I made ten books this year.
Coloring journals, mostly. With prompts inside. And sarcastic slogans. And opening letters that start with "Hi" and end with "with dark humor and genuine love."
Each one is about a different kind of pain.
Anxiety. Burnout. Grief. Toxic workplaces. People pleasing. Loneliness. ADHD. Caregiver exhaustion. Midlife identity. Digital overwhelm.
Ten books. Ten kinds of hurt. All of them mine at some point.
I didn't write them as a healed person looking back. I wrote them as someone still in the middle of it, trying to make something useful out of the mess. That's the only kind of writing I know how to do.
Here's what nobody tells you about making things when your life is complicated:
The making is the therapy.
Not in the Hallmark movie way where you cry it out and emerge glowing and resolved. In the messier way where you're writing a journal prompt about grief at midnight in the guest room after a fight and you finish it and think — okay. That's done. That exists now. Whatever else is happening, that exists.
I have made things my entire life to survive things.
I wrote in diaries when I was a single mother of five in the Philippines married to someone who scared me. I wrote when I was working in a call center and quietly planning a different life. I started a blog when I came to America and had nobody — literally nobody — except two acres of land in the mountains and the deer that wandered through and the blue jays that showed up every morning like they were checking on me.
The blue jays were better company than most people I've met.
The blog started as a way to sell things.
That's the honest version. Someone — actually it was an AI, which is its own kind of story — told me I needed content. So I started writing. And then the writing became the thing. Not the selling. The writing.
People started reading. Repinning. Following. Something was growing.
Then it got complicated. Then I stopped. Then I started somewhere else. Then somewhere else. Then I made ten books. Then I came back here.
That's the whole arc. Scattered and circling and somehow still moving forward.
Here's what I know right now, today, on a Monday after a bad Mother's Day:
I am not healed.
I have unresolved things sitting in my chest that have been there for years. Old wounds that never got acknowledged. New ones that reopened them. A life that looks fine from the outside and feels like a lot from the inside.
I also made ten books.
Both things are true simultaneously.
Unhealed. But still here.
Still making things. Still finding that the making is what keeps me moving when nothing else does. Still believing — some days more than others — that the thing I'm building matters. That someone will find it at the right moment. That the right words reaching the right person at the right time is worth all the scattered attempts and wrong directions and bad Mondays.
The ten books are on Amazon.
They're called The Done Pretending Collection. They're for people who are tired of pretending they're fine — about their anxiety, their burnout, their grief, their toxic workplace, their loneliness, their ADHD, their caregiving exhaustion, their midlife, their phone addiction.
Each one has a letter at the front that starts with Hi and ends with warmth and means every word.
Search Dory Loomis on Amazon if you want them.
Stay here if you want the rest of the story.
There's a lot of it.
Dory Loomis writes books for people done pretending they're fine. She is also, frequently, one of those people.
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