Writing Soles in College: (In Progress) A Book Loosely Based on My Life

I am writing my first novel, Soles—a project years in the making, loosely inspired by my own life and people I've known, in real settings made fictional.

Soles is a whirlwind of timelines, emotions, and buried secrets, told only in part from the perspective of an autistic character who goes by Casey—someone with severe ADHD, chronic PTSD, and a magnet for chaos. Unaware of the true source of their suffering, Casey assigns it instead to their interpersonal relationships and external world.

But Casey is just one thread in a tangled web of perspectives. The novel follows many other characters whose lives become entwined—intentionally or at the hand of others—in a spiderweb of thoughts, contradictions, and a chain reaction of mischief and misery.

It will have you laughing uncontrollably, crying unexpectedly, and crawling out of your skin to get further into my aesthetically obsessive mind, page after page. It honestly may be too much emotional overwhelm for some, but for others it will read like falling deeper and deeper into a song you leave on repeat to escape your own mind rather than drown in the familiar pain grabbing you from under your bed at night. The novel is deeply personal yet painfully relatable to anyone still seeking closure from an upbringing that gave them legs to run—though never fast enough to escape the deceit, control, and lies we tell ourselves in search of the conceptual drug we call happiness.

At its core, Soles is a message to creatives and dreamers everywhere: No one else is in charge of your dreams but you. No one is in charge of your mental health but you. And hell hath no fury like a teenager growing up. It is your duty to yourself to use your pain and anger as fuel to survive this world, rather than let it convince you that all you are is what you feel.  You have to own your accountability to break free from the narcissism and victim mentality that stunts your healing, shrinks your world, limits your experience, and shames you into doubting your own power to become the person you are destined to be. The settings are intimately personal from my life, while the characters are halved and stuck together. Much like in my own life, it would sincerely be easier to narrow down what the book isn't about, vs what it is. Memory is fallible, and emotions evolve over time, so this novel is an homage to all the versions of me I've been in my life and the moments that acted as anchors in my earnest development to simply just be okay. When you put the book down, I hope you walk away from it a more curious and compassionate person willing to reach out to others despite you've been programmed all your life to hold on to reasons not to. In the meantime, let it be the real world escape for you I've worked my entire adulthood trying to outrun. It took me all these years to accept I'm just not wired to fit into being what others want of me, and simply to live as I am, not too unlike Casey--just older and thankfully wiser, but not without the scars to prove it. Is that the kind of book you're in need of, regardless of what your age is? What are your shoes telling you?