the book you’ll never read

I've written a book, but there's another version of it that you'll never read.

That’s the one written in invisible ink, for my eyes only.

It's filled with paragraphs that never made it onto the page, emotions that never made it into the manuscript, and stories that were intentionally set aside.

The book I’ll publish is the one I believe will help people. The invisible-ink version is the one that brought it into being.

In the beginning, there was no audience in mind. No chapter outline and no plan for publication. There was only a person trying to make sense of a life that had changed in ways she never expected.

The earliest pages were less a manuscript than a place to pour things out. More like stream-of-consciousness journaling, meant just for myself. All the frustration, fear, and grief are there, often all at once. Much of what eventually became this book began as an attempt to give language to what was happening to me and process how I was going to live with it.

Back then, the voice spoke entirely in the first person. After all, it was about me.

But somewhere along the way, that began to change.

The more I wrote, the more I recognized that many of the thoughts and struggles I was describing weren't unique to me at all. What started as an intensely personal exercise gradually became something far more collective. The manuscript became less about documenting what had happened to Julie and more about exploring experiences that many people living with chronic pain share.

I started noticing how the voice shifted from "I" to "we," almost on its own. At some point, I knew this project was evolving into something that needed to be shared. It was becoming something larger than the project I had originally begun.

The invisible-ink version still exists beneath the surface of the finished manuscript. I see it there every time I read through the chapters, remembering exactly where I was in the journey when I wrote them.

It contains the anger I felt as chronic pain overtook my life. The fear that accompanied all the medical uncertainty. The grief that returned again and again as familiar parts of my world disappeared. The rage I felt on days when I wanted to scream.

It also contains stories that never quite belonged in this book. The deeper, more detailed stories about navigating disability systems, financial uncertainty, professional loss, and experiences that often felt unnecessarily harsh at a time when life was already difficult enough.

Those experiences were very real, and they left their mark. In fact, I'm not quite the same person I was before they happened. I don't think someone can endure all those things at once and remain unchanged.

Other experiences taught me things I wouldn’t have learned otherwise. Some simply hurt. There are stories I'm still trying to figure out how to tell, and some I may never find the words for.

But the book I eventually set out to write was never meant to document every difficult moment I lived through. It was to create something useful from them.

And doing that meant making choices.

None of those pages was wasted. The invisible-ink version did exactly what it needed to do. It gave me a place to work through experiences I couldn't yet make sense of. It helped me discover what mattered, what still endured, and what might resonate beyond my own story. In many ways, the book that readers will eventually see was built on top of those earlier pages.

As the manuscript evolved, I found myself asking a different set of questions. Not just whether something was true, but whether it belonged. Whether a particular story illuminated a larger experience or simply explained more about my own. Whether a paragraph offered something useful to the reader or merely helped me process what had happened.

There were times when I wanted to describe exactly what it felt like to have someone else hold all the power over me. The helplessness of having major decisions made somewhere behind closed doors while I was left to deal with the consequences. I wanted to tell the whole story about the medical leave process and all that happened. How it felt to be reduced to a case number after years of dedicated service. The feeling of constantly having to prove things that were already obvious.

But I didn't.

It’s not that those things didn’t matter. There came a point when I realized there’s a difference between telling the whole truth and telling the most helpful truth.

The book was no less honest because of those choices. It was simply serving a different purpose.

Some of those stories could have filled entire chapters on their own. The invisible-ink version contains far more of those details than readers will ever see.

Some stories survived that process. Others didn't.

I still touch upon the harder things that I know others will relate to. I don't pretend they weren't there or that they didn't happen. But the pages readers will eventually hold in their hands don’t contain everything I thought, felt, feared, or experienced while writing them.

They aren’t supposed to.

They make up what remained after the question changed from "What happened?" to "What might help?"

The invisible-ink version still exists beneath the surface of every chapter. It always will.

That’s just not the version you’ll be reading.

With you on the journey,

Julie