find It
Paperback on Amazon
Digital edition, sliding scale
Audiobook, read in my own voice, with a companion PDF, sliding scale
For the digital and audio editions, choose whatever contribution fits your capacity.
To everyone who has read the Playbook, worked through Rooting & Rising, or sent encouragement from afar: thank you. Whatever this next season brings, I know I’ll find another way through. And I’m fortunate not to be finding it alone.
