The Things I Stopped Explaining Away

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from dismissing yourself.

Not the exhaustion of a long day or a hard week…something, quieter than that. The slow drain of filing things away. Of having an experience, a knowing, a moment that doesn’t fit the framework you’ve been handed, and choosing again, to set it aside.

I did this for years.

I knew things I shouldn’t have known. I felt things I couldn’t explain. I had experiences that didn’t fit neatly into the worldview I’d inherited…and so I did what most of us do. I found a drawer for them. I labeled it “probably nothing” and I moved on.

The drawer got full.

I don’t remember a single moment when everything shifted. It was more gradual than that; a slow accumulation of things I could no longer convincingly dismiss. A dream that came back too many times to be random. A knowing that arrived before the information did. A conversation with a dear friend that cracked something open that has never fully closed again. At some point, I stopped asking “how is this possible” and started asking “what is this telling me.”

That’s a different question entirely. And it changes everything.

The woman I’m writing for

I think about her often - the woman who is somewhere in the middle of this. Who has always felt the pull of something she couldn’t name. Who grew up shaped by one belief system and has quietly sensed, for years, that the world is larger and stranger and more connected than that system allowed for.

She doesn’t necessarily have language for what she’s experiencing. She might not call it awakening or spirituality or anything at all. She just knows that some of her friendships feel fated. That some places feel like memory. That some dreams feel like more than dreams. She lights a candle and isn’t entirely sure why…but she does it anyway.

I know her because I am her. Or I was her, for a long time, before I stopped explaining things away and started paying attention.

What paying attention looked like

For me it started with stillness. With meditation. Tentatively at first, then with more trust. With conversations that I would have once dismissed as too strange to take seriously. With the slow, surprising discovery that the things I’d been filing away my whole life weren’t evidence of something wrong with me. They were evidence of something I hadn’t yet learned to read.

But the further I went, the more I began to wonder…what if the filing away was never the truth? What if the truth was earlier than that?

I think about the little girl I was before the world handed me its frameworks. She made potions out of melted ice cream and whatever toppings she could find, absolutely certain something was happening in that bowl. She collected rocks and minerals, not because anyone told her to, but because they made her feel something she couldn’t explain and didn’t need to, the feeling was enough. She wrote stories. She sensed things. She knew things in the way children know things before they’re taught to doubt themselves.

That little girl wasn’t wrong. She was just early.

What I’ve come to believe - and what opening my mind and heart has slowly confirmed - is that who we are before the world tells us who to be is closer to the truth of our soul than anything that comes after. The passions we had at seven, the things that lit us up before anyone told us they were impractical or strange or too much…those weren’t phases to outgrow. They were signals. They were us, before the noise.

Paying attention, for me, has meant finding my way back to her. The girl with the potions and the rocks and the stories that insisted on being told.

She knew. She always knew.

When it came time to choose a direction, I chose psychology; drawn to understanding how the mind works, how we make decisions, what moves beneath the surface of human behavior. That curiosity eventually led me toward business, toward organizational behavior, toward a career built on strategy and human connection. I became good at it. I built something real with it.

But the scientific framework, as useful as it was, could only take me so far. It could explain behavior. It couldn’t explain knowing. And the knowing had always been there; patient, persistent, waiting for me to stop trying to categorize it and simply pay attention.

From there I found crystals and energy work and ancestral memory and past lives; not as abstract concepts but as lived experience. I found other people who had felt what I had felt, who had also spent years dismissing themselves into exhaustion.

I found my way back to who I was before the world told me who to be.

Why I write what I write

The Triquetra Chronicles didn’t begin as a writing project. It began with an experience. A real one, shared with a dear friend, that gave me a glimpse of something I couldn’t un-see. A past life. How it ended. The bond that had carried forward anyway across centuries.

I built the first book around what I saw that day. The series has taken on a life of its own since, drawing on my own continuing journey, on the histories that were deliberately forgotten, on the women across time who knew things they weren’t supposed to know, and loved each other fiercely anyway.

I write these books for the woman who is somewhere in that same in-between. Who hasn’t yet stopped explaining things away, or who has just barely started. Who needs to see her experience reflected somewhere before she can fully trust it.

Fiction is a safe container for that. You can explore a past life through a character before you’re ready to claim you own. You can feel the pull of something ancient and unnamed through a story before you have language for what you’re actually feeling.

That’s what I hope these books do.

Something is coming

I’ve been writing toward something new for a while now. The next chapter of this series, and of this journey, is almost ready. If you want to be the first to know what it is, head over to the contact page and join the list. Those on the inside will hear it first.

The past isn’t finished with us yet.