Drafting Soal: Learning to Honor a Broken Self

Sparks coalesced along the Svetskyn’s fingertips, and the light spilled in a frenzied path from his hands.

Soal struggled against the grasp of his mind, gasping as the living Memory echoed from both his mind and hers. She had to dig past it, she had to find the light in her veins before the Svetskyn’s light struck her body and burned her whole. But the Memory was strong. Leaping nyun. Flaring nyun. A deadly arc—

In a last, desperate jerk of muscles, Soal flung her hands up over her face—and opened her mind to the electricity that streaked from the Svetskyn’s hands. I am Soal! she cried to it.

Drafting Soal was a thrilling ride. I could sink into every moment of magic, each gesture, each tension. And as I wrote it, I found both the pain and joy buried in each of Soal’s dysfunctional relationships.

It’s breathtaking, sometimes, to remember that even in unhealthy relationships, we are still ourselves. We still experience joy and tenderness. And as we extricate ourselves from the patterns that are poisonous–that those past joys can, with time, still be perceived.

Perhaps it is a form of honoring the reality of what we have experienced, even when–and perhaps especially–when we choose to walk more deeply into who we want to be. For as we walk deeper into ourselves, we learn that where those emotions came from may have been a signal from our inner selves, a cry, a communication that we still have a chance to decipher.