THE DEEP FACTOR
The years it hurt to be alive.
At six months old, I had an allergic reaction to the DTAP vaccine that led to serious back pain and then autoimmunity. At fifteen, my heart was malfunctioning so badly that I feared I would die. For seven years, I was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. I had anemia for ten years.
But all of that was minimal compared with when, in April 2020, I began experiencing fibromyalgia. It remains the most excruciating experience of my life. I had the sensation of being poked with pins, bitten by ants, stung by wasps, or stabbed with rebar approximately 1,000 times per day...for three full years.
This bled into every part of my life and made everyday functioning difficult. I became extremely sleep-deprived, to the point that my body could hardly heal from little things like scratches. I nearly wrecked my car more than once from the stabbing feeling.
And yet, on the nights when I laid on the floor and asked God, "How much longer?" I would feel his joy come over me. I would feel his presence with me, comforting me through wave after wave of pain. I became a happier person than I’d ever been in my whole life—because even on the days I was so sick that I wanted to pass out, Jesus’s joy and strength would carry me.
Most of Until They Kill Me was written during this time. These themes of pressing on through difficulty became very raw elements of the story and infused it with a whole new power and grace. I put my characters through even harder things than I was experiencing, and made them overcome, which helped carry me through.
And then, in April 2023, I felt the Lord say, "The season is over." And within three weeks, the pain was almost completely gone. Since then, I’ve had almost total healing from back pain, and my diagnoses of anemia and Hashimoto’s have been reversed.
But the things I learned in that season: the will to persevere, defiance against fear, and a fire-in-my-bones determination that we can overcome absolutely anything if Jesus is with us...those have remained. And those convictions are part of what I believe makes Until They Kill Me a powerful story—because I’ve lived them, and they are true.