Having been a guest on some Booktube channels, I am often asked what inspired Dark Bloom. I always stumble on this question, because the answer is not a short one, nor an easy one to hear. Instead, I’ve decided to write out in length how exactly Dark Bloom came to be. Fair warning: much of my life story is to follow.

 My parents went through a rough divorce when I was six years old. My father had endured a back injury which left him unable to work. What followed was a depression that caused him to spend night after night in the garage, drinking away his pains and isolating himself from the family. My mother started going out to bars and coming home at all hours of the night. I can remember nights when I was scooped from my bed and taken to a hotel room by a parent, just to spite the other. When my parents were at home together, they were screaming at each other, accusing and blaming and cursing. My only saving grace was my sister. She is ten years older than me and served as my protector and distractor during these situations.

 When my parents finally parted ways, I started getting sick late at night and early in the morning. My family was unsure what was going on with me and assumed it had something to do with meals. The rule was not to feed Molly after a certain time to avoid the nausea and puking fits that were bound to follow. Looking back now, I understand that this was my introduction to anxiety.

 I first became acquainted with depression in middle school. Living with my mother provided a stable sense of normalcy. I had a schedule, and a bedtime, participated in sports, and did after-school activities like drama and chorus. I spent every other weekend and a few weekdays with my father, who was often in different living situations, addicted to drugs, drinking alcohol, and in a new, toxic marriage.

 Because of guilt, my father would often explain to me how my parent's marriage came undone. I shared the burden and knowledge of adult themes that exceeded my maturity level and developed a sense of codependence with my father. I felt as though he needed me and when I wasn’t with him, I felt anxious and worried about him.

 My father’s life was filled with turmoil, which often leaked into my own world. I can remember one of my birthdays when he had promised to pick me up after school and spend the evening with me. I stared out of my bedroom window for hours, and he never showed up or called. Yeah, it sounds like a cheesy, cliche moment from a sad movie, but things like that happened often.

 At some point during this time, I was dating a boy who introduced me to bands like AFI and Mudvayne. I remember hearing those songs for the first time and they sounded like I felt. Angry. Devastated. Sorrowful. I spent a lot of time listening to emo/alternative rock sprawled out on my bedroom floor crying. It sounds dramatic. It probably was. I was in a lot of emotional pain but worst of all, it was difficult to understand why. What I did know was that the music made me feel like I had a friend who understood what I was feeling because they had sometimes felt the same way.

 While time at my mom’s was structured and normal, time with my father was independent. He had so much going on that he didn’t care much what I did and so at the start of high school, I was hanging out with older people and drinking and riding around at all hours. I started dating a boy who was four years older than me. My first mature relationship, or so I thought. I was fourteen and naive. He told me a lot of things I had never heard before. He said that he loved me, we would get married someday, and we would be together forever. At fourteen, when you’re already starved for the love and protection a father should provide, you’ll believe anything.

 He ended up taking something from me. Something no one else would be able to take from me. And then he stopped returning my phone calls and text messages. I became a hardened shell of a person. I was jaded. I hated love, the idea of it, the prospect of it. It was just an imaginary theme concocted by Disney and Hallmark movies. It did not exist.

 Except I wanted it to.

 I continued doing whatever I pleased on my father’s time. I put myself around a lot of boys who did not have my best interest in mind because I decided that sex and intimacy were clearly not important. They don’t care. Why should I?

 Though, deep down I wanted to care. I wanted to believe that there was someone out there who was safe and expressed love deeply despite the careless, numb person I had become.

 And that’s how Nick and Kate were born. Though, they did not have names for the longest time. I guess you’d call it dissociation? I started daydreaming of these dark scenarios where life was chaos and everything was going wrong but a female character would meet a male character that would empower and strengthen and love her.

 Several months after my debacle of a first relationship, I met another boy who was also much older than me. In fact, our first time hanging out was at his graduation party and I was a freshman in high school. He was fun. He was attentive. We hit it off and had a great time.

 We spent the next 4 years in a confusing, on-and-off relationship where he told me I was the only one he loved but we argued and I was constantly being accused of cheating.

 When I was a senior in high school, I dated my now-husband for several months. We broke up because I was leaving for college and he was going to Marine Corps boot camp.

 After attending college for a few months, my toxic ex reconnected with me and we started dating. Being away at college was difficult because he had no trust in me. Instead of continuing to hang out with my dorm mates and enjoy college life, I isolated myself to my room, only leaving to go to the food halls and even then, I was accused of doing something adulterous.

 I ended up dropping out of college and moving back home. My ex and I moved into a small house together. I started working as a medication technician for an assisted living facility. My ex took to doing drugs behind my back and working odd jobs which only funded his drug habits. Our relationship grew more toxic. I was accused of things at every turn while he slept with his phone beneath the mattress and locked in the bathroom with him when he showered.

