In my mind’s eye, there’s a room full of beautifully wrapped boxes. Inside each box is one reason I believe in miracles. This week, the week before Christmas Day, I’m unwrapping one box at a time. The reasons included already have been: presence, innocence, and strangers.

Summing up all the reasons why writing validates my belief in miracles could fill a hundred books. I could write for days on a thousand reasons why. Miracles are objects of wonder. Wonder is originally from an Old English word, wundrian, that means the object of astonishment, marvelous thing. Marvelous is an adjective used to describe something whose goodness or beauty far exceeds whatever else is around. Writing is not an object of wonder, or miraculous, for me because it’s something I enjoy doing; everyone has something they enjoy doing. Writing is miraculous because of the many ways it has acted as a North Star in my life; it’s miraculous, too, because it’s unextraordinary. Everyone has something that can do for her what writing has done for me; given that, currently in 2023, there are some 8,045,311,447 billion people it is miraculous that each one of them has something as unique as their fingerprints (which could be a miracle-validating topic in itself) to help them overcome life’s challenges. There are millions of writers, you say. Each with their own unique style, diction, perspective, tones and themes, I reply. 

This week, I’m listing a few of the reasons why miracles are not abstract to me: they are real. When I thought you gotta write about writing, I felt a shade overwhelmed. Where to start? How do I capture the importance of writing in a way I haven’t before? Wasps of nervous uncertainty swarmed inside my belly. I couldn’t leave it out, but I didn’t know how to write about it in an organized, new way. The simplest way I can think of is a list. To keep things succinct, I’ll focus on the five things that I keep coming back to. 

1. It provided an escape. Many people talk about escapism, losing themselves in something. But what does that mean? When I’m writing, or reading a good book, the real world fades away until I’m in the story. When I was young, this escape was a lifeline. Whether it was because I was in the middle of an abusive situation, or just riding aimlessly down an interstate for hours on end, writing allowed me to imagine that I was safe, surrounded with friends, pretty, smart, protected–whatever it was that I didn’t believe at the moment, a story made me feel as though it were true. Writing is a magic portal: it doesn’t matter how good, or not, I am at it. What matters is picking up a pen and creating a world I feel comfortable living within. The miraculous part of this is that writing is not a destructive coping strategy. There are plenty of other escapes available: drugs, sex, self-harm, alcohol, the list goes on and on. Instead, I grasped hold of a constructive outlet gave me a way out while safeguarding my physical and emotional well-being.
   
2. It taught me to see myself, and my trauma, through a healthier lens. This miracle was a few decades in the making, and it took another decade or so to recognize the change. The first step was deciding to write. The second step was deciding what to write about. I’ve never had the kind of brilliant imagination that dreams up entire worlds full of mythical creatures and laden with symbolisms. Instead, I write contemporary, real-to-life stories. It’s what I read when I was young, and it’s the only thing I know to write. There have been times I’ve wished I had the creativity and skill to write something like, say, Narnia. For the most part, though, I am so thankful that I write the real-to-life stories that I do. In each book, I wanted the protagonist to learn something; I wanted her to heal. To do that, I had to introduce her to ideas like it was never her fault, she was never alone, she is worthy. 
   
   For years, there were repeated themes in my books. Just like Danielle Steel, my characters were, fairly, predictable. It was almost always (with one notable exception) the girl who had been badly hurt. It was Victoria in the Friends series, which I wrote between the ages of, maybe, eleven to fourteen, who was the first character to be sexually abused. Before her, I was too scared to write about sexual abuse so, instead, I wrote about women who felt like they were being controlled. Men usually came from wealth. Not because I particularly care about money, but because my father’s family was wealthy and, growing up, they represented stability for me; stability, in my mind, equated to protection. For years, the girl was, essentially, rescued. You have no idea how many decades of writing it took me to recognize, and own, that. Things began to change, slowly, word by word, with the writing of The Character. It was the first time I wasn’t scared to say what happened: I told my story, using Anna as a buffer, in first person narration. I didn’t skim over the bad parts. A few years later, I’d write Broken, getting me one step closer to transformation. See, Broken was about a fifteen-year-old’s ideation with suicide as a result of bullying and sexual abuse. Taya’s father was a petty convict, in and out of jail. Literal pages from my life. The next earth-shattering book was Haven, and it was monumentally important because it was the first time I talked about the little girl. Daphne, though, in The Storyteller made me so proud that I chose her name as my alias for the hotline on which I volunteer. She was the first female character to fight back, to get herself out of the situation. My point in this walk down memory lane is that, though it’s taken millions of words, hundreds of stories, eventually, something’s shifted within me. What I once didn’t believe could be true for me felt impossible to be anything but true for me. Maybe I was afraid that, if it hadn’t been my fault, then that would have to mean I’d been truly defenseless… and that was what I’d never wanted to be. 
   
