The Reader Is Always the Co-Author

Sometimes the line that breaks you open doesn’t come gently. It comes like a strike, and the wound it makes is the one that finally lets you breathe.

Tomorrow.

Tomorrow this book is no longer mine. It’s yours.

I’ve carried these pages through sleepless nights, coffee-stained mornings, and moments that nearly broke me.
Tomorrow, you get to carry them.

You get to underline the lines that hurt in the best way.
You get to dog-ear the pages that feel like medicine.
You get to keep this book close for the nights when you can’t keep yourself together.

One more day.
Then it’s in your hands.

Healing Thoughts II launches tomorrow.
Be ready.

“Words don’t belong to the writer. They belong to the one who needs them most.”

I left fingerprints in the margins,
coffee stains where the weight of my head pressed too long.

There were nights I tore out sentences
just to stop them from staring back.

What survived still carries the silence of those rooms.
It carries the pulse I couldn’t steady.

If you open it,
don’t expect clean pages.

Expect fragments.
Expect me,
unfinished.

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
— Franz Kafka

Every word you underline belongs less to me and more to the part of you that recognized it. That’s the secret life of books. The meaning is carried in the person who stops breathing for a second because something landed exactly where it needed to.

We live inside constant noise, yet the lines we hold onto are always the quiet ones. The sentence that feels like it was written only for you is the moment your own memory surfaces. That’s how ownership of meaning works. The writer begins the shape. The reader fills it with lived detail.

Healing often happens this way. Not as instruction, but as recognition. Not through someone telling you how to change, but by someone saying something that makes you realize you’ve been holding the answer the whole time. The words were never mine. They were always waiting for you.

☕ This newsletter runs on coffee and confession. If you’ve found something honest here, consider tipping the truth.
Buy Me a Coffee →

Before you move on, consider this:

What lines—written, spoken, or remembered—have you carried as if they were your own?

I’ve poured everything into this. Healing Thoughts II: 33 Poems and Meditations for Emotional Renewal is up for preorder now. Release date: October 1. These pages carry the deepest, sharpest work I’ve done, and I can’t wait for them to be in your hands.

Scraps + Bandaids:

🕊 New messages drop most weekdays. Quiet, but not gentle.
🔥 Paid subscribers keep the wounds lit long enough to be named.
📚 When the pain overflows, it becomes a book.
🧢 Healing wears well when stitched into something real.
☕ This newsletter runs on coffee and confession.
🖤 Shadow Thoughts carries the pieces too jagged for here.