Why I Restart My Books: My Writing Process I'm a writer. That much has been established. I’m still new at this, but with three books published, you’d think I’d have figured a few things out by the time I got to Book Four. Apparently not. Every book has forced me to start over at least once. The writing process is grueling. With Book One, I made the mistake of trying to write for a Western audience. At the time, it didn’t feel like a mistake. It felt… logical. A bigger audience, maybe. More...

The older I get, the less convinced I am that any of us are as unique as we think we are. I probably believed it more when I was younger—that what I felt, what I struggled with, what I valued, even the way I saw the world, was somehow especially mine. That my thoughts were singular. My pain more layered. My questions more personal. But life has a way of wearing down that illusion. You live long enough, meet enough people, and pay close enough attention, and a pattern begins to emerge (one...

I’ve been thinking a lot about how much of what we believe just… comes from what we’ve seen growing up. What a man should be. What a woman should be. What a marriage should look like. Some of it is said out loud. A lot of it isn’t. It’s just there. In how homes function. In what we watch our parents do. In who gets up first to clear the table. In things no one ever questioned, so no one ever explained. And for the longest time, it didn't even feel like conditioning (social conditioning in...