Still Here 002
Finally.
I’ve been waiting for this moment for a long time. Not just to finish a book. I’ve been writing for over ten years, so finishing wasn’t the question. I’ve been waiting to feel ready to be seen. To stop carrying everything quietly and put it somewhere people could hold it too.
I’ve been carrying doubt, shame, illness, and the weight of capitalism. The words of my father. The lies of past lovers. My younger self on my back. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, in my small Detroit apartment, recovering from my second major surgery, it finally got quiet enough to hear what had been knocking on every door of my being for years.
A book. This book.
I painted the cover myself. I want to tell you how that happened because I almost didn’t.
My good friend Maya reminded me that I had gifts beyond writing, that I could create, design, and bring a vision to life. I am not an artist by trade, but by nurture. I’m the daughter of a painter. My mom taught me to make happy mistakes. My body has felt like a mistake for so long. But something about picking up that paintbrush and making something with my own hands made the mistakes right. Made them purposeful.
I wanted to paint a body unidentified, untethered. A figure with the freedom to go off the page, off the script. To show the imperfections left behind by survival, such as the way the spine loses its shape when someone’s stomach hurts, or when someone gets back up again.
The figure is me. She/They are moving towards something. In a world that would rather deny reality than feel it, I choose to go towards what hurts. To heal. To stand. To continue. To survive.
This book is not for the market. It is for the ones living in the margins. For the non-academics, the chronically ill, the women, the queers. For the sweethearts and the soldiers, too. For the abused, the survivors, the healed, and the hurting. For the ones the world tries to erase. For the ones who have already lost their mind and found it renewed later on. Who put their suffering on the shelf and served meals of solace.
I know who you are because I am you.
In 2014, a year after my first surgery, I attempted to take my own life and survived. I chose to keep going. My mind is not the same, and neither am I. I know what brokenness feels like from the inside. I have tucked my own hardship away to show up for others, not as a martyr, but as a community. My phone has been one to call. My home has held many. The School of Radical Healing has been my offering.
I survived myself. My own body. To arrive here. Around week 6-post op, I started putting this book together. Off Woodward, still on IV nutrition, deep in recovery, I found all the words that had been waiting on my return. It felt like every lesson in survival had brought me to this moment. Words written across decades keeping me in the present. Preserving me.
And this, all of this, is only the beginning.
I hope this book gives you something beyond hope. A reminder that there is a beginning, a middle, and sometimes an end, but the story is never finished. That what you’ve carried does not have to be what you become. I hope it gives you a recipe to transmute whatever you are holding. I hope you pick it up time and time again and find the energy to continue, to return.
The cover is here.
Before the world sees it, I wanted you to hold it first.
adria moses · writing
The Letters
Essays on the body, healing, survival, and coming home to yourself. Written from inside the work, not above it.
The monthly column
Still Here
Once a month, a letter from the ongoing work of staying. Still creating, still healing, still building. A space that will one day hold other voices too.
Next letter coming soon"If we are still here, that means change is possible. That love is possible. That care is possible."
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