Turning Hurt into Story, and Finding I Wasn't Alone

What piece of you exists in your writing? Let me tell you a story—one that started with depression and now continues with hope.

It was mid-2022, and I was depressed. The type of depression that makes me remember that time as if it were a black-and-white silent film. There was no motion, just stagnation; no sounds, no music, no nothing—not even sadness or despair.

I remember the few moments of joy like bright, soundful photos that I hold on dearly because they kept me going. Quiet, yet powerful images that now, in hindsight, still cheer me up.

There was plenty of wrong back then—perhaps too much to start enumerating, but there is one key detail: I was trapped in a toxic job that I hated and couldn’t leave. I felt caged, suffocated, lacking all agency and with no way out and not even hope for the future. So much depended on me, and I focused on keep going even when I was falling apart every minute of every day. At that moment, I had the absolute certainty that my situation would be like so forever.

Let me tell you another detail: I had stopped writing. I had closed that chapter, decided that it was futile.

It was January 2022 when I made the call…

I zipped all my projects, deleting the folders and trying to smile like a strong girl that was making the right choice by focusing in her career. A career that was making me deeply unhappy… but that is another story¹.

That decision of January 2022 stemmed from how and why I write, and what happened when I started querying my books.

You see? With a few exceptions from my very early years, I always wrote for a purpose—as if all my worries and problems boiled within me to form the words and ideas I’d commit into a fantasy or sci-fi story. Not because I wanted to escape, but because speculative fiction allowed me to craft allegories and use them as quiet disguises to say what I needed without disclosing too much. There was always a bit of me on whatever I wrote, be it a vulnerable part trying to cope, an angry facet needing to scream, an idea that needed discussion, or something I was trying to discover.

I started in 2020 with a huge idea—one I’ve polishing over ~16 years now—but it was rejected. I switched to write short-stories, all with a meaning behind: a robot that was trapped in a loophole of code because it couldn’t access the truth, a fallen demon everyone despised because of his featherless wings, a ceramic ballerina that albeit fractured kept dancing.

After months of querying all my shorts to no avail, I went back to the drawing board. At that moment the ‘advice’ was to write standalones and so I did—crafting a dark coming-of-age with a particularly personal theme: how everything we go through changes us, and how trauma can induce such a radical change that our old self is ‘dead’ and a new one is ‘born’.

It was by no means a easy-to-read book, but it was deeply personal. It had helped me cope with the idea that sometimes we need to leave things behind just to be able to move forward and. It was a story about mourning my past self.

I wanted other people to read it; I wanted readers to find some respite in my writing and to know that, after all, others have been through the same.

Thus, I mustered my courage again and spent weeks searching for agents that wanted “deep and thoughtful” manuscripts, “personal stories”, and even “stories with a focus on mental health”. I crafted my query letter, had my partner read over it, and sent it with so much hope.

Of course, the results were even worse than with the shorts.

A few agents actually requested a handful of chapters to read, but what they answered killed all my dreams. One of them said that: “they liked my writing and the premise but that I was not marketable enough to sell that story” and another, an agent that particularly wanted thoughtful books, told me that “they found it to be an uncomfortable read.”

Of course it was uncomfortable! It was a story about accepting that traumatic events (or periods in one life) can fundamentally alter who you are! Granted, it was shrouded in allegories, packed in a hard magic system, set in a world full of music and winged cats… but I had written it to make sense of what I felt.

Those comments just left me empty.

I wondered: why do I do it? Why do I keep writing? My whole purpose was to share the story in the hopes it’d help other people, and the very same agents claiming to be interested in such topics, just… answered me like that?

I shelved it.

Zipped all the files, deciding that writing was not for me. My partner kept suggesting to try self-publishing but… I just couldn’t.

Not at that time.

And so I moved on…

The months passed, the colours and sounds faded, and by June 2022 I was a husk. Dreamless and hopeless because I had no motivation.

Cue in my significant other. The guy who’s seen all my ups and downs, the one who fell in love with old-me but keeps being in love with current-me, no matter what. The one who can read my writing and discover every single hidden meaning because he’s been there with me. The one I cherish above everything.

