Disclaimer: As I mentioned in the introduction, I am only sharing stories that I have already integrated. Whenever I discuss a messy, painful time, I don’t ask that you hold space for me, especially if you are a young reader. Instead, I ask that you consider all the many ways you yourself can survive a messy, painful time.

Weaving meaning from your life is a continuous process, and I haven’t finished. Instead, I do this alongside you. I use the tools I’ve shared here every day, because I tool need them. I share them with you in the hope that you find a use for them too.

I have told you a lot of stories, but now it’s time to tell you the rest of the story behind this Season.

Yes, readers asked me about character developments, especially in subplots. 

Yes, I knew that the complete answer would be long and thorough. 

Yes, I spent years considering and crafting my response. For a long time, I just had the title: People Are Stories-in-Progress, with lists of random behind-the-scenes info on how I crafted Lena’s subplot.

And then, one day, in January 2020, I began actually writing it.

Logically, it wasn’t a great time for such a project. I was in the middle of leaving the job I’d had for almost four years, and this transition demanded quite a bit of my time, attention, and creative energy. 

Counterintuitively, it was also a wonderful time for this project. Wrapping up my day job and returning to writing, I was about to have a lot more time. 

So, I began, and I wrote the stories first. To be specific, I wrote the stories about what had shaped my own life: the one about my mother’s grief and my relationship with it, and the one collapsing into a puddle in college and its effect on me. 

If you have questioned my decision to use these stories, I completely understand. I second-guessed myself often, but like “the Handless Maiden” fairy tale in Lena’s subplot, these stories kept presenting themselves to be used. Yes, they were very personal. Yes, they walked through uncomfortable territory. But they also showed something true about me and my approach to the writing craft.

Storytelling has always been vital to my life. I’d already talked publicly about the techniques I used for writing fiction, but I hadn’t yet discussed the way that I used those same techniques to understand and shape my own story, the one I was living. 

At the beginning of 2020, this felt necessary for more than just me. 

A part of me balked about sharing so deeply about what had scarred me. I rarely did so, even in my personal life, and as a writer for young people, I’ve made it a policy to never share wounds still in the process of healing. But I thought: This all happened a while ago. I’m in a good place. They don’t really even really bother me anymore, and it’s important to share that though pain happens, you can survive it with more strength than when you started.

So, I finished the stories and moved on to the tools. I told my agent what I was up to. In the midst of the rush and chaos of the job transition, I found moments to open up my computer and let the words pour through. 

Then, in March 2020, the first confirmed cases of the pandemic reached my city, less than two weeks before I left that job. In early April 2020, one of my closest college friends, also a writer and a teacher, passed away due to complications from COVID. 

I soldiered on, determined, and by June 2020, I finished the first draft. The next month, I started the revision, sure that these tools would be helpful to more than just me. 

Then the revision stalled, and for almost a year, I didn’t know why.

Looking back, I do see the pattern I missed.

I often tell myself, when drafting a novel which is challenging me, “Some days, you write the book; some days, you live it.”

The same applies to this Season. 

Some months, I could write about the tools, and some months, I simply needed to use them. 

In January 2021, four members of my family got COVID, and I was the fourth. Then in February, a few more family members got sick with the same, the oldest of them landing in the hospital. Between the end of February and mid-April, my family lost three elders, the last to COVID, and the first two to other health crises. The middle death was my grandmother, my mother’s mother, the widow of the grandfather whose death I tried to tell to my elementary school class.

It took me until that spring to realize: I was struggling to revise People Are Stories-in-Progress, because I was in the thick of my own story. Like everyone else on the planet, I was experiencing new chapters on grief and health.  

I had drafted stories with three installments, employing the rule of threes, but of course, in a life, there are always more than three. I was living the next installments of both stories, and I was shaken to my core. 

How do you tell others “People Are Stories-in-Progress” when your story too is in progress, in so much flux that you feel constantly unsteady on your feet?

Maybe I could have forced myself to finish the words on the page, making them presentable, but I couldn’t have stood behind them. First of all, they would have rung hollow until the rest of my story was integrated. Secondly, I couldn’t have shared either of those still-in-progress stories without weeping, and I couldn’t have changed those stories without feeling disappointment in myself.

So, I chose to hold off and heal. 

I shared other tools in public, and in private, I leaned on the tools in this Season. Testing them out, I also refined until they worked more perfectly for me.  I integrated what had just happened to me. I tended my fresh wounds until they grew scars. I wove a new foundation of unshakable meaning for me to stand upon, knowing that I would eventually tell these stories again, with a steady voice and a mended heart. 

Then, this spring, I returned to this Season and rewrote it to include all the fresh meaning I’d made over the past two years.

Again, weaving meaning from your life is a continuous process, and I haven’t finished. Instead, I do this alongside you. 

I knew that I would share these stories and the tools that accompany them, because I was convinced that others out there would need them, the same way I did.

I haven’t yet met anyone who emerged from the pandemic unscathed. Hearts have been broken in a hundred thousand ways, and many of us are just at the beginning of our mending. 

If that’s you, if you are standing at the edge of your story feeling bruised and beaten, what I offer you as a human is my compassion.

What I offer you as a writer are the tools here, and I urge you:

Make meaning, even from this.  

Dig into what is available to you, even the painful bits, and learn to understand your own story in a way that helps you feel steady and strong. You don’t have to tell it to anyone but yourself, especially at the beginning of your processing, but you may need to create your own meaning from these events to walk into the next phase of your journey.

Your story, the one you’re living, will continue regardless—as long as you’re alive.

Make sure it’s the right story for you. 

Close this chapter by understanding and integrating what has happened to you. Then go and live the next one.