This Is Me - Into the Unmapped Places

On recovery, creation, cryptids, and God who keeps showing up to provide strength and guidance

Tiffany  •  Clinical practitioner • writer/artist • 3 x’s master level badass

addiction recovery  •  faith  •  cryptozoology  •  creative writing  •  art & healing

I’ve spent years sitting with people in the darkest rooms they’ve ever been in — not metaphorically, but literally. Fluorescent lights. Paper cups of cold coffee. The specific silence that lives just after someone says the truest thing they’ve ever said out loud. I am a clinician who worked in residential addiction treatment, PHP and IOP, which means I know what it looks like when a human being is cracked open, uncertain whether anything worth finding lives inside.

I was a Private Investigator. I sought answers for the unknown and was able to solve mysteries not everyone could do. I observed what people did to others behind their back. I found people who wanted to stay hidden and I worked to shed light on the things done in shadows.

I believe in the Loch Ness Monster. Not as a metaphor. As a real, living creature — massive, elusive, glimpsed mostly at the edge of credibility — that a lot of serious people keep insisting they’ve seen. I believe in the possibility of the Mothman, Bigfoot, of the Thunderbird, of things in deep water that haven’t been named yet. I find cryptozoology genuinely thrilling, the way children find the world genuinely thrilling: as a place that still holds secrets, that hasn’t finished revealing itself, that is larger than we thought.

"The wilderness is not empty. I learned that in the field notes of monster hunters, and I learned it again in the book of Job."

I am also a woman of faith. These things — the clinical work, being a detective, the love of the strange and unverified, and a faith that will conquer — live side by side in me without apologizing for each other. If you came here expecting any one of them to cancel out the others, I hope you’ll stay anyway. That tension is, I think, exactly what this space is for.

This is a blog about healing. It is also a blog about writing, and about making art, and about why I believe that creativity is not supplemental to recovery but is sometimes the very mechanism of it. The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are the architecture we live inside. When those stories are built from shame and scarcity and the things addiction whispered in the dark, the work of recovery is also the work of authorship — claiming the pen back, learning to write a different ending.

I’ll write here about what I’ve seen in life from the different perspectives. I’ll write about the craft of narrative, about how a short story can do something a lecture cannot. I’ll write about cryptids with the same reverence I bring to everything else that asks us to keep our eyes open, stay humble about the limits of what we know, and sit with the uncomfortable possibility that the world is stranger and more generous than we assumed.

And I’ll write about faith — not a faith that answers everything neatly, but the kind that says: you are not done. A faith that continues to lead me to new journeys to help those along the way find themself.

• • •

If you’re in recovery, or love someone who is, you’re welcome here. If you’re a writer or an artist who suspects that the things you make matter more than you’re allowed to say out loud — you’re welcome here. If you once read a field report about a seven-foot bipedal figure in the Pacific Northwest and felt, illogically, a little less alone in the universe — especially welcome here.

I’m not sure exactly what shape this space will take. I know it will be honest. I know it will be a little strange. I know it will take both the suffering of people and the strangeness of the world with complete seriousness, because I think they deserve that.

Come in. The fog is fine. I’ve been walking in it for years.

— Tiffany  •  Clinician. Writer. Believer in things not yet confirmed.