He is a solver. If I can’t find something, he’ll search it for me. If I have a problem he’ll listen attentively and offer reassurance, ideas, or whatever I need. If I want to learn something, he’ll encourage me to do so… and if I had dropped my dream, he’d find a way to give me a new chance at it.

He did create that chance for me.

In June 2022, he told me: "Let's make a videogame² together; a bookshelf of interactive stories. You can write whatever you want."

That’s how Unearthed Stories³ (acronym us, and purely intended because we’re cheesy) came to be. We started brainstorming what we wanted for this app, and decided that it had to be speculative fiction only (fantasy or sci-fi), for adult readers, featuring thematic work, and—my favourite—trying to leverage the full potential of interactivity as the fundamental game mechanic.

He suggested I added interactivity to that novel (the one with music and winged cats)… but I just couldn’t do it. That book—which remains unpublished at the time of writing this—already had a shape, an identity. I couldn’t just make it into something else.

I, however, had zipped all my rejected short-stories, many of which were also highly personal.

When I unzipped that folder, I found exactly what I needed to write.

Allow me to flashback. I’ll tell you about that short story.

It stemmed from a very personal feeling.

You see? I had already been enduring that toxic job for a few years already, and between that and other stuff, I was at my limit. One particularly depressing night, I remember feeling like a shattered teacup—one that had fallen to the ground, been stepped over, then glued hastily back, and put to use again⁴.

I woke up in the morning, went to work like a husk, came back and wrote a short story about a ceramic ballerina doll.

She was fractured and fissured all over but kept dancing atop her music box because that was her duty and she couldn’t leave the cupboard. The short ended with another doll coming to her and telling her that she was lovable… because I was lovable even if life had shattered me.

So I picked that short, and made it interactive.

It was among the first I wrote for Unearthed Stories.

While the short began with the ballerina already fractured, for the interactive version I wanted to tell the full story: how she came to be fissured, how her innocence and trust were shattered, and how she mildly accepted her new self… but I also wanted to give her hope along the way because I needed that hope to keep going.

It was then when the idea of the narrator who censors herself came to life: when I realised I kept replacing ideas or feelings for others simply because it was either easier or my depression took over. After all, assuming that other’s toxicity was my fault put the blame on me, and if I was to blame, then perhaps I was able to do something about it.

(It wasn’t the case, but those are the mental gymnastics depression and trauma inculcate on its survivors.)

Cue in my writer self: and I wanted to do that in my story—have the narrator censor itself, and have the reader experience exactly how awful that can be. Since I was writing interactive fiction (for games!) I said, “why not?” and started playing with text formatting until I landed in strike-through text.

The boy walks with gigantic steps, turquoise coat fluttering behind him, gold embroidery sparkling with the morning’s light. His grip is too tight firm, and it hurts holds me tightly. I clutch his topmost fingers, battling my ceramic eyelashes in sheer terror, my petal peplum flowing beneath his grip.

But then… it wasn’t enough and so I added “vanishing” or “strike-through” choices to frustrate the reader because dealing with depression—and its pull to let go, to rot, to fall deeper and deeper—is incredibly frustrating. Even when my logical self understood what was happening, my emotional self… sometimes just couldn’t impose herself. Exactly as my protagonist.

Then, I went even further—I removed agency from my character. She couldn’t speak and neither gesture in any other way than smiling, because that was exactly how I felt. Having to swallow my pain, unable to speak up about what was happening, and unable to do anything else than to pretend to be fine (and smile, smile, smile).

I jolt in surprise, trying to scowl, but my face doesn’t move. The sensation… is strange, and so I forego my attempts to descend to watch myself in the mirror’s reflection. […] I will myself to scowl—but nothing happens. […] Bewildered, I test other gestures, pouting, grimacing, narrowing my eyes, gasping in anger or startling in fear—but they refuse to appear. All of them. I feel the emotions, the anxiety building within me, yet my face remains gently restful.

I published it as free-to-read interactive fiction (in Unearthed Stories) in May 2023.

