I wrote her because I needed to:
I didn’t exactly start with a plot when working on my second novel. I started with a character and a feeling I knew intimately: the tight-chested anticipation that something terrible might happen. Where did that anxiety come from?
Back in the 60s, no one knew about ADHD. My grade school report cards noted I was a chatterbox and a daydreamer. I was more interested in what everyone else was doing than what my own work. I alternated between being too quiet or too loud and was prone to blurting thoughts that made others cringe. I got lost when teachers gave instructions because they overwhelmed me.
Once, on a gray November afternoon during recess, the mindless chatter of my girlfriends bored me. I tilted my head back and screamed as loud as I could just to see what it felt like. When my friends clapped their hands over their ears, I mistook their shock for awe.
“Wow,” I thought. “They’re impressed by my vocal power.” I kept screaming, trying to outdo myself each time.
It wasn’t until Cindy touched me coat sleeve and said, “Please stop,” that I finally registered the disconnect between how I thought I was coming across and how others saw me.
That incident changed so much. Fortunately, in high school, my talent in art and writing gave me good cover. Drawing and painting didn’t require interpretation or small talk, and I could edit what I wrote. I acted the part of being independent and aloof, wearing patched jeans and hand-painted shoes. Socially, I stayed on the fringe because it felt safer. Inside, I felt like I was walking in shoes two sizes too small.
Looking back, I recognize those moments of social confusion, impulsive behavior, and self-censoring to fit in as classic signs of ADHD. At the time, I just figured I was weird. In fact, that’s what some classmates called me. I learned to say, “Thank you.”
I drank, a form of self-medication, when attending art school. Then I worked in the art field after marriage. A few years after my husband, children and I moved to Michigan, I fell into depression.
I didn’t get a diagnosis until I was a mother sitting in a psychologist’s office. My eldest son’s counselor looked at me and said, “You know, you have ADHD, too.”
After I read the symptom list I realized I checked every box. Suddenly, my past made sense. The anxiety, the worry, tight chest, and hives on this inside of my arms, not to mention hypersensitivity to noise, clothing seams and crumbs on the table. It had a name. I had a hard time untangling where distractibility ended and anxiety began.
Anxiety had seeped into every area of my life: the way I dreaded making phone calls, spent hours rehearsing conversations, sat on the sidelines, and avoided confrontation. I wasn’t just trying to keep myself safe; I was trying to keep control.
So, I created a character with double the anxiety.
She’s the 30-something protagonist of my novel, Love and Other Incurable Ailments.
Writing Serenity wasn’t just a creative challenge. In a way, I also explored parts of myself. Through her, I could ask, “What if I stopped apologizing for who I am?”
Her social missteps, like attending a magic-themed formal event dressed as a clumsy magic carpet (crafted from a real carpet) while her boyfriend wore a sleek magician’s hat, were lifted from a painfully misguided Halloween costume I wore in my 20s, one that I now understand was culturally offensive, but didn’t have the language or awareness for it. The laughter, the embarrassment, the judgment and shame she felt were also mine.
I gave her my habits and my hypersensitivities: how seams in clothing drive her mad, the trouble she has focusing when her workspace is disorganized, the wild leaps of logic that turn a hangnail into an impending hospital stay.
She studies people for the same reason I stare unabashedly at others–it’s an attempt to read and understand social cues. When I was younger, I simply wanted to know when and why they laughed, if they interrupted each other, and if they did, was it okay?
When Serenity meets a new friend, Emma, she second guesses herself constantly. But over time, she realizes Emma has her own baggage, too.
Their mutual vulnerability becomes a bridge when Serenity finally confides to her, “It was a huge moment when a psychiatrist told me, ‘Don’t let anyone tell you you’re crazy. You have a disorder.’ Knowing there was a name for it meant everything.”
Emma replies, simply, “I just thought you were anal. Wow. You never know what people are dealing with.”
The need for comedic relief
Anxiety on the page can quickly become exhausting for readers. Humor—especially self-aware humor—creates breathing room. Serenity’s misguided magic-carpet costume or her dramatic “chance of survival” weather reports allow readers to laugh with her instead of pulling away.
While writing, I found a quote by Seneca: “We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”
It’s Serenity, and also me. Our worst fears seldom turn out to be as bad as we imagine. Anxiety writes wild scripts in our heads, and a headache becomes a brain tumor, a delayed text means rejection, a misstep at a party becomes social exile. Our bodies react as if it’s all true when it’s not.
As a writer, I understood those scripts were also story material.
One of the most healing things in life is being understood or simply accepted without always having to explain. Serenity learns how to achieve this, slowly, as I have. When I gave my own missteps a character and a storyline, it stopped feeling like a flaw and started behaving like motivation. Fiction allowed me to examine it from a safe distance.
Creating Serenity and writing her story reminded me that mental conditions aren’t a weakness. Even anxiety is a kind of intelligence turned inward. It’s vigilance and sensitivity and a desire to feel safe. It doesn’t have to define you, and it certainly doesn’t have to silence you.
If I could go back to that girl on the playground, screaming into the cold November air, I’d tell her this: One day, you’ll find a way to use that voice. And someone will hear it and say, “Hey, that’s me too.”