   Writing is miraculous because it challenges my beliefs about myself, and about what happened to me. It forces me to talk about things that, otherwise, I would never speak of. Writing is miraculous because, over time, it’s forced me to question the lies of abuse; questioning them has led to healing.
   
3. Writing is miraculous because it helps me believe in happily-ever-after. While, sure, there’s usually an antagonist in my stories and while, sure, that antagonist is mostly a bad guy, there are also really, really good men in the stories as well. The first one I fell in love with was Landon Montgomery. He appears in The Storyteller; unfortunately, his and Amanda’s story is still in handwritten form and unlikely to ever make it to the digital word. But I loved him. He was a cowboy — and he was the one who had been abused, but he’d used it to create a ranch for special needs kids. He was tough, strict… and had the biggest heart. Next came Clayton Cunningham from Me who, no kidding, I’d still marry if I could bring to life. Most recently, Cole, who captivated me by calling Daphne a ‘hero.’ I didn’t set out to write about romantic relationships… but trouble with intimacy was an effect of sexual abuse. Imagining healing could happen without addressing that area of life is unrealistic, so these stories of love overcoming fear and shame show up. Writing them has been more than fun: it’s been instrumental in allowing me to believe that happily-ever-after can be real. It’s easy to lose that belief without sexual abuse; with sexual abuse a part of the past, it’s miraculous.
   
4. Writing is miraculous because it builds real-life connections. One rainy day, when you have hours to spare, I’d love to share all the stories of special and important connections formed through the books. Every time I speak, at least one person leaves me convinced that s/he is the reason that event took place. The truth is I’m mostly introverted. While I can speak, and lead, I’m not good at one-on-ones, and I’d rather do just about anything than voluntarily attend a social event. Without the books as a shield, I wouldn’t have been able to speak in public; without the books, I wouldn’t have enjoyed so many meaningful conversations. Yet, those connections have been the thing that have fueled my healing. 
   
   I once worked as a trainer for a bunch of truckers (very interesting job that I actually enjoyed). One day, while standing in front of the vending machine, a woman I’d never met, did not know, and who worked in a different department, said, “Are you the one who wrote The Character?” She sounded angry, which immediately made me nervous. I nodded. Yes. I had no idea how she learned about the book. She angrily tossed a piece of trash in the garbage, pointed a finger and said, “There’s no way you could have written that without it having happened to you too.” It was not a question. At this time, I had not spoken yet in public; I wrote about my past, but it was new, and infrequent. I’d never been put on the spot like that. Still, I nodded. She pursed her lips, returned a nod, and stalked out of the cafeteria. She told me, without telling me, that there was someone else who understood childhood sexual abuse. Another person told me, It’s like you said out loud what I’ve always thought was just my own crazy thoughts. I’m still not completely over that one. 
   
   The idea that one of the books might be a catalyst for someone hurting to reach out to someone is part of my dream. The connections have put breathing, tangible people in front of me who prove the notion I’m crazy false. Connections, no matter how big, or how small, bring restoration, strength, courage, compassion and motivation. That is miraculous. 
   
5. Writing is miraculous because it teaches me that my story matters. I’ve struggled all my life with deep-seated fears of being inadequate. I compared sexual abuse to the horrors of the Holocaust and, when it failed to be as bad as that, I told myself that my story wasn’t worth mentioning. Writing said otherwise. When I told myself I was crazy, characters made me feel grounded… so I kept writing. When shame choked me and I couldn’t finish a chapter, characters asked to spend a day with me. When I felt unsafe, Ash whisked me away to some other place, a place filled with other characters who always made me feel welcomed. Over time, another seismic shift happened: I no longer wondered before publishing will anyone get this story? Is it just proof I’m crazy–nobody thinks these things. I no longer wondered because, whether anyone got it or not, whether anyone read it or not, it was my story. It’s the way I share, it’s the way I heal, it’s the way I process. I’ve come to trust the characters — I don’t use scene by scene outlines anymore — and know that it’s a story that matters to me. And so, it does matter.
   
   Writing is a passion. It is fun. Its is inspiration. It is motivational. It is cathartic. It is proof for my girls that dreams can come true. It’s a space to say that which you think has to remain unspoken because the silent truth might be the very thing that, if voiced, grants you the freedom to be authentically you. And that is a life-altering kind of miracle.

I yearn for the day when everyone recognizes h/her passion, is encouraged by others to nurture the passion, and learns to rely on it when hopelessness seems real. Miracles are all around us; miracles are hiding within us; miracles are the dreams that make us wonder and fill us with awe. 

What’s your magic?