 Our relationship was confusing. I was still only about nineteen or twenty years old and unable to process the emotional ricochet of his words. He loved me. Then, acted like he could care less about me. He was cheating on me. I spied on him one night and watched the girl from down the street walk into my house. That I was paying for. That I kept clean. But when I confronted him about it, everything was turned around on me and I did not have the verbal warfare to effectively fight him.

 This was when my daydreams played a huge role in coping with my relationship. I felt trapped, unable to escape the situation I was in. I would lose myself in imagining a beautiful relationship borne of the tattered remnants of a dark world. Eventually, I spent more of the day in my head than in reality and decided that my characters needed names. Easy, simple names I could call upon during my fictional scenarios. And so they were called Nick and Kate.

 Nick and Kate have lived many lives, a zombie apocalypse being only one of them. They escaped the darkness of their own minds together in the modern day, in centuries past, and everywhere in between. Long before they became the main characters of a book, Nick and Kate stood in as trauma responses when I had no other means of escape.

 One day, when I had had enough and wanted to get out of the house for a bit, my ex pinned me to the ground. He took one of my feet in his hands and began hitting himself in the face with the sole of my shoe. Then he cried, asking me why I would do that to him. At first, I was afraid he was going to call the cops and accuse me of abuse, but when he didn’t I knew that his intentions were far worse. It was a manipulative mind scramble.

 When I finally got to the point of realizing I was no longer in love with him and wanted to leave, he would cry and tell me that if I left, he would kill himself. Or he would end up homeless and die on the streets and it would be all my fault. I battled this guilt for months until finally, I just had to be okay with killing him. I gave my mom and sister a time and day to come help me pack and leave the house. When they showed up, I already had everything on the front porch ready to go.

 He chose to be absent from the house that day. I’ll never really know why. Perhaps, he already had another means of survival. Or maybe he did not want to face my family. Either way, I was grateful he was gone.

 Only a few months after I was home, living with my mom again, I got a message on Myspace. Yes, Myspace. Remember those days?

 It was a man I had broken up with when I left for college and he left for boot camp. I was wary about getting into another relationship. I was not ready to put my emotions into something again. But mostly, I did not want to be controlled. I had spent so much time under someone’s thumb. However, I gave it a chance, and I had a strict mental checklist in my head. After my previous relationship, I knew everything I did not want in a partner.

That Marine and I have been married for eleven years, have two beautiful little girls, and have an incredible life together. I don’t think I need to tell you that he checked all the boxes on my list. In fact, he far exceeded the requirements on that list. Sure, we bicker. Things aren’t always perfect. But he respects me, values me, loves spending time with me, and supports everything that I do.

 In fact, one day I came home excited after listening to Stephen King’s It. I told him King just tells a story. A really good one. Maybe I could tell a story. My husband told me that I should write a book. I laughed. What would I even write about? That’s when Nick and Kate said, “Umm, hello?”

 It has been over twelve years since my ex and I were together, and there are still days where I misinterpret a conversation as a battle. I still know where my shields are and ready them on occasion. I still have days where I don’t trust the intentions of people I have come to know and love. But it has not been a war I’ve had to fight alone. My husband was willing to work with me to lower my defenses, making it a two-person accomplishment rather than the sole responsibility of either party.

 Much of what I went through with my ex has been purged from my mind. Perhaps the passing of time has released the memories to make room for new ones, or my mind has chosen to let go of the pain on purpose. While the memories are gone, the emotional reflexes remain. 

The idea that trust must be built implies that it is a brick laid upon another brick. Eventually, it will become a formidable bond between two people. Perhaps that is true in some cases, though I have found sometimes I knock those bricks over myself. Or sometimes the bricks are not bricks, but crumbly, unstable blocks of sand. 

Trust is much like co-parenting. First, two people must decide on limits and rules. My husband came to learn, probably the hard way, what things were acceptable to do and say, what things were not acceptable, and what things must be avoided at all costs. Trust must be catered to each day, keeping it alive and minding its growth.

I’m sure it can be frustrating. These things happened so long ago. How can they still have such an effect at times? I attribute this to the fact that most of the rough things in life happened at an age when I was still learning about the world. My brain was still forming an idea of how people worked and what relationships were supposed to resemble. Carrying that with me into my marriage set a strange, uneven standard that had to be carefully reassembled.

I will be close friends with depression and anxiety all my life. They are simply a part of who I am. I have found many ways to cope and it is important to remember that the feelings will pass. Instead of fighting it and resisting with everything that I am, it is better to be still, endure the ride and know that I will come through. And yet, sometimes I still think back on those days and feel guilt and shame. I often have to remind myself that it is not my fault that my ex passed away.