It was titled Dance With Me.

Photo by Teresa Jang, 2023.

But the story didn’t end there!

We grew—Unearthed Stories grew.

A few weeks after releasing the app with my first five interactive pieces, someone read Dance With Me and reached out in Discord. I won’t reproduce their exact words here, but in summary: they felt seen and understood, and were grateful to me for writing this novella because now they had hope.

You have no idea how much I cried and smiled at the same time. It was the contradiction of knowing the weight of everything I’ve poured into that story, combined with the joy of knowing this one person now had hope because of my silly novella.

The months passed. Unearthed Stories kept gathering reader-players. A few more reached out to talk about Dance With Me. Someone even blurbed the interactive story. Someone else reviewed it. More months passed. Someone else reached out.

I kept writing. Non-stop. Every day after work, I kept writing and writing—because my partner had created this platform for me, and because of the few that reached out and told me that my work had helped in one way or another.

It was September 2024, during a dinner date, when we realised that we were fast approaching the second anniversary of Unearthed Stories. My first thought was to ponder where time had gone (in words, written in about ~13 published books, including interactive fiction). My second thought was to propose we celebrate the anniversary—but my partner, as usual, had a better idea.

“Let’s novelise Dance With Me. It deserves to be a book,” he said.

I could only agree.

And so it happened—and more people reached out!

I sat to work, picking up the best paths, extending scenes, reviewing the text yet keeping the essence because the only thing I wanted was for Dance With Me to reach all those readers that needed that tale of hope and redemption.

But I knew we couldn’t do it on our own—and so I reached out to beta- and ARC-readers. Some of them had read the interactive version already while others hadn’t, yet I had many volunteers.

January 2025 came fast, and I sent an uncorrected proof of the novelisation to more people than I had originally expected. I was not expecting what they said.

Some read the allegory as a toxic work relationship, others read it as filial or even romantic relationships. Many opened up and told me it was a difficult but worthwhile read, that it reminded them of something that had happened (or they witnessed happened), that it helped them heal or cope, and even that “it had arrived at the precise moment” in which they needed it.

Each of those comments mended a bit of my soul. For so long I thought nobody cared about my work, that nobody would read it. For so long I felt like the only person depressed as hell in an ocean of happiness—social networks do not help here—and suddenly there was this influx of people reaching out to me about Dance With Me and how it had soothed their pain, mended something, or helped them in one way.

People who don’t even know me but had installed Unearthed Stories. People who only knew me from online interactions. People from all around the world, from different backgrounds and cultures. People with wildly different life paths.

They told me my novella helped. That it was meaningful. That my protagonist—that piece of me—was valuable to them.

I didn’t know how much I needed to hear that.

(I knew, deep down. I had never accepted it until then.)

That is why I write.

To gain perspective, to complain, to bury a piece of me, to discuss ideas, to learn something new about the craft, to philosophy about life and purpose, to mourn those I lost. To help others through my writing because that would give meaning to what not always has a logic behind it.

I didn’t write Dance With Me to fix anything—your past is not something to fix, it’s something you overcome, slowly, and then learn to live again with the new self that surges after that. I wrote it because it gave me closure, it gave me perspective, and the characters spoke what I needed to hear.

Maybe you’ll find something in it too. Dance With Me, if you want.

1. In hindsight, there is something ironically funny about this. After I wrote the novella I’m discussing here (Dance With Me) I proceeded straight into writing another novel, Mien, which is actually an allegorical complaint about the career path that I hated.

2. Yes, he’s both a videogame developer and my knight in shining armour.

3. Unearthed Stories is a free-to-install mobile app available for Android (through Google Play) and iPhone/iPad (through the AppStore). Most of my writing is there, most is also free to read. We also grew enough so as to acquire short interactive stories from self-published writers. If you’re into literary fantasy and meaningful themes, you may like it.

4. There is an important ‘falling’ scene in Dance With Me, and it stems directly from this very specific beginning of the allegory. There is a reason as to why it happens roughly in the middle of the book—its the beginning of the descent.