I Published A Book I Was Afraid to Let People Read

Content Note: This post discusses sexual assault, trauma, sex, and intimacy.

Putting your life into words is a strange feeling. It means allowing someone, a stranger, into your world and giving them unfiltered access. Unfiltered access to your thoughts, your demons, your wins, your losses, and everything that has made you the person that you are today. 

I spent twelve years trying to get this story out of me. Putting words onto a piece of paper that I wasn’t sure I was even gonna be able to explain. Twelve years of my life trying to identify how to share it so that it had the most impact. 

And now…

I’m trying to convince people to let it into their lives.

THE VULNERABILITY OF WRITING A BOOK ABOUT SEX, YOUR LIFE, AND YOUR DEMONS

Somewhere Between Us isn’t just about sex. Yes, sure, it has spicy scenes. BUT it is about the complex emotions of falling in love, having sex, and learning how to be in your body after trauma. 

You see, I lost my virginity to a sexual assault. I had NEVER kissed a boy before that. I had one boyfriend, and that was back in Grade 5. That was it. 

And so for me, I didn’t just lose something that day. I lost experiences I hadn’t even gotten to have yet. I lost the experience of choosing when, how, and with whom I would have sex for the first time.

Somewhere Between Us sits inside that year and a half between my sexual assault and meeting my husband. It sits in the unknowns. In the moments when life is falling apart around you, and the only way you know how to keep some sort of control is by giving away what you can. The one thing you think people want from you. SEX.

Somewhere Between Us explores the relationship between trauma and love. Learning to safeguard your heart while giving your body away. There is a strange contradiction in being terrified of vulnerability while being willing to take your clothes off. 

I could give someone access to my body without giving them access to me. Sex could look like intimacy without requiring the kind of intimacy that terrified me. My body could be available while my heart stayed somewhere no one could reach it.

It shows that the behaviors we see on the surface can have so much more behind them than we realize. 

Instead of saying, “She’s a slut. She sleeps around a lot.” Maybe, just maybe, one person will instead look at her and think, “I hope she is okay. I wonder if there is anything that I can help her with.” 

Somewhere Between Us is a conversation piece. A way to bring in the hard conversations about sex, trauma, emotions, betrayal, and the idea that we need to be fixed to be loved. I want someone to walk away from reading this book and understand that sex after trauma isn’t as simple as saying, I love you. It isn’t as simple as saying you will be there for someone. 

I have cried.

I have laughed.

I have gotten angry.

I have tried to forget.

BUT the thing is, Somewhere Between Us didn’t let me. I tried to forget. I tried to walk away. I tried so very hard not to bring Faye and Josh to life.

This book needed to come out. It needed to exist because trauma can change the way we understand ourselves, our bodies, love, sex, safety, and intimacy. But none of those changes make us unlovable. 

Sometimes letting another person see the parts of us we’ve worked so hard to hide can become part of finding our way back to ourselves. Not because they fix us. Not because their love magically makes the trauma disappear. But because vulnerability can show us that the things we believed made us impossible to love never did.

Change may not happen right away, but opening yourself up means that you are exposing the dark to the light. It means that you are not allowing the shadows to grow stronger. That is beautiful. That is what Somewhere Between Us is all about.

It was about putting myself into a book that showed my cracks, my scars, and the parts of myself I once believed I needed to hide, while still showing that my life can be beautiful. That love can be beautiful.

Maybe that is why selling this book feels so vulnerable.

Writing it meant putting pieces of myself onto paper. Publishing it meant accepting that strangers could see them. But selling it means standing in front of those pieces, saying, Here. I want you to see this.

That part scares me.

Because Somewhere Between Us contains sex and love and trauma and pieces of a woman I used to be. There are parts of myself in these pages that would have been much easier to leave hidden. 

But I spent twelve years trying to get this story out of me. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to keep it to myself.

So now comes the part I didn’t anticipate.

I have to let you in. 

Somewhere Between Us. What happens when sex is easy, but intimacy is terrifying? 

Buy Somewhere Between Us