In May of 2018, my friend’s mom asked me to help her write a memoir.

Her name is Nicole.

Nicole is diagnosed with vascular and hypermobile Ehlers Danlos Syndrome (EDS), a connective tissue disorder that causes structural fragility in her ligaments and blood vessels.

She is also a probable patient of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disease present in certain individuals with a history of repeated head trauma. This disease affects her motor function, mood regulation, and short-term memory.

Due to a gauntlet of surgeries (and the consequential pain and exhaustion of those surgeries) Nicole was forced to hang up her scrubs and retire prematurely from a career in physical therapy.

For a while, Nicole spiraled into a deep and seemingly unending depression. Being able-bodied, and helping others to be able-bodied, were among her chief joys of living. Without this, her life became unmanageable.

Everything fell apart.

But in time, the light returned. Depression relented, and Nicole found new perspective.

Yes, she couldn’t help people heal physically anymore, but she could still help them heal emotionally and spiritually by writing a book.

Nicole had decided on a new mission. But with her memory as unreliable as it was, she’d need help if she was going to outline and write a full manuscript.

That’s where I came in.

I started meeting with Nicole in her home on a regular basis. She would share stories from her life for hours on end: her formative experiences, her loved ones, spritual musings, and everything in between.

I would listen intently, asking thoughtful questions and jotting careful notes, though I was unsure if I was doing things right.

After all, this was the first book I’d written. I felt so young and inexperienced at my craft.

When I started working with Nicole, I was seventeen years old: a high school student with an identity stubbornly rooted in academic excellence, running myself ragged and ignoring my own needs in an effort to be the perfect Jack I believed everyone wanted me to be.

But beneath, I was mourning the loss of my late grandpa George.

My head was underwater. To cope with the pain of this loss, I was struggling with a behavioral addiction. I needed help, but to truthfully admit the exact nature of my illness would’ve been contrary to the carefully manifactured lie I presented to the public. The fallout of this lie crumbling would’ve been too devastating to accept.

“If people knew this about me, my life would be over. They wouldn’t see me the same. They wouldn’t love me the same.”

So I didn’t accept it. I stayed silent. I directed all my grief, rage, and loathing inward until I reached a state of numbness so bleak and pervasive that I sincerely wished to die.

If not for Nicole, I might’ve acted on that wish.

As our work continued, Nicole began to open up about the thornier details of her life: people who hurt her, loved ones she’d hurt through her mistakes, and how she’d hurt herself. Because she granted me an audience to her shame and sorrow, I felt comfortable doing the same with her.

With Nicole’s help, I came to terms with the truth and started on a better, albeit tenuous, path to recovery. With my help, Nicole found an outlet for her story and reclaimed the purpose she’d lost.

I finished the first draft of our book, The Monster Inside My Head, around the end of 2022. It sits at roughly 63,000 words and reads similarly to Tuesdays with Morrie—except no one dies at the end, and it focuses more intently on themes of identity, loss, and reconciliation.

I’d started querying for literary agents in 2023 but was soon forced to retire the project entirely due to an interpersonal conflict with Nicole.

It’s…complicated.

I’m not sure this manuscript will ever find its way to a bookstore shelf, at least not in its current form.

Regardless, this was undoubtedly the most significant and ambitious writing project of my late teens/early twenties; I felt it would be wasteful to outright exclude it from my body of work.

If you’d like to read it, you can click here to request access.