I accidentally wrote a book

My first book, Father's Daughter, is out now

I’ve gone quiet. It’s been a month since I shared any new writing with you all. Can you forgive me? I’ve been preoccupied. My attention has been elsewhere. I’ve been busy. First, I was busy reflecting on my long, winding road of incest recovery, which has spanned nearly a decade now. Then I was busy reading every essay I’ve ever written, fully registering how far I’ve come and revelling in it. Then I was busy feverishly editing said essays, then compiling them into a cohesive narrative with a story arc. Before I knew it, I was busy adding page numbers and securing an ISBN number.

Translation: I’ve been busy accidentally writing a book.

I’m so excited to say that Father’s Daughter, my first book, is out now. It is a collection of essays I’ve written, primarily over the past year, documenting the process of reclaiming my body, mind, and spirit in the aftermath of incest. Weaving memoir, somatics, and dream analysis, these essays expand far beyond my own individual story. Hell, they expand beyond incest entirely. They forge a path that ventures into universal questions of love, safety, embodiment, and what it means to be in relationship altogether. If you’re an avid reader of my writing, you’ve likely read many of the essays in this book before. So have I—and I can say it’s an entirely different experience when compiled in a print collection.

I didn’t anticipate publishing a book this year. Really, I didn’t. I’ve been busy trying to survive. Four months ago, I found out my rapist father—the primary muse behind this Substack—has been reading all of my writing and tracking me from afar, and ever since, my nervous system has been temporarily wrecked. In the midst of navigating a connective tissue disorder, precarious physical health, and the ongoing residual nervous system distress of complex trauma, all resulting from being his captive for a decade, this news fresh out of a horror movie was the last thing I needed to pile on.

But it also lit a fire. As he spread lies about my writing and denied the truths embedded in it, it pushed me to double down in my bone-deep knowing, to exorcise deeper layers of the story, to weave a firmer, unbreakable narrative, now forever in print. On a different level, it even begged me to confront the reality of our relationship. He’s still alive. He’s still out there, existing on the same planet as me, still meddling in my business, as much as I tried to shield myself from that reality for a decade. And he’s still my father. No longer legally, but by blood, by an ancestral inheritance I’ll never shed so long as I’m in this body. In writing Father’s Daughter, I think I finally came to terms with that.

So, as fate would have it, I wrote a book on accident. And looking back through my Substack archive, it’s a striking full circle moment.

The first post I ever made on this platform three years ago went as follows:

“You should write a book,” people often tell me.

“Once I gain some self-discipline,” I say.

“Once I escape the stultifying grip of perfectionism” would be a more truthful response, but it sounds a bit dramatic.

All those new age self-help gurus online tell me, “Perfectionism is the fear of rejection and abandonment in disguise.”

They say, “You don’t actually want to be perfect; you want the safety that you think being perfect will bring you.”

And they’re right. It’s a simple formula. Perfectionism is rooted in shame. Shame is rooted in self-protection. Shame tells you to go into hiding to protect yourself.

Feeling frozen in perfectionism is your nervous system hitting the brakes when birthing your creativity into the light of day feels like a threat to your safety. If at a young age we learned that our safety and survival rest on relational acceptance, and that acceptance only comes with perfection, then imperfection means rejection, and rejection means you die. So you hide your imperfect self to survive. Your nervous system just wants to keep you alive, and it thinks that imperfection is going to get you killed.

It sounds a bit dramatic.

Whatever.

It’s just the truth.

I remember shamelessly opening a 40-page paper in college with the sentence: “I don’t want to write this because it won’t be perfect.”

That self-protective resistance still comes up each time I write.

My nervous system is not ready for a book!

I’ll write a blog instead.

Well, I did write a blog.

I wrote a blog for three whole years, and it turns out, if you write a ton of essays over an extended period of time, you might just end up gradually thawing your chronic freeze response and tricking your stubborn, resistant, perfectionistic nervous system into completing the very act that terrified you most.

You might end up accidentally writing that book, after all.

Shhh… don’t tell the perfectionists.