Klara’s Truth is my debut novel, and my first published piece ever, other than an article I wrote for the Medium’s blog Invisible Illness at the beginning of the pandemic. A friend recently asked me if I’ve always been a writer, and I replied, “Actually, no.” He was a bit surprised. I thought back to writing as a kid. I spent much of fourth grade, writing about a girl named Elvira in a black and white composition notebook. She grew larger and larger over time, finally becoming big and heavy enough to sit on and squash whomever she chose. It was therapeutic and gave me a voice. I believe that was my first journaling experience. Although I didn’t know it at the time, I was clearly Elvira and Elvira was me. Since then, I began journaling on and off in my later 20’s and 30’s. By my 40’s, I was writing stories for myself privately. Every now and then, I’d share something with my husband.

And then, something happened. After a number of years of working as a psychotherapist, as well as having my own personal therapy, I began writing a story that kept going and going. It felt like the story was writing me, rather than the other way around. I believe other writers speak about this as well. I began writing a piece I would eventually call Artifacts. It began with a middle-aged female archaeologist, just as Klara’s Truth does, but she flew to the Yucatán by the second chapter of the book to co-lead an archaeological dig rather than to Warsaw to find her father’s family. It was important to me that Klara, the protagonist, was an archaeologist because her job involved digging for ancient artifacts, just as mine does as a psychotherapist. The difference was that I was helping others excavate their personal emotional and narrative memory, and she was helping society excavate its communal cultural and anthropological memory. The original title Artifacts was a play on the word, as to me; it expressed both physical remnants of our collective past as well as individual emotional ones.

However, the novel Artifacts was not to be, as I was told on multiple occasions that my novel was not one but two books— the first half taking place in the Yucatán, and the second, mostly set in Poland. After much resistance, I finally accepted that if I were to get my novel published, I would have to cut out the whole first Yucatán part, which I did with a heavy heart. No writer wants to delete what feels like an integral part of their story to which they are wed. Perhaps there’s a budding prequel in all of this.

I’ve always thought of myself as a psychotherapist, working in this profession for over twenty-five years. More recently, identifying as a writer is novel for me. Even writing this blog post as a part of my website is a first. I feel like I’m on the precipice of something very exciting and new, as I take a huge leap into the unknown. Thank you for sharing this experience with me. We all wear many hats. We just have to be willing to keep trying new ones on so that we can more completely become who we’re meant to be.