From Memoir to Fantasy:
How Survival Became Evenhere

The story that takes place in the Kingdom of Evenhere did not begin with a map or a dragon. It began in a dumpster in Manhattan. It began with an HIV diagnosis in a quiet hospital room in Ohio. It began years ago when my body became currency for men twice my age, and it began the first time I tried meth and realized that all of the pain could stop screaming in my head momentarily. It started when I realized that the institutions of the real world were not strong enough to hold the weight of my struggle and the language of the real world was not vast enough to contain the narrative of my survival.

In my memoir, Shards of Hope: A Tweaker Witch's Journey, I document the raw mechanics of staying alive. It is the story of Tina and sexual violation, and it addresses the systemic failure of traditional recovery models that prioritize abstinence over healing. I had to forge a path through harm reduction to manage my reality while using witchcraft to protect my spirit.

This lived experience is how I learned to discover the colors that live within me. It is how I found the way to manage my anger, my sadness, and my scars, and it is how I learned to forgive myself while letting go of the versions of myself that I never became. I built my own path and my own magic. I built my own recovery and in doing so I found myself. Not only that, but I found that the world I live in and the life that I live does not have to be what I'm told it has to be. And neither do I.

I realized that I can be something else in totality.

When I finally decided to share my story, I sat down with the pages and the words flowed. They poured out of me in a raw and honest torrent of everything I had survived and how I had done so. But then, I realized that the publishing world might not be ready for the level of honesty that I was bringing. I couldn't sanitize my work because it would erase my story and I was tired of my story being erased. I was tired of being silenced. Still, I knew that this was a story that needed to be given to the world.

That is how The Shards of Color Trilogy was born. I found a way to tell my story and to explain my path and my journey through a lens that is accessible to people of all ages, backgrounds, and struggles.

I created a story that bridges the gap between queer survival in a world that's trying to kill us, the struggles faced by people of color in a world that won't just let them live, and neurodivergent existence in a world of emotional divergence.

I wrote a story about a boy who has been ostracized and pathologized. A boy who was abused by society because he just happened to be a little bit more colorful than them. What began as a story that was meant to be a battle cry for queer self-acceptance and self-integration, I soon realized was a story about a boy who had been treated as if he was less than because of the color of his skin. I realized I had written a story about a boy who was a little bit different from the rest of the world and deemed unworthy because of his perceived flaw.

When the reasons behind my emotions became too massive to face, I turned to the teachings of Carl Jung. I realized that my survival was a process of individuation which involves the integration of the conscious and the unconscious. I forged that psychological understanding of myself into a full narrative and the backbone of the story within The Shards of Color Trilogy.

For a while, I thought that Jethran Frye was supposed to represent me in the story. Now that it's completed, I look back and I see that that's not me. He represents my journey. He represents what I've been through and how I've come out to the other side. He is actively my shadow. He is a gray-skinned boy trying to integrate all of the parts of himself so that he can be the colorful, bright, and vibrant individual that he was always meant to be.

The people in the world of his story are living as unintegrated versions of themselves because they lack the emotional language to reach inward. They mark him as a flaw because he represents all of the truth that they cannot speak about themselves. He is the thing that threatens the lie that allows them to remain comfortable with their existence.

He finally becomes unable to contain the truth of his emotions any longer and despite how uncomfortable the world may feel about it, he finally releases it. And in doing so, he colors his entire world and everyone in it.

Within LGBTQ+ spaces and media, there is a hollow space in our stories where the raw and messy truths of queer survival should be spoken.

Within marginalized communities, there is the inherent truth that without having walked through the journeys of each other's experiences, we lack the ability to understand them. While this fact remains true, it ignores the very real fact that understanding experience and comprehending oppression is not the same.

In the same way that a queer person, a person of color, or a neurodivergent person can look at the character of Jethran Frye and each see themselves represented in unique ways, we as divided marginalized communities can look at each other's lives to find the commonality of systemic oppression that unites us as one group. While some may experience higher privilege than others, the fact remains that it is still difficult for us all who do not fit into the boxes that are built by those who wish to keep us separated and subjugated. The track that we all are running may have different turns, but the obstacles remain the same.

It is only when we recognize our shared histories of struggle that we can begin the conversations that need to happen in order to bring us all out of the margins.

By bridging the true story in my memoir with the fantasy story in my trilogy, I hope to create space for those conversations to happen. For a different type of conversation to happen. We can move beyond the narratives that society has given us and into a space where your scars are your spells and your trauma is the fuel for your transformation.

We all suffer alone and in shame, and it is time for that to stop. We can have honest conversations with ourselves and with each other, and maybe we can all grow from that. We can become something else